US President Joe Biden’s ill-advised and brief recent trip to West Asia was always going to be a pro forma affair, given the intractable nature of regional geopolitics and America’s now rather limited leverage in these parts. That it ended with a whimper, therefore, should be no surprise. As expected, President Biden’s visit produced no tangible deliverables. But what is causing concern and some consternation in Western policy circles is the perception that America is neither respected nor feared in these parts anymore. And it is a situation largely of its own making. According to West Asia scholar Shadi Hamid, the presidential visit underlined the reality that Washington is susceptible to being “manipulated by weak, autocratic regimes in the region… supposed allies can disrespect, embarrass, and undermine the USA at will”.

Mr Biden, say critics, has managed the feat of undermining both America’s interests and its selfprofessed values on his sojourn. The consequences of floundering American policy in West Asia are there for all to see. On 16 July, less than 24 hours after Mr Biden left the region, the United Arab Emirates sentenced an American citizen, Mr Asim Ghafoor, to three years in prison on charges many believe are trumped up. Mr Ghafoor, a lawyer for the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was picked up just a couple of days earlier from Dubai International Airport. Many may ~ and have ~ argued that this is par for the course in dictatorships dressed up as quasi-democracies. But, as Hamid points out, what it means for America is that a supposed US partner country is either taunting Mr Biden or, at the very least, couldn’t care less how its actions are perceived by Washington.

This is nothing new. Autocrats are known to test the limits to see how far they can go. In contemporary West Asia, however, “American allies seem to have found that such a limit doesn’t exist”. All Mr Biden has done is deepen the cynicism across the world that he only talks about human rights at quasidemocracies the USA is in bed with to keep the Democratic faithful at home onboard. Then there was President Biden’s infamous fist bump with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely seen as evidence that the Saudi leader had managed to rehabilitate himself after the horrific slaying of Khashoggi.

More humiliatingly for Team Biden, their encouragement of the US President’s West Asia visit was in large part an effort to ease gasoline costs at home by getting the Saudis to increase oil production. Not only did that not happen in any significant way, it was also a textbook case, in strategic terms, of projecting weakness. Mr Biden needed to be much, much better advised. The world has seen, as a result of the President’s West Asia visit, that the sole superpower is now being played by its erstwhile clientstates such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It is a lesson which many countries across the globe will take to heart in their interactions with the USA going forward.