For Joe Biden, the price of upholding a global rules-based order seems to be shaking hands with killers and tyrants
Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel, and a co-presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm.
Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks have criticised Biden's visit to the country.
Saudi Arabia is a heinous authoritarian state that locks up people without trial, carries out public executions and oppresses women — even if they are now allowed to drive cars.
When it comes human rights, China ranks higher than Saudi, according to Freedom House.
Biden himself has said he wants to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. Now, though, he says it is in America's interests to meet the man known as MBS. Biden knows there are few virtuous choices in the Middle East, just ever more morally fraught ones.
Biden treads warily in the Middle East
With escalating inflation and rising petrol prices, Biden needs Saudi to pump more oil.
He also needs Saudi to offset Iran's influence in the region and stymie growing Chinese and Russian influence in the Middle East.
Biden wants to build on the clandestine closer ties between Israel and Saudi. Saudi has tacitly allowed the normalisation of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, even as Riyadh itself stops short of formal recognition of Israel.
It grows out of a shared hostility to and threat from Iran.
Biden treads warily in the Middle East, a region in turmoil that provides a glimpse of what has been called a "post-American world".
It resembles a Hobbesian war of all against all. The post-World War I end of Ottoman Empire, birth of a new Middle East has been marked by weak or despotic governments; ethnic, tribal and sectarian rivalries.
Even periods of stability have not been periods of peace.
The US has contributed to instability. Its 2003 invasion of Iraq made a bad situation worse. A ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, was toppled but upheaval and violence followed. Islamic State took root.
As international affairs analyst F. Gregory Gause wrote in a recent edition of Foreign Affairs: "Iraq was a weak state when the United States invaded. But it became a failed state after invasion."
Gause chronicles a region in freefall.
When regional crises become global ones
The invasion of Iraq and the 2010 Arab Spring uprisings which toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya triggered a contagion of chaos spilling over into civil war in Syria and a Saudi-Iran proxy war in Yemen that the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
With so many states in conflict, Gause says, regional crises become global.
Russia has seized on it to strengthen its power. The flood of refugees fleeing the region into Europe has disrupted politics across the continent, giving rise to anti-immigration populism.
The US, which has exhausted blood and treasure in the region, may have looked to pull back and wind down the war on terror but, as a global leader, there is no way out.
Now, Gause says a chastened America must swap hopes of regional stability for specific interests.
So, Biden has to bet on another despot: Mohammed bin Salman. Not only is MBS implicated in murder, but as journalist Graeme Wood, a specialist in terrorism and the Middle East, wrote in The Atlantic magazine, bin Salman has "created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history".
Yet, improbably, this is what a reformer looks like. As Wood points out, Mohammed bin Salman has opened up the country socially and culturally and "curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police".
Wood met with bin Salman, who rarely speaks to media. Asked about Jamal Khashoggi, Wood quotes the Saudi leader as saying if he wanted to kill anyone, "Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on the list".
MBS told Wood that he wants to strengthen ties with America and Biden has to think about what is in US interests. If he doesn't see the potential of Saudi, bin Salman warned, China will.
Wherever Joe Biden turns, China looms
As the US President headed to the Middle East, America was seeking to woo Pacific Island leaders away from Beijing.
Growing influence was front and centre at this week's Pacific Islands Forum. Australia and the US now recognise it has to make up lost ground.
The Pacific finds itself at the frontline of the 21st century struggle for global power.
We are hearing again the mantra of upholding the rules-based order. But do we stop to think what that is?
Where does rules-based order come from? Who writes the rules?
It isn't a 20th century invention but has its roots in post-Napoleon Europe. Then European states joined with Russia to claim victory over France and, as historian Glenda Sluga points out in her book, The Invention of International Order, "They invented a new culture of international diplomacy".
It was a Western idea and favourable to Christian states. The international order has always been about choosing who is in and who is out.
Since the 18th century, Sluga says, the "promise of modernity ... has delivered a voice only for some".
Sluga says the invention of a European-dominated international order is "a story of the forgetting of ... an Ottoman Empire with equal legal standing".
Rules have been made — and broken
In the 20th century a new order emerged out of the two World Wars. It has been built around first the League of Nations and later the United Nations regulated by covenants and treaties.
It is helmed by institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organisation, World Trade Organisation, the International Criminal Court.
It is grounded in universal ideas of human rights, national sovereignty and respect for rule of law.
But as historian, Simon Reid-Henry points out, it is less universal than an "Atlantic dominated order".
It is often described as a liberal rules-based order but, as Reid-Henry says, it has been "more about order than it was about liberalism; it was about consolidating political authority in the name of freedom".
Reid-Henry argues that the architects of the post-war order increasingly made a case for the use of "political violence" in defence of the order.
Rules have been made and broken by the great powers. Great powers for centuries have claimed exceptionalism; the US as a global leader has when it suits put itself outside of the law.
Corruption and hypocrisy are built into the order. What place morality? Morals often lose out to realpolitik and, as political scientist Joseph Nye has said, foreign policy always involve trade-offs and choices.
Nye says good moral reasoning requires "weighing and balancing the intentions, the means and the consequences of decisions".
From the Middle East to the Pacific, the global order is contested. Russia is waging war in Ukraine. There is the threat of war with China.
For Joe Biden, the price of upholding a "global rules-based order" is to shake hands with killers and tyrants.
Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel, and a co-presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-17/joe-biden-upholding-rules-based-order-shaking-hands-with-killers/101242386
posted by Satish Sharma at
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