President Biden strict with Middle East I remove him from the list of priorities

The signals are not meant to be delicate, his counselors have said. The president has made only one call to a Middle East head of state and to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, which was delayed for more than three weeks.

He had announced an end to US support for Saudi-led operations in Yemen in the two weeks in office, a move preceding the freezing of arms sales agreements in the region, writes Politico, translated Periscopi.

And his administration has deliberately decided to drop that Middle Eastern priority list.

If you want to see the list of regions that Biden has priority, the Middle East is not among the top three,” said a close Biden adviser. The “First is Asia-Peacekeeping, then Europe, and the third is the Western Hemisphere. And this reflects a super-party consensus that issues that call for our attention have changed as the race of great powers [with China and Russia] is going out. ”

Another Biden adviser said even more sharply: “they're just making it extremely deliberate that they don't want to dive into the Middle East. ”

This priority change is about what they described as deliberate efforts to prioritize what they see as more important global issues.

The president has a long and tormenting history in the Middle East. He had voted against the Iraq war in 1991, which the US had won quickly. But then he passed a resolution authorising President George W. Bush to evacuate Iraq in 2003, a vote he has said he has regretted.

In 2007, while competing for president, he had proposed a plan that would divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions to be held by the Shiites, Sunni and Kurds. /Periscope