Saudi Arabia and its partners in the region may have a fraught relationship with the U.S. if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidency, experts say.
As a 2020 presidential candidate, Harris was highly critical of the kingdom after the killing of journalist Jamaal Khashoggi and backed a 2019 Senate bill demanding a public report on it.
And in response to a 2019 questionnaire from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Harris called the Saudis “strong partners,” but said the U.S. needed to “fundamentally reevaluate our relationship” and “us[e] our leverage to stand up for American values and interests.”
She also expressed outright opposition to weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
President Biden approved a massive, multibillion-dollar arms deal with the Saudis in 2022, then paused offensive weapons sales to the nation until earlier this month.
“We need to end U.S. support for the catastrophic Saudi-led war in Yemen,” Harris said in response to CFR.
EX-OBAMA OFFICIAL PREDICTS HARRIS WILL SEEK NEW NUCLEAR IRAN DEAL
“The last thing we should do is sell them billions in weapons,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in June 2019.
While running for election, Biden promised to reevaluate U.S.-Saudi ties over the Khashoggi killing, but upon taking the presidency, reached a truce with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a way to counter the growing threat of Iran.
His administration has long been pushing for several agreements to bolster the U.S.-Saudi relationship: defense guarantees, civil nuclear cooperation and a historic bilateral agreement to normalize relations between the Kingdom and Israel.
“The Biden administration has been pretty on top of the relationship with Saudi Arabia in terms of supplying it with necessary weapons to defend the region against Iranian aggression,” Gerard Fillitti, senior counsel at the international Jewish human rights group Lawfare Project, told Fox News Digital.
“Joe Biden did understand very well the intricacies of the Saudi involvement in Yemen,” he went on.
“It’s less clear that Kamala Harris understands that relationship and the need to bulk up Saudi Arabia as a buffer to Iranian intervention and military expeditions in the region using its proxies.”
Prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Biden administration made the deal a top Middle East priority. Negotiations seemed to be nearing their end with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan visiting Riyadh multiple times. But since that point, chances of the agreement materializing before the election have dissipated; sticking points remain due to the war in Gaza.
A Harris-Walz administration may even “turn a blind eye” to Iran’s abuses in favor of diplomacy talks aimed at denuclearization, according to Middle East experts.
“The single biggest threat to the Saudis is Iran,” Filitti told Fox News Digital. “She’ll be more open to negotiating with Iran. And let’s remember, any time people have negotiated Iran, it has not ended well.”
“America’s partners and allies in the region have concerns that a Harris administration would be much more lenient towards Iran’s regional activity compared to a Trump administration,” Firas Maksad, senior director at the Middle East Institute, told Fox News Digital.
Harris, in her 2019 response to CFR, said she favored rejoining the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) aimed at limiting Iran’s nuclear programs.
“President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from an agreement that was verifiably preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — against the warnings of our closest allies, and without any plan for what comes next — was beyond reckless,” she said.
Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018, arguing it was too weak to restrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear aspirations, calling it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”
Former President Obama and his allies had agreed to the deal and saw it as a necessary compromise to bring Tehran to the negotiating table.
Maksad predicted that Harris would try to rewrite the Iran nuclear deal.
“The Iranians have said that that deal is dead. It will have to be renegotiated from scratch for various technical reasons… but I do expect that a Harris administration would invest much more time and effort in diplomacy with Iran and be willing to look the other way as Iran goes about its nefarious activities throughout the region in favor of prioritizing a deal on the nuclear program,” he said.
After the supreme leader of Iran signaled a willingness to return to nuclear negotiations with the U.S. this week, the Biden administration threw cold water on that idea.
“We are far away from anything like that right now,” a State Department spokesperson said.