Thread by @tparsi

News of Iraqi-brokered talks between Saudi & Iran is a VERY BIG DEAL. Not just because the two sides are talking, but WHY they have started talks. I explain here how the US's military disengagement is incentivizing countries to pursue their own diplomacy ft.com/content/852e94…

In January 2020, I wrote a controversial piece for @ForeignPolicy arguing that the US's military involvement in the region has incentivized US partners to be more reckless and destabilizing.>>
foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/06/the…

When that involvement reduced, good things emerged. I argued Trump's refusal to go to war with Iran over the attacks on Saudi oil fields, prompted Saudi to both engage in its own diplomacy with Iran and reduce aggression in Yemen.>>

As long as the Saudis could count on the US fighting wars for it, it had no incentive to engage in diplomacy with its neighbors. Only when it realized that the US was NOT going to bail it out did diplomacy become attractive to it.>>

In fact, when Iranian general Soleimani was assassinated by the US, he had just landed in Iraq to deliver a message to the Saudis via the Iraqis. By killing Soleimani, Trump also killed the Saudi-Iranian talks.>>

The US had rerecommitted itself to confrontation with Iran and the Saudis adjusted to that reality: No more Saudi-Iranian diplomacy.>>

Now, however, after:
- Talks to rejoin the #IranDeal
- End to US support for the Saudi war in Yemen
- Pull out from Afghanistan and Biden's crystal clear rejection of the logic of endless war…
...lo and behold, we read that the Saudis are engaged in diplomacy once again.>>

The FT spells out the WHY very clearly:
"The Saudi-Iranian talks are a sign that the election of Biden, who has said he will rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal... has begun to shift regional dynamics.">>

And there's more:
“It’s moving faster because the US talks [related to the nuclear deal] are moving faster and [because of] the Houthi attacks,” the official said.>>

At the @QuincyInst, we predicted this a long time ago. In our report on a new paradigm for the US in the Middle East, we specifically argued that reduced US military involvement in the region would not lead to chaos, but would compel regional states to engage in more diplomacy.

Here's that report. Read it carefully. Though the Biden administration has not explicitly embraced Restraint, it is increasingly using restraint arguments to justify its policies in the MidEast. quincyinst.org/2020/07/17/end…

Bizarrely, this still remains a controversial position in Washington. It shouldn't be. One cannot be against forever wars, yet favor forever military domination. As we see, once we move away from that domination, diplomacy rather than chaos ensues.

That doesn't mean that everything will be fine in the Middle East. It certainly won't. But the task of fixing it will fall on the countries of the region themselves - through their own direct diplomacy - rather than on the US. And that's a very good thing. //