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On Monday night, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gathered for a classified briefing with Trump administration officials to hear about a proposed $ 23 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates. Just as he finished, one of the attendees criticized what had happened behind closed doors.
“Just a mind-boggling amount of outstanding issues and questions that the Administration couldn’t answer,” the Democratic senator tweeted. Chris murphy. “It’s hard to overstate the danger of rushing this.”
That comment underscored the growing political struggle over the arms deal announced in early November, a showdown that could seriously affect the United States’ relations with its authoritarian ally and the military balance in the Middle East.
President Donald Trump wants to sell up to 50 F-35 fighter jets, nearly 20 Reaper drones, and around 14,000 bombs and ammunition to the UAE, and he wants to do so before President-elect Joe Biden enters the Oval Office and possibly Scuttle the rebate.
The administration has explicitly linked the massive arms package to Trump’s broader efforts to counter Iran and the normalization of the UAE’s relations with Israel in August.
“This is in recognition of our deepening relationship and the UAE’s need for advanced defense capabilities to deter and defend against intense threats from Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement announcing his authorization. about the sales. “The landmark UAE agreement to normalize relations with Israel under the Abrahamic Accords offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to positively transform the strategic landscape of the region.”
But some Republicans and Democrats in Congress, along with certain activist groups, oppose the proposed arms transfer, saying that a country responsible for killing civilians in Yemen and funding Russian mercenaries in Libya does not deserve to be rewarded with even better-made weapons. American.
“Selling such advanced military equipment to the UAE now would be supporting those policies and threatening US interests and regional stability,” said Seth Binder, a defense officer for the Middle East Democracy Project, who is leading an effort. from gun control organizations human rights groups to stop the sale.
Which means the next 50 days before Biden takes over will see a nasty fight over one of Trump’s last major foreign policy initiatives, one he’s trying to pass before time runs out.
“This is happening too fast,” said Michael Hanna, a Middle East security expert at the Century Foundation in New York City. “The process is important, the substance is important, and neither is good here.”
Why the UAE wants US-made weapons
The UAE has long wanted advanced fighter jets and top-of-the-line drones, which would make it a bigger and more powerful player in the region, not only militarily, but also politically.
“We are not talking about going to war here. We are talking about affecting change in the Middle East, “said Dalia Fahmy, UAE foreign policy expert at Long Island University. “The UAE is asserting itself in the region. It’s about being able to harness that perceived power. “
In other words, the UAE wants the world’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35, and surveillance and attack drones because it could then launch its weight into the Middle East. That sounds good in principle; after all, most nations seek to increase their power and influence whenever they can. But a big question is how, and where, exactly the UAE can attempt to do that.
The sale “is not useful [for the US] if there is more adventurism in Libya or in the Horn of Africa, ”said a State Department official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “Perhaps it will be useful in a multilateral theoretical framework” against Iran.
Both Trump and Biden would certainly prefer the country to use arms against Iran in the event of a war and not, say, to bomb innocent men, women and children in Yemen, where the UAE is waging a war as part of a war. Saudi. led coalition.
Finding out what guarantees the United States received from the UAE before the sales took up much of Monday’s Senate classified audience, according to two Senate sources familiar with the discussion.
Murphy’s tweet made it clear that the responses the senators received were unsatisfactory, and now he and others are trying to prevent the transfers from happening.
There is a five-front case against the UAE arms deal
On November 18, three senators, Democrats Murphy and senior Senate Foreign Relations member Robert Menendez, along with Republican Rand Paul, introduced four joint resolutions to prevent the UAE arms deal from happening.
“Congress is intervening once again to serve as a checkpoint to avoid putting profits on the national security of the United States and our allies, and to prevent a new arms race in the Middle East,” Menéndez said in a statement there. moment.
Those resolutions must be voted on and passed before December 11 or they will expire, clearing Trump’s path to the sale. But whether the lockdown effort works or not, the resolutions help clarify the top five arguments against the deal.
The first, as mentioned above, is that the UAE could use the weapons indiscriminately, killing civilians in Yemen or elsewhere. Without clear guarantees that that will not happen, senators and activists do not want the measure to move forward.
The second concern is that Israel could lose what is called its “qualitative military advantage” (QME) in the Middle East. In short, US policy since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war has been to ensure that Israel has more powerful forces than its Arab neighbors. Israel and others fear that giving the UAE F-35s and drones could erode that advantage.
However, that issue “has lost importance” more recently, said Barbara Leaf, the US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2014 to 2018. The main reason is that in October, the Israeli government dropped its objection to the transfers of the F-35 in particular. shortly after the Pentagon promised Jerusalem that its advantage would remain intact.
“Now it’s more about the foreign policy dimensions of the proposed sale,” Leaf told me.
Which brings us to the third objection: that the UAE having this advanced weaponry could shift the balance of power in the Middle East, making the Gulf country an even stronger and more influential regional player. If that were the case, the experts told me, the UAE could use its new force to attack its enemies, namely Iran, on its own and back other representatives in the area.
But some are not so concerned about that possibility. “This will not change the military balance in the Middle East,” said Leaf, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington, DC. “Iran’s missile and unconventional arsenals are formidable and could cause immense damage, even if the UAE gets the F-35.”
The fourth concern is the possibility of an arms race. Basically, if the UAE gets a lot of advanced weapons, it is possible that others, like Qatar and Iran, the UAE’s adversaries, will want them too. At that time, each country can continue to buy more and more weapons until the region becomes increasingly militarized and dangerous. That’s a result that many experts hope to avoid, although that possibility is still a long way off.
The fifth concern is that the Trump administration is reaching an agreement in a matter of months that would normally take years to complete. “This is definitely accelerating. That is abnormal and bad practice, ”said Hanna of the Century Foundation.
What usually happens is that a thorough agreement is first reached between the two parties, then the State Department and the Pentagon review it closely, and then long-term consultations with Congress begin. One issue for debate would be the issue of Israel, for example, which could take years to resolve.
In this case, the Trump administration wants to go from an announcement in November to a sale before January 20, the day Biden is sworn in as president. That’s unheard of, especially for a weapon pack of this size.
That’s why a Senate aide told me that they didn’t want the deal to pass before they “dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.”
Until then, backlash against the deal is likely to persist.
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