Saudi Arabia, US and the Middle East

S P SETH

The backdrop to the Saudi King Salman’s recent US visit was largely a pervasive fear of Iranian regional ambitions, augmented due to the US nuclear deal with Iran. Which meant, as far as Riyadh was concerned, that the US was wavering in its absolute commitment to contain, prevent and stop Tehran from destabilizing the region to establish its own regional primacy. Until the nuclear deal, which envisages withdrawal of international economic sanctions against Iran in return for serious curbs on its nuclear ambitions, Iran was increasingly becoming an economic basket case with not much capacity to play a serious regional role, though it still managed to scare some of its Arab neighbours. And that is how Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies and Israel, for its own reasons, wanted things to continue, hoping that, over time, this will seriously weaken Iran’s clerical regime and/or bring it down, thus ensuring the stability of the Saudi-led and overseen conservative political order in the Middle East. Having failed to prevent the US-Iran nuclear deal, Riyadh sought to show its displeasure in all sorts of ways, including an earlier absence by King Salman at an Obama-hosted Gulf summit in the US designed to assure its Middle Eastern allies that its regional strategy remained essentially unchanged despite the nuclear deal with Iran. Which is that they will have virtual US defence umbrella, including all sorts of advanced weaponry the US would continue to sell to refurbish their defence.

What sort of threat(s) Iran poses is generally left vague apart from a general sense that Iran is somehow a malevolent regional force out to destabilize/destroy its Sunni Arab neighbours. And its evil designs are seen in Syria, its support and arming of Hezbollah and in Yemen where Saudi and its allied forces are bombing the Houthis, said to be establishing their control over the country with Iranian support. And, of course, Iran is also supposed to exercise influence and control over Iraq’s Shia regime. In all these places, though, the so-called Iranian proxies are in a precarious situation, with the US largely working against them.

The one possible area of strategic convergence between Iran and the US is the expanding IS control in parts of Iraq and Syria. The US regards IS as a greater danger ideologically, politically and strategically than other scattered jihadi elements in the region. Its appeal to many disaffected Muslim youth, particularly in the west, is quite fetching as seen in their recruitment to the cause at home and on the ground in the region. And so far, despite massive US aerial targeting of IS assets in Iraq and Syria and the engagement of the US-trained and equipped Iraqi army against the enemy, IS seems to be doing pretty well. The US objective to degrade, destroy and ultimately annihilate IS doesn’t appear to have made much headway, if at all. In the midst of it, Iranian trained and equipped Shia militias seem to be the only effective counterforce with real potential to push back IS. And the US is quite supportive, if not encouraging, of Iranian role. Which makes the Saudis jittery about the future strategic evolution of the region where Iran might come to have an influence on US regional policy.

Even though the Saudis recognize at some level that IS also has Saudi monarchy as its target, as seen in a series of recent explosions in the kingdom, they tend to gloss over it by regarding Iran as a bigger threat. During his recent US visit, King Salman seems to have been reassured, to the extent possible; that the United States doesn’t have any short or medium term plans to make Iran into a strategic friend/ally. And it is showing this by selling huge amounts of weaponry to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. In 2014 alone, Saudi Arabia, now the world’s biggest arms buyer, reportedly spent $80 billion on arms purchases, much of it from the United States. And the UAE spent $23 billion on arms purchases. The Gulf States are awash with sophisticated foreign arms, most of them from the United States with trainers, consultants and any number of experts and handlers hired to do the job if and when necessary.

With almost no real strategic road map to bring about stability and security to the region, such seemingly ad hoc deployment of military resources is a further invitation to disaster in a region that is already on the brink in more than one way. And Riyadh still feels threatened and worried about some perceived change in the US Middle East policy. Bruce Riedel, a US strategic analyst at the Brookings Institution, has this to say of Saudi bombing of Yemen, where they fear the Houthis are engaged in a proxy war for Iran: “What the Saudis really want from Obama is unquestioning and complete political support for their war and its enormous carnage. [And] They have it—and the Yemeni people are paying for the Iran nuclear deal.” The US needs to go out of its way to assure the Saudis that its overall Middle Eastern strategy of supporting their friends and allies remains uncompromised by the US-Iran nuclear deal.

And this in a way might encourage Saudi Arabia to further push the limits of its regional primacy. As Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi reportedly told reporters in Washington in April 2015, “The dangerous thing is, we don’t know what the Saudis want to do [after Yemen]. Is Iraq within their radar? That’s very, very dangerous—the idea that you intervene in another state, unprovoked, just for regional ambition is wrong.” He added, “Saddam did it before—see what it has done to the country.”

In other words, the Middle Eastern situation is becoming messier and messier with not much thought, if any, being paid to exploring political solutions. And an important reason for this is the proliferation and easy access to weapons all around for state actors from the United States and other external powers, and to Jihadis of all sorts from their regional benefactors and promoters. And IS helps itself to these weapons and treasures by raiding and capturing such a vast array of weapons all around. No wonder that there is no prospect anywhere in sight of any sort of political solution. And here we haven’t even dealt with the increasingly dangerous situation in Syria, and Turkey’s no-holds barred offensive against the Kurds.  

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au