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How will the US re-engage with its Middle East allies and Iran in a post-Trump world?
- US President-elect Joe Biden is expected to revive a nuclear deal with Iran as he seeks a return to a ‘rules-based’ order in the region
- The expectation has prompted an anticipatory foreign policy shuffle by Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
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The widely expected resumption of diplomatic engagement between Iran and the incoming administration of US President-elect Joe Biden in Washington has prompted an anticipatory foreign policy shuffle by powers across the Middle East.
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The return of the United States to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – agreed on in 2015 to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons – is certain to top Biden’s agenda as he seeks to reinstate a “rules-based order”, according to experts on the Middle East.
In interviews with This Week In Asia, analysts based in Istanbul, Tehran and Washington agreed that the Biden administration would look to tie a US return to the JCPOA to a broader dialogue on Iran’s political and military involvement in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Similarly, Biden is expected to ramp up pressure on key US allies in the region – Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to rein in their military interventions in battlefields as far afield as Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean.
“The geopolitical landscape that Joe Biden is inheriting is much different than the one he left behind four years ago,” said Yusuf Erim, an Istanbul-based foreign policy analyst and editor-at-large of TRT World, a Turkish state-owned broadcaster.
“The diminishing US presence in the Middle East and North Africa and Mediterranean basin during the Trump administration created voids which have been filled by other actors,” he said. “Biden will have to tread carefully to create space for America to reassert itself in these areas of interest.”
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Iran remains deeply sceptical of Biden’s motives for diplomatic re-engagement, however.
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