WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th November, 2020) Democratic candidate Joe Biden's claimed election victory over previous US President Donald Trump will mean little change to US policies on the middle East, former United Kingdom's ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, told Sputnik.
"I expect minimal change," Ford said on Saturday. "As Trump discovered when he attempted to withdraw US troops from Syria, a US President is only ever allowed by the security establishment to make minimal adjustments in a dovish direction."
Biden's long public career of 36 years in the US Senate and eight years as vice president to President Barack Obama had also never shown any signs that he was prepared to defy the institutional, bipartisan and Deep State policy consensus on major issues, Ford recalled.
"Nothing in Biden's record suggests he has ever had a thought in his head about foreign policy which departs from the bipartisan orthodoxy of American imperialism," he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had openly favored Trump over Biden during the long US election campaign but Biden, a longtime supporter of Israel, was unlikely to try and make him pay for it, Ford noted.
"Netanyahu despite his bet on Trump can rest easy. Biden will soon be currying favor, not least because he will already be thinking of his second term and the power of the Israel lobby," Ford said.
Nor would Biden seek to restructure or question the close and financially lucrative US security partnership Trump had expanded with Saudi Arabia through its ruler Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, Ford explained.
"What would Biden have to gain from distancing himself from the Saudis? No, he will seek to complete Trump's work of normalising relations between Arab states and Israel," he said.
Only on Iran would Biden feel under some pressure to move away from Trumpian policies, Ford predicted.
"That [is] only because Trump was at such pains to disavow Obama's crowning foreign policy achievement; the nuclear agreement with Iran," he said.
Yet even on the Iranian nuclear agreement, Biden might prove unable to overcome the hostility to the deal within the US national security establishment, Ford cautioned.
"Such is the reluctance of the foreign policy establishment to give any ground at all to Iran that it is far from certain that Biden will not overplay his hand with Iran and demand too much for the nuclear deal to be restored," he said.
While Biden claimed victory in the 2020 presidential election earlier on Saturday, Trump argued that the race was not over yet.
