United States President Joe Biden will have a tough time selling his proposal for America’s Middle East allies to integrate their militaries into an alliance against Iran when he visits the region next month, influential analysts said. Biden told reporters on Saturday that his first visit to the Middle East would see him table a “national security programme” for Israel and eight Arab states at a scheduled summit in Saudi Arabia in mid-July. The conference will be hosted by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which comprises Bahrain, Kuwait , Oman, Qatar , Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Although Biden did not elaborate on the parameters of the programme, top US officials have since November pressed their Arab allies to join what Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett last week referred to as the new “regional architecture”. July’s summit will also be attended by leaders of Egypt and Jordan, but Israel is not invited because it does not have formal relations with four of the participating GCC nations. Can Biden convince the US’ Middle East allies he still has their back? Arab-Israeli differences over Palestine are just one of the fierce disputes which would make it difficult for Biden to sell his integrated defence proposal, the analysts said. “It is very unlikely that the eight Arab states will publicly agree to integrate their security forces with Israel,” said Bruce Riedel, a career CIA officer who advised four US presidents on the Middle East before retiring in 2006. The Saudis have ‘collaborated clandestinely” with Israel for decades but not publicly, he said, while Kuwait has never worked with Israel. Likewise, Jordan and Egypt keep any cooperation with Israel “quiet and private” despite signing peace agreements decades ago. Why the US’ Middle East allies are losing faith in its security guarantees Only cooperation between Israel and the UAE – which alongside Bahrain normalised ties in August 2020 – is “well advanced and public,” said Riedel, who is now director of the Brookings Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based think tank. Biden’s planned visit comes amid a months-long stalemate in Vienna-based talks between Western powers and Iran on reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which would prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. The United Nations ’ atomic watchdog last Wednesday censured Iran for failing to provide “credible information” over manufactured nuclear material found at three undeclared sites. Iran responded by starting to remove 27 surveillance cameras installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, prompting its director general Rafael Mariano Grossi to warn failure to reinstall them in three to four weeks “would be a fatal blow” to negotiations for the US rejoining the JCPOA. The Biden administration’s national security programme for the Middle East was unveiled by Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin in November at a security conference in Bahrain. Following complaints voiced in particular by Saudi Arabia and the UAE about a drawdown of US forces and air defence systems from the region which started last August, Austin asked American allies to take a “broader view” of Middle Eastern security. He called for “deeper multilateral partnerships to tackle shared threats” including Iran’s nuclear programme, and the ballistic missile and explosives-laden drones Tehran supplies to allied militias in Iraq , Lebanon , Syria and Yemen . Yemen’s rebel Ansarullah movement, commonly known as the Houthis, and a shadowy Iraqi militia called the True Promise Brigades, have peppered Saudi Arabia with aerial attacks on its energy facilities since 2019, and earlier this year extended their campaign to the UAE. Responding to growing scepticism in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi about Washington’s continuing commitment to their security, top Biden administration officials have in recent months pressed GCC states to form an integrated air defence system, according to official US statements after their meetings. However, the corresponding statements issued by Gulf officials made no mention of a common defence platform to tackle the Iranian threat, reflecting a lack of enthusiasm for the proposal, the analysts said. “Secretary Austin is the latest in a long line of SecDefs going back to the [Ronald] Reagan era that have pushed an integrated GCC air defence system,” Riedel said. Despite decades of American encouragement, the six GCC states still do not have an integrated air defence system because of their competing interests for influence in the Middle East and differing policy approaches towards Iran, the analysts said. Qataris begin entering Saudi Arabia via border crossing as rift ends Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain imposed an air and sea embargo on Qatar between June 2017 and January 2021. “The most integrated Arab military operation ever was the 2016 intervention in Yemen, which was a complete failure,” Riedel said. Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said “it’s going to take years for a regional security architecture to go from non-existent to fully integrated and operational.” “Such an integrated defence, however, has to begin somewhere and the easiest and most likely place is with some of the Gulf states: probably Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain,” he said. Panikoff said Biden’s trip to the Middle East is as much about resetting the relationship with Saudi Arabia – and using it to make progress in areas including both defence and energy – as it is about ‘finalising any specific agreement or way forward”. The perception of US withdrawal from the region is frustrating allies, even as the US insists it is not accurate, he said. “However, what the US does not have the capability to do any more is to prioritise giving the region more attention than the rest of the world, especially China ,” Panikoff said. As a result, the US wants its partners and allies in the region to be more actively engaged and committed to participating in their own defence than Washington views as having previously been the case, he said. Rivalries between Gulf states may prevent them from all joining an integrated defence system all at once, Panikoff added. But the looming threat from Iran is “likely to trump intraregional mistrust and cajole more Gulf states to join such an arrangement, once proven to work.”