Only hours before Lindsey Graham passed away on July 12, he reportedly joked to friends that he couldn’t die without seeing Israel and Saudi Arabia establish diplomatic relations. Graham’s apparent passion for Israel-Saudi normalization started early in 2023. When I arrived in Riyadh as US ambassador later that spring, he was fast becoming the kingdom’s most frequent visitor from Washington. Graham’s visits were part of a sometimes tempestuous journey he had traveled with the kingdom, a journey which I think he came to believe could culminate in a worthy career-crowning legacy. The visits would end before Graham’s dream was fulfilled.

Support for the US-Saudi partnership had been a staple of Republican policy for decades, and Graham was no outlier. He called the Saudis imperfect but critical partners. He opposed efforts in Congress to block arms sales to the kingdom, even when the Saudi-led war in Yemen had become politically toxic in Washington. But after the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Graham turned as scathing as any American public figure – harsher than even then-candidate Joe Biden, who famously promised to make Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, or MBS as he is widely known, a “pariah.” Graham called MBS a “wrecking ball” who had “tainted [his] country and tainted himself.” He told Fox & Friends that he had been Saudi Arabia’s “biggest defender on the floor of the United States Senate,” adding with a sense of bitterness, even betrayal, in his voice that he now felt “used and abused.”

But then a few things happened to change Graham’s mind, and they were connected.

Once in office, President Biden had, by all accounts, been unenthusiastic about patching things up with the Saudis. His staff convinced him to try, but I don’t think his heart was ever in it. His July 2022 visit to Jeddah, now known mostly for an awkward fist bump with MBS, seemed to be one of the rare state visits by a US president that left the relationship – both government-to-government and leader-to-leader – in worse shape.

Things deteriorated further that fall when OPEC was poised to make a decision to cut oil production by two million barrels a day, a move which Washington felt would be ill timed. The disagreement became an acrimonious Rashomon tale: Did Biden want the Saudis to increase oil production to ease gas prices in America and solve a political problem in advance of the 2022 mid-terms? Or was Washington only interested in stabilizing global oil markets and denying Russia the benefit of higher oil revenue after its invasion of Ukraine? The incident left Washington and Riyadh embittered and deeply estranged. White House officials started telling the media that the administration was “reexamining the relationship” with Saudi Arabia. I sensed that people around both Biden and MBS felt this wasn’t just a hiccup in the relationship; it was the last straw in a stream of grievances that began with the Khashoggi episode and had never been resolved, only papered over. Were American and Saudi leaders ready to walk away from a partnership that endured for nearly a century? Saudis I later met who knew America well told me they had never seen things so bad.

In that dark period, almost improbably, discussions began between the Biden team and the Crown Prince about a grand deal that would not only put the relationship back on a sound footing, but could potentially change the trajectory of the modern Middle East.

Saudi Arabia was then in the early years of a massive social and economic transformation called Vision 2030, and their plans were threatened by nothing so much as their own volatile region. It was also a period of transition for MBS, from what I came to regard as his age of misadventure – think murder of Khashoggi, war in Yemen, blockade of Qatar – to an age of astonishing ambition, which brought the effective emancipation of Saudi women; investments in technology, AI, and green energy; billion-dollar “giga-projects,” not to mention rock concerts and sporting events inconceivable only a few years earlier. MBS’s goal became protecting at all costs the transformation which he deemed essential groundwork for the kingdom’s post-fossil fuel future. The best protection, he concluded, would be an insurance policy of sorts against his region’s instability and its principal trouble-maker, Iran.

What MBS had in mind was a mutual defense treaty between the United States and Saudi Arabia. At that point, the United States had not formalized a mutual defense treaty in over 60 years – since the 1960 revision to the US-Japan Security Treaty. Such an agreement would require US Senate ratification, meaning 67 Senators – Republicans and Democrats – would have to vote for it. The Saudis knew it was no small ask, and so they put something on the table that was seriously tantalizing: normalized relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

From the Saudi perspective, I think it is often underappreciated how Saudi Arabia sees its security fundamentally anchored in its relationship with the United States. Decades of arms purchases, training, joint exercises, and base access agreements meant the US-Saudi military partnership was not easily replaceable. And the relationship had survived, often thrived, across eight decades and through multiple crises, including the 1973 oil embargo and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Saudis may have found the United States frustrating and sometimes fickle, but there was no alternative partner, and a mutual defense treaty with Pakistan or Turkey – which incidentally they now have – simply doesn’t carry the same weight. MBS knew only the United States could provide the insurance policy he sought to protect Saudi Arabia’s massive investment in transformation.

On the US side, Biden’s advisors told me the President, despite his neuralgia about MBS, really didn’t want that relationship to blow up. It is also fair to say MBS’s willingness to put normalization on the table gave Saudi Arabia enormous leverage with Biden and his team, who at that point faced a Middle East filled with multiple crises to manage, but no potential legacies to tout. What is more, Saudi Arabia was expected to play a major role in global oil markets for decades more, and the United States believed the partnership would be critical in the event of a regional war. And, by the way, it turned out the United States was wrong about the OPEC oil cuts – the decision to cut oil output at the October 5, 2022........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)