Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Counterproductive Reactive Saudi Policies
By Nicola Nasser*
Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011,
Rachel Bronson asked: “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia
However, On September
30 the next year, the senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for
Middle East Policy Bruce Riedel concluded that the “revolution in Saudi Arabia
is no longer unthinkable.”
To preempt such a possibility, the kingdom in March 2011, in a “military” move to curb the tide of the Arab popular
uprisings which raged across the Arab world from sweeping to its doorsteps, the
kingdom sent troops to Bahrain
That rapid reactive
Saudi military move into Bahrain
Amid a continuing succession process in Saudi Arabia,
while major socioeconomic and political challenges loom large
regionally, the kingdom is looking for security as far away as China, but
blinded to the shortest way to its stability in its immediate proximity, where
regional understanding with its geopolitical Arab and Muslim neighborhood would
secure the kingdom and save it a wealth of assets squandered on unguaranteed guarantees.
In his quest
to contain any fallout from the “Arab Spring,” Saudi King Abdullah Ben Abdel-Aziz selectively
proposed inviting the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco to join the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf,
known as the Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC), leading The Economist on May 19, 2011 to joke
that the organization should be renamed the “Gulf Counter-Revolutionary Club.” For sure including Iraq
and Yemen
Ahead of US President Barak Obama’s
official visit to the kingdom by the end of this March, Saudi Arabia was
looking “forward to China as an international
magnate with a great political and economic weight to play a prominent role in
achieving peace and security in the region,” according to Defense Minister and
Crown Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud who was in Beijing from March 13 to
16 “to enhance cooperation with China to protect peace, security and stability
in the region.” He was quoted by a statement from the Saudi Press Agency.
Prince Salman was in Japan India
and Saudi Arabia Indonesia and Saudi Arabia
While a strong Saudi-Pakistan defense
partnership has existed for long, it has been upgraded recently. Princes
Salman and Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal arrived in Pakistan Saudi Arabia
On this March 14, the Financial Times
reported that Saudi Arabia has given $1.5 billion (Dh5.5 billion) to Pakistan Saudi Arabia Pakistan ’s agreement, during Prince Salman’s visit,
to support the establishment of a “transitional governing body” in Syria
On this March
5, the kingdom led two other members of the six-member GCC, namely the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain , to withdraw their ambassadors from Qatar
Hunting
two French and Lebanese birds with one shot, the kingdom early last January
pledged a $3 billion royal grant, estimated to be two-time the entire military
budget of Lebanon
The Saudi
multi-billion dollar support to the change of guards in Egypt early last July
and the kingdom’s subscription to Egypt’s make or break campaign against the
Muslim Brotherhood (MB) inside and outside the country following the ouster of
the MB’s former president Mohammed Morsi reveal a much more important Saudi
strategic and security unsigned accord with Egypt’s new rulers.
On the outset
of the so-called “Arab Spring,” the kingdom also bailed out Bahrain
More
multi-billion petrodollars were squandered inside the country to bribe the
population against joining the sweeping popular Arab protests.
Yet still more
billions were squandered on twenty percent of all arms transfers to the region
between 2009-2013 to make the kingdom the world’s fifth largest importer of
arms while more Saudi orders for arms are outstanding, according to a new study
released on this March 17 by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI).
While the United States will continue to “guarantee Israel ’s qualitative military edge” over all the
twenty two Arab nations plus Iran ,
Iran is developing its own
defense industries to defend itself against both the US
and Israel
Had all of those squandered
billions of petrodollars spent more wisely they could have created a revolution
of development in the region.
Not Assured by US
Ahead of
Obama’s visit, the Saudi message is self-evident. They are looking, on their
own, for alternative security guarantees, or at least additional ones. They
don’t trust their decades - long American security umbrella anymore. The US
sellout of close allies like the former presidents of Tunisia , Egypt
and Yemen shed doubt on any
“assurances’ Washington
President Obama is scheduled to be in Riyadh by the end of
this March to assure Saudi Arabia of what his Deputy
Secretary of State Bill Burns on
last February 19 told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that
the United States takes Saudi security concerns “seriously,” “US-Saudi partnership is as
important today as it ever was” and that the “Security
cooperation is at the heart of our agenda” with the GCC, reminding his audience
that his country still keeps about 35,000 members of the US military at 12
bases in and around the Arabian Gulf.
However, “the Saudi voices
I hear do not think that what they see as the current lack of American resolve
is merely a short-term feature of the Obama Presidency: They spot a deeper
trend of Western disengagement from their region,” Sir Tom Phillips - British
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia 2010-12 and an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Middle East and
North Africa Programme - wrote on last February 12.
Obviously,
the Saudis are not assured, neither internally, regionally or at the
international level because as Burns said on the same occasion: “We
don’t always see eye to eye” and it is natural that Gulf states
would “question our reliability as partners” given US efforts to achieve energy
independence and US warnings that traditional power structures, such as the
gulf monarchies, are “unsustainable.”
Obama’s upcoming visit to
the kingdom has been described as a “fence-mending” one. Saudi Foreign Minister
Prince Saud Al
Faisal, at a joint press conference alongside visiting US Secretary of
State John Kerry last November, hinted that
fences might not be mended because “a true relationship between friends is
based on sincerity, candor, and frankness rather than mere courtesy.”
What Prince Al
Faisal described as “frankness” is still missing: His brother, prince Turki
al-Faisal, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last December,
blasted the Obama administration for keeping his country in the dark on its
secret talks with Iran
“The Saudis have good
reason to feel besieged and fearful,” Immanuel Wallerstein, director emeritus
of the Fernand Braudel
Center at Binghamton
University and senior researcher at Yale University
and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris , was
quoted as saying by AlJazeera America
Senior associate
of Carnegie’s Middle East program Frederic Wehry on this March 10 wrote that, “There is a growing sense in Gulf
capitals … led by Saudi Arabia ”
that “the United States
What
Burns described as “tactical
differences” with Saudi Arabia and its GCC co-members, the Saudis are acting on
the premise that those differences are much more strategic than “tactical” and
accordingly are overstretching their search for alternative security guarantees
worldwide because they seem to disagree with Burns that “our Gulf partners know that no country or collection of
countries can do for the Gulf states what the United States has done and
continues to do.”
Pressured between
Two ‘Crescents’
Three threatening developments
have led to Saudi distrust in US security assurances. The first was the selling
out of a US ally like the
former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the second was the Qatari, Turkish and
US coordination with the Muslim Brotherhood regionally and the third was the
assumption to power of the MB in Egypt Riyadh
of a possible similar scenario in Saudi Arabia
The second development put
the kingdom on alert against the emerging MB, Turkey, Qatar and the US axis
that would have encircled Saudi Arabia had the kingdom allowed this axis to
hand the power over to the Brotherhood in Syria in the north and in Egypt in
the west. The MB is influential in Jordan, the kingdom’s northern neighbor, and
in Yemen
The third development surrendered
the western strategic backyard of the kingdom to the MB, which has become
untrustworthy politically in view of its membership in the emerging US-led ““Brotherhood
crescent” after decades of sponsoring the MB leaders who found in the kingdom a
safe haven from their suppression in Syria and Egypt and using them against the
pan-Arab regimes in both countries and against the pan-Arab and communist
political movements.
Unmercifully pressured
between the “Brotherhood crescent” and what King Abdullah II of Jordan once
described as the “Shiite crescent” extending from Iran through Iraq and Syria
to Hezbullah in Lebanon, let alone the al-Qaeda offshoots, which have deep
roots inside the kingdom and in its immediate surroundings and have emerged as
a major threat to regional as well as to internal stability, in addition to
what the Saudis perceive as the withdrawal or at least the rebalancing of the
US power out of the region, the kingdom seems poised to find an answer to the
question which Bruce Riedel asked on September 30, 2012 about whether or not
the “revolution in Saudi Arabia is no longer unthinkable.”
The Saudi answer so far has
been reactive more than proactive. “It is difficult to avoid the impression
that Saudi policy is more re-active than pro-active,” Sir Tom Phillips -
British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia 2010-12 and an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Middle
East and North Africa Programme - wrote on last February 12.
Proactive Shorter Path
Overdue
Following the lead of
the United States and Europe who have come to deal with the fait accompli that
Iran as a pivotal regional power is there to stay for the foreseeable future, a
more Saudi proactive regional policy that would engage Iran and Syria would be
a much shorter and cheaper route to internal security as well as to regional
stability, instead of reacting to their alliance by engaging in a lost and
costly battle for a “regime change” in both countries.
Or much better, the
kingdom could follow the lead of the Sultanate of Oman, which risked to break
away from the GCC should they go along with the Saudi proposal late in 2011 for
transforming their “council” into an anti-Iran military “union.” Regardless of
what regime rules in Tehran and since the time
of the Shah, Oman has been
dealing with Iran Qatar
takes a middle ground between the Saudi and Omani positions vis-à-vis Iran Tehran
Feeling
isolated, besieged and threatened by being left in the cold as a result of what
it perceives as a withdrawing US security umbrella, the kingdom’s new
experience of trying to cope on its own is indulging the country in
counterproductive external policies in the turmoil of the aftermath of the
shock waves of the Arab popular
uprisings, which have raged across the Arab world since 2011, but its tide has
stopped at the Damascus gate of the Iranian – Syrian alliance, which is backed
internationally by the emerging Russian and Chinese world powers.
At the end of
the day, the kingdom’s recent historical experience indicates that the Saudi
dynasty lived its most safe and secure era during the Saudi-Egyptian-Syrian
trilateral understanding, which was developed as a regional axis of stability,
as the backbone of the Arab League regional system and was reinforced by the
trilateral coordination in the 1973 Arab – Israeli war.
The revival of the Saudi
coordination with Egypt in
the post-Morsi presidency was a crucial first step that would lead nowhere
unless it is completed by an overdue Saudi political U-turn on Syria that would revive the old trilateral axis
to defend Arabs against Israel Iran
would be a surplus; otherwise the revival of the trilateral coordination would
at least serve as a better Saudi defense against Iran
However such a Saudi U-turn
would require of course a strategic decision that would renege on the kingdom’s
US-inspired and ill-advised policy of dealing with Syria and Iran as “the enemy,”
while dealing with Israel, which still occupies Palestinian, Syrian and
Lebanese territories, as a possible “peace partner” and a co-member of an
anti-Iran and Syria “front of moderates,” which the successive US
administrations have been promoting.
It would first require as
well a change of foreign policy decision-makers in Riyadh Saudi Arabia
