Opinion | How Biden’s broken Middle East policy will complicate the US’ Indo-Pacific pivot to compete with China

Name: Israel and Hamas agree on truce to end 11-day war
Uploaded: 2021-05-23T19:30:12.000Z
Duration: 2 min 10 s
Description: Israel and Hamas agree on truce to end 11-day war

The tragedies in the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan underscore the fragility of the Biden administration’s efforts to disengage from the region

Unless the US radically overhauls its Middle East strategy, it will struggle to compete with China in the Indo-Pacific

Reading Time:4 minutes

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Richard Heydarian

Published: 3:30am, 24 May 2021Updated: 3:34am, 24 May 2021

“It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet,” the great sage Miyamoto Musashi observed. The same logic also applies to 21st-century geopolitics, whereby one cannot understand the future of Sino-US rivalry by focusing on the Asian region alone.

In many ways, Washington’s strategic capital and foreign policy bandwidth continue to be determined by developments in other vital regions, most especially the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

The twin tragedies in the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan, where hundreds of civilians have been killed in recent weeks, underscore the fragility of the Biden administration’s efforts to disengage from the region. This provides strategic rivals such as China a unique opportunity to expand their influence across the Mena region, where the US enjoys little goodwill among the masses.

The region’s population is comparable to the European Union’s, while its combined gross domestic product is similar to that of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. However, there are three reasons the region continues to dominate US foreign policy, thus complicating Biden’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific against a rising China.

First, as US congressman Tip O’Neill once said, “all politics is local”. Although a global superpower, America’s democratic institutions are vulnerable to institutionalised capture by vested interests.

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Israel and Hamas agree on truce to end 11-day war

A recent study by Princeton University showed how the US was more like a civil “oligarchy” than a true democracy since “economic elites and organised groups” tend to “have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”.

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