Late last month, Jordan’s King Abdullah II allowed that he would be “one of the first people that would endorse a Middle East NATO,” adding that “we’ve got to very clearly define, what is our role … The mission statement has to be very, very clear.”
The statement came ahead of Biden’s visit to the region, and follows the recent announcement by Benny Gantz, Israel’s defense minister, that Israel is participating in a U.S.-led, regional joint air defense network known as the “Middle East Air Defense Alliance,” or MEAD.
In fact, what MEAD actually is remains a mystery. Mysteriousness seems a hallmark of recent Middle East defense arrangements, which are often little more than concepts of cooperation that stop at practical policy. Take the Trump administration’s 2017 “Middle East Strategic Alliance” framework, or MESA, which is a joint defense partnership between the Gulf Cooperation Council states as well as Egypt and Jordan. Marketed as a U.S.-Arab venture to confront extremism and terrorism and to achieve peace regionally and internationally, MESA fell short in one critical area: Nobody fully agreed about what the defense system was, well, defending.
Team Trump brought MESA to the table as part of a U.S. push to increase burden-sharing in the region, but took for granted that all participants agreed the unidentified actor behind the “extremism, terrorism” language was Iran. It quickly became clear, however, that while the real MESA objective of deterrence and defense against Iran was a shared priority among some MESA members – the United States, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – it was a priority not shared by other members, such as Oman and Qatar.
A few weeks ago, Israel reported that MEAD has already thwarted Iranian threats. Despite ruminations that without evidence, the statement might not be taken seriously, it clearly signals that the two deal-makers with the most military might (the United States and Israel) have publicly identified Iran as the primary MEAD threat — again. That narrative, coupled with predictions of full GCC participation and with Oman and Qatar’s continuing positive relations with Iran, means that the threat objective is likely to remain ill-defined in any new agreement – no matter how many times the acronym changes.
When defense agreements are based on an actual common threat, they benefit from existing funding and military platforms, and they gain credibility and clarity of purpose. For example, because common defense is accepted as a shared goal in Israeli-U.S. bilateral defense agreements, the two nations are able to make progress in policy and technology. After President Biden landed in Israel, the Israeli government unveiled a new laser weapon, “Iron Beam,” which is meant to enhance their lauded Iron Dome technology. The beam can counter threats from Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Gaza. Israel is now turning to the U.S. for help on perfecting the range and specificity of the laser. It is less likely that a similar technological leap will be unveiled during Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia later this week, where talks are focused on flight patterns and diplomatic normalization between Israel and Arab counterparts.
No multilateral defense architecture can survive if part of the alliance disagrees about the mission. NATO was founded on the common pledge of defending against the Soviet Union, and its famous Article 5 lays out a shared belief that an attack on one is an attack on all. If Oman prizes neutrality over collective security, or Qatar seeks economic advantage from trade relations with Iran at the expense of common defense, the entire framework of MEAD is defunct. If cooperative Middle East actors are serious about moving out of an era of bilateral agreements and into shared security, they must be serious about identifying common threats, and prioritizing multilateral defense over bilateral gain. Talk of an “Arab NATO” cannot be taken seriously until the members of MEAD, or the next attempt at a joint defense, actually agree on a common threat.
Clara Keuss is a foreign and defense policy research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. The views expressed are the author's own.
