The Jeddah summit, requested by the U.S., should have been Joe Biden’s show. “America is back”. Instead, it was a spectacle that showed America as a spent force desperately trying to stay relevant. Biden’s arrival to the region was probably comparable to Biden’s departure from Afghanistan. 

No one has managed to expose the U.S. superpower fallacy than Russia’s Putin. And no one described that fallacy better than China’s Mao, describing the U.S. as a, “paper tiger”, decades ago.   

Up to this week, no one managed to demonstrate that fallacy, more evidently, that Mohammed Bin Salman, the seemingly unremovable heir to the Saudi throne, who sat rejoicing his  reincarnation as a statesman, leading a real nation, and negotiating with his defeated U.S. nemesis across the table. That wasn’t enough. Then came an American reporter, shouting at Joe Biden, who sat in stone silence, whether the Saudi is still a pariah. There’s no way of knowing whether that loud dagger was plunged and twisted into Biden by MBS’ himself. It might as well have been. 

Worst still, the Superpower leader and his delegation were made to listen, in obvious shock, to the young prince across the table loudly refusing to increase oil output beyond 13m b/d, which was the only reason that brought Biden to the Saudi capital. Why MBS had to wait until Biden sat across the table to deal that humiliating blow, is open to speculation. The body language among the American delegation was interesting, to say the least. Even before MBS dealt this blow, his father, king Salman, decided to disappear after a quick handshake with Biden, giving a clear message. You deal with my son, or you don’t deal.  

America’s previous hegemony in the region is a thing of the past. Earlier, MBS received the U.S. leader at the palace, unlike all other leaders attending, whom he met warmly at the airport. Whether that was another intended message or part of the protocol shouldn’t matter anymore. Biden would have been better served staying at home. Trump must be relishing the spectacle and comparing it to his own welcome, complete with Saudi folk dances and a 110 billion dollar arms deal.  

Clearly, Biden’s declaration that America is back found no welcoming party. 

It can never be more personally humiliating than this for a sitting U.S. president being forced to eat his words by a political operator more than 50 years his junior. Neither can the superpower fallacy be more humiliatingly exposed than this. No superpower worth the name can be brought to its knees in such fashion by a dependent power. If Putin or MBS have no other benefits from Ukraine’s disaster, this victory is enough for them. A previous oil searching visit to Riyadh, by Joe Biden’s ally, British prime minister Boris Johnson, who was recently disgracefully removed, was followed almost immediately by MBS’ trip to China. What will happen to Biden come 2024, assuming the Democrats are foolish enough to nominate him, is anybody’s guess. 

All this humiliation could have been avoided. The “emperor” could have kept his clothes.  The fallacy could have continued. Instead, the U.S. and its NATO allies were intoxicated by past impunity when they bullied weak nations. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Vietnam, Somalia, Libya, Syria. Perhaps that’s how far they should have limited their colonial offensive. Against weak nations that couldn’t retaliate, offensives they got away with successfully. Perhaps they should have listened to Russia’s leaders, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin, and even listened to many of their own political scientists, all of whom have been repeatedly warning for 30 years, not to cross the red lines with an eastward NATO expansion to Russia’s borders. Many of those warning about the probable consequences reminded the U.S. how President John Kennedy dangerously reacted with DEFCON 2 to Nikita Kruchev’s decision to put Soviet missiles on America’s southern borders in Cuba. That potential holocaust was only averted after the Soviet agreed to climb down, but only when the U.S. itself agreed to withdraw its own missiles from Soviet borders in Turkey. 

Now the U.S. decided to take on real world powers. Russia, with a plan for China on the drawing boards. The result is not just the disastrous predicament faced by Ukrainians, but also the political debacles we have been witnessing in the past months, leading to the mother of all humiliations, when cap in hand, the U.S. came begging MBS, that murderous outlaw leading a “pariah”, for his charity, and he, you can be certain, extorting a pound of flesh in return, before also refusing to go higher than 13m b/d.  

Noteworthy, Biden’s regional tour didn’t include the UAE, a key regional player, where Biden’s Russian and Chinese counterparts were given  welcomes fit for reigning emperors, not so long ago.  The UAE is progressively showing a cunning survival ability to balance not just world powers, but regional ones as well, to its own advantage. Reconciliation with Turkey while retaining strong economic relations with Iran, the two competing major regional powers, are key to the UAE balancing act. Something that Saudi’s MBS has started to emulate. 

Biden’s single seeming success was in Israel, where he managed to hold a virtual quartet summit that included UAE’s Bin Zayed, who earlier walked away from the F35 deal after discovering the plane’s technological compromise aimed at retaining Israel’s superiority, and India’s Narendra Modi, whose government recently warned the U.S. not to interfere with India’s sovereign decisions and its relationship with Putin’s Russia. 

My expectations were actually the opposite. I expected the Saudis will welcome America’s re-entry into our region and seek an offensive against Iran. We didn’t hear that language from MBS and his spokespersons. Instead, we heard language that indicated America’s weakness and unreliability as an ally and a regional desire to find solutions with Iran. Saudi political commentators, who never speak without their government’s approval, portrayed America as a spent force whose time is up. The region has changed, evolved and moved on. And it can do without America. Whether that vacuum will be filled by Arabs themselves, by Iran or by America’s heirs in Tel Aviv is the question that will keep us busy in the months ahead. But America’s previous hegemony in the region is a thing of the past. 

Back home, there is a lot of soul searching required from Americans to discover how they can adjust and peacefully coexist with a changing world in which America’s word is no longer divine. More importantly, try to learn how not to be extravagant in estimating America’s position, and to instead understand the new limits of its global power. 

* Munir Saeed is a political analyst