Besides spending America into bankruptcy, Joe Biden's legacy as president can be summed up with this: if President Trump built it, he broke it.

That brings us to the Middle East.

According to Reuters:

DUBAI/RIYADH, March 10 (Reuters) — Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed on Friday to re-establish relations after years of hostility that had threatened stability and security in the Gulf and helped fuel conflicts in the Middle East from Yemen to Syria.

The deal, brokered by China, was announced after four days of previously undisclosed talks in Beijing between top security officials from the two rival Middle East powers.

Let's stop right there.  Beijing did these negotiations as the great power broker for the region, the one they all turned to for fair mediation?

Beijing?  That great peacemaker Beijing?

And America was cut out of the action?  The U.S. got told about it after the deed was done, same as everyone else?

Gabriel Noronha has an interesting analysis in the Washington Examiner:

Gone are the days when the Rose Garden was packed with peacemakers heralding the Abraham Accords. Today, Middle Eastern leaders are flocking to the Forbidden City for the "Beijing Dialogues."

China has brokered a resumption of diplomatic ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It's a coup for Beijing's reputation in the region and a blow to American interests. The Iranian and Saudi national security advisers shook hands on either side of Wang Yi, the top Chinese diplomat, while dozens of Chinese state-owned media cameras clicked away.

This marks quite a failure for Joe Biden, given that nobody wanted him to be involved in any brokered negotiations with the Iranians, despite all the sucking up he's done for Iran.  They didn't want the U.S. involved; they wanted the ChiComs to take care of this.

That's indeed a big loss of influence for the U.S. in the region and could actually shift the balance of power, given Beijing's alliance with Russia.  The Chicoms already have the hooks in various outposts of the Middle East through their Belt and Road initiative, and they've made big inroads in Afghanistan and Iraq, cleaning up on the influence front after the American pullouts.  Iraq, which is an oil barony, recently declared that it would accept payments for its oil shipments in yuan, allowing Beijing to get the hooks in even deeper.

Now there's this — and we all know that while it may buy some kind of peace for Saudi Arabia, it won't do anything good for Israel or the U.S., as Iran's mullahs find their hands freed up from harassing Saudi Arabia to focusing on war with Israel and the U.S.  That's a boon for Iran — and China.

Under President Trump, the great Abraham Accords created peace between Israel and its neighbors.  The accord was signed with regional linchpin Saudi Arabia and Israel, and afterward, Arab state after Arab state moved into the alignment, doing the Saudi thing and establishing trade and transit with Israel.  That was amazing diplomacy from President Trump, given the intractability of Israel's neighbors toward the Jewish state — peace in a place that hadn't see that in decades, and a powerful case for a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump. 

It also re-established the U.S. as the go-to power broker for negotiating out a fair agreement for everyone and friendly ties for all.

Since Trump did it, though, Joe Biden (or whoever controls him) was reflexively against it.  Here's the Joe Biden team in 2021:

The White House is now dismissing President Trump's Abraham Accords between Arab states and Israel — after candidate Joseph R. Biden in 2020 effusively praised the deals and took credit for laying the diplomatic groundwork.

The normalization pacts between Israel and a number of Arab states were at the heart of the Trump administration's Middle East strategy, easing Israel's economic and diplomatic isolation and building up a regional coalition of allies to confront Iran and its proxies. 

Asked by a reporter last week specifically about the status of Mr. Trump's accords, Jen Psaki, President Biden's press secretary, responded: "Aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival, we don't think they did anything constructive, really, to bring an end to the longstanding conflict in the Middle East."

Then there was a backpedal in 2022:

President Biden on Thursday said he strongly supports the Abraham Accords, promoting the Trump-era declarations as a way to integrate Israel in the Middle East.

"We will also continue building on the Abraham Accords, which I strongly support because they deepen, they deepen Israel's integration into the broader region and establish lasting ties for business, cooperation and tourism," Biden said during a press conference in Jerusalem.

Joe complicated things further by demonizing Saudi Arabia as a human rights violator and then went begging to them afterward to pump him some more oil because he had shut down U.S. production, exposing the U.S. as both arrogant and weak, a lethal combo in those parts, and disgusting to everyone else.  Who'd want to trust or associate with anyone who insulted your kingdom as a pariah state, then bent down to beg for petroleum products even as he denounced their existence and vowed to make them obsolete back home?  All this, while stumbling his way across the globe?

It certainly explains why the Saudis turned to China for their mediation needs.  Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout alone pretty well told them he would botch it, and his mixed messages to them made him a repulsive player to deal with anyway.

So now we have this reality going on in the Middle East — China is the power broker, and the U.S. is a regional bystander.  Sound as though things are going to get better?  Not for the U.S., they won't.  China will unite all sides around the idea of the U.S. as the bad guy, and they'll go along if it gets them their immediate needs fixed.  That's some diplomacy we got from Joe Biden and company.  Less American influence, more ChiCom influence.  Stand up and take a bow, Joe.  You did that.

Image: Screen shot from The Guardian video via YouTube.