Secretary of
State John Kerry was escorted by the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud
al-Faisal, as he arrived in Riyadh on Nov. 3, th. 2013.
WASHINGTON — There was a time when Saudi
and American interests in the Middle East seemed so aligned that the
cigar-smoking former Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was
viewed as one of the most influential diplomats in Washington.
Those days are over. The Saudi king and
his envoys — like the Israelis — have spent weeks lobbying fruitlessly
against the interim nuclear accord with Iran that was reached in Geneva
on Sunday. In the end, there was little they could do: The Obama
administration saw the nuclear talks in a fundamentally different light
from the Saudis, who fear that any letup in the sanctions will come at
the cost of a wider and more dangerous Iranian role in the Middle East.
Although the Saudis remain close American
allies, the nuclear accord is the culmination of a slow mutual
disenchantment that began at the end of the Cold War.
For decades, Washington depended on Saudi
Arabia — a country of 30 million people but the Middle East’s largest
reserves of oil — to shore up stability in a region dominated by
autocrats and hostile to another ally, Israel. The Saudis used their
role as the dominant power in OPEC to help rein in Iraq and Iran, and
they supported bases for the American military, anchoring American
influence in the Middle East and beyond.
But the Arab uprisings altered the
balance of power across the Middle East, especially with the ouster of
the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of both the Saudis
and the Americans.
The United States has also been reluctant
to take sides in the worsening sectarian strife between Shiite and
Sunni, in which the Saudis are firm partisans on the Sunni side.
At the same time, new sources of oil have
made the Saudis less essential. And the Obama administration’s recent
diplomatic initiatives on Syria and Iran have left the Saudis with a
deep fear of abandonment.
“We still share many of the same goals,
but our priorities are increasingly different from the Saudis,” said F.
Gregory Gause III, a professor of Middle East studies at the University
of Vermont. “When you look at our differing views of the Arab Spring, on
how to deal with Iran, on changing energy markets that make gulf oil
less central — these things have altered the basis of U.S.-Saudi
relations.”
The United States always had important
differences with the Saudis, including on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the spread of fundamentalist strains of Islam, Mr. Gause
added. But the Obama administration’s determination to ease the long
estrangement with Iran’s theocratic leaders has touched an especially
raw nerve: Saudi Arabia’s deep-rooted hostility to its Shiite rival for
leadership of the Islamic world.
Saudi reaction to the Geneva agreement
was guarded on Monday, with the official Saudi Press Agency declaring in
a statement that “if there is good will, then this agreement could be
an initial step” toward a comprehensive solution for Iran’s nuclear
ambitions.
In recent days, Saudi officials and
influential columnists have made clear that they fear the agreement will
reward Iran with new legitimacy and a few billion dollars in sanctions
relief at exactly the wrong time. Iran has been mounting a costly effort
to support the government of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad,
including arms, training and some of its most valuable Revolutionary
Guards commandos, an effort that has helped Mr. Assad win important
victories in recent months.
The Saudis fear that further battlefield
gains will translate into expanded Iranian hegemony across the region.
Already, the Saudis have watched with alarm as Turkey — their ally in
supporting the Syrian rebels — has begun making conciliatory gestures
toward Iran, including an invitation by the Turkish president, Abdullah
Gul, to his Iranian counterpart to pay an official visit earlier this
month.
In the wake of the accord’s announcement
on Sunday, Saudi Twitter users posted a wave of anxious, defeatist
comments about being abandoned by the United States.
In many ways, those fears are at odds
with the facts of continuing American-Saudi cooperation on many fronts,
including counterterrorism. “We’re training their National Guard, we’re
doing security plans and training for oil terminals and other
facilities, and we’re implementing one of the biggest arms deals in
history,” said Thomas W. Lippman, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East
Institute who has written extensively on American-Saudi relations.
And despite all the talk of decreasing reliance on Saudi oil, the Saudis remain a crucial producer for world markets.
But none of this can obscure a
fundamental split in perspectives toward the Geneva accord. The Saudis
see the nuclear file as one front in a sectarian proxy war — centered in
Syria — that will shape the Middle East for decades to come, pitting
them against their ancient rival.
“To the Saudis, the Iranian nuclear
program and the Syria war are parts of a single conflict,” said Bernard
Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton. “One
well-placed Saudi told me, ‘If we don’t do this in Syria, we’ll be
fighting them next inside the kingdom.’ ”
How the Saudis propose to win the
struggle for Syria is not clear. Already, their expanded support for
Islamist rebel fighters in Syria — and the widespread assumption that
they are linked to the jihadist groups fighting there — has elevated
tensions across the region. After a double suicide bombing killed 23
people outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut last Tuesday, the Arab news
media was full of panicky reports that this was a Saudi “message” to
Iran before the nuclear talks in Geneva. A day later, a Shiite group in
Iraq claimed responsibility for mortars fired into Saudi Arabia near the
border between the two countries.
The Saudi-owned news media has bubbled
with vitriol in recent days. One prominent columnist, Tareq al-Homayed,
sarcastically compared President Obama to Mother Teresa, “turning his
right and left cheeks to his opponents in hopes of reconciliation.”
American efforts to assuage these
anxieties, including Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Riyadh
earlier this month, have had little effect.
The Saudis have already broadcast their
discontent about the Iran agreement, and America’s Syria policy, by
refusing their newly won seat on the United Nations Security Council
last month. It was a gesture that many analysts ridiculed as
self-defeating.
Beyond such gestures, it is not clear
that the Saudis can do much. The Obama administration has made fairly
clear that it is not overly worried about Saudi discontent, because the
Saudis have no one else to turn to for protection from Iran.
The Saudis have increased their support
for Syrian rebel groups in the past two months, including some Islamist
groups that are not part of the secular American-backed coalition.
“They are working with some people who
make us squeamish,” said one United States official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. “But they’re effective, they’re the real deal.
These are Islamists who foresee a Syria where Alawites and Christians
are tolerated minorities, but at least they’re not enemies to be
slaughtered.”
In its most feverish form, the Saudis’
anxiety is not just that the United States will leave them more exposed
to Iran, but that it will reach a reconciliation and ultimately anoint
Iran as the central American ally in the region. As the Saudi newspaper
Al Riyadh put it recently in an unsigned column: “The Geneva
negotiations are just a prelude to a new chapter of convergence” between
the United States and Iran.
That may seem far-fetched in light of the
ferocious and entrenched anti-Americanism of the Iranian government.
But the Saudi king and his ministers have not forgotten the days of Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, who cherished his status as America’s
great friend in the region.
“The Saudis are feeling surrounded by
Iranian influence — in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Bahrain,” said
Richard W. Murphy, a retired American ambassador who spent decades in
the Middle East. “It’s a hard state of mind to deal with, a rivalry with
ancient roots — a blood feud operating in the 21st century.”.
(ABNS)
(ABNS)
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