Leveretts: "Washington’s deference to Saudi anxieties as corrosive as its deference to Israel"

We return from a recent trip to the region persuaded that the main question engaging people with respect to the “Arab spring” is no longer, “who’s next”, but rather “how far will Saudi Arabia go in pushing a counter-revolutionary agenda” across the Middle East? Whether Saudi Arabia is really capable of coping with the momentous changes going on in the region—not just with respect of demands for political change in a number of Arab states, but geopolitically, as well—is a truly profound and important question.  To unpack this, it is helpful to take a historical perspective on Saudi Arabia and its traditional national security strategy. 

Unlike Iran and Turkey, many Arab states are not, within their current boundaries, “natural” states.  Most, in fact, are the creations of colonial powers, at least within their present borders—e.g., Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the smaller GCC states all fit this bill.  Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, is an important exception to this generalization.  But, in contrast to Egypt, Saudi Arabia is not a historically “natural” state.  The Saudi state was definitely created—but by indigenous actors, not outsiders...... 

 

The Kingdom wants to have at least a quasi-hegemonic status on the Arabian peninsula; at the same time, it does not want another regional state to attain what it would see as hegemony over the Middle East as a whole.  And, even in the post-Cold War period, the Saudis have wanted to see their relationship with the United States as the ultimate guarantee of their security and survival.  Today, that strategy is in crisis on all fronts—and the Saudis are not handling it well. 

The strategy is in crisis, first of all, because of Riyadh’s plummeting confidence in the reliability and competence of the United States as a security partner.  This dynamic is not, per se, new.  The Kingdom grew increasingly disenchanted with various aspects of America’s Middle East policy during the 1990s—disenchantment intensified by the various traumas that fallout from the 9/11 attacks inflicted on U.S.-Saudi relations.  (The militancy associated with the religious ideology promoted by Saudi Arabia over decades has generated a number of significant security problems for the United States.)    

But the Saudi leadership—including, it would seem, King Abdullah himself—is both enormously angry and deeply unsettled by what it sees as Washington’s abandonment of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.  Egypt is a critically important state for the Saudi—and it has not always been a friendly one.  Mubarak’s predecessors, Nasser and Sadat, both challenged Saudi Arabia, in diametrically different but powerful ways.  And now that Egyptian political order, the orientation of which is so strategically consequential for Saudi Arabia, is again up for grabs.  So, while Western assessments have tended to criticize President Obama and his Administration for being too slow in supporting “forces of change” in Egypt, from a Saudi perspective the Obama Administration dropped Mubarak much too quickly, squandering opportunities to support him in pushing back against those demanding his removal.  

On the regional front, the Saudis are discombobulated by what they see as a rising tide of Iranian influence across the Middle East.  The Islamic Republic’s allies have been winning, politically, in key venues—Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine.  Historically, the Saudis have never been big fans of pan-Arabism.  But, in recent years, senior Saudi princes have, with increasing frequency, denounced what they have come portentously to call Iranian “interference” in “Arab affairs”.  Now, with the Arab spring, the Saudis are alarmed that the influence of the Islamic Republic and political forces friendly to it will rise even more dramatically.  The Saudis are even more alarmed about the potential geopolitical consequences of these developments—e.g., the high likelihood that post-Mubarak Egypt will enjoy improved relations with the Islamic Republic.

So, as the Saudi state sees itself increasingly “encircled” by multiple and expanding threats, Saudi leaders are doubling down on the fundamentals of their traditional national security strategy—military force to ensure its dominance on the Arabian peninsula, the use of religious ideology to raise sectarian concern about rising Shi’a influence, and putting enormous financial resources on the table (e.g., $30 billion for Bahrain) to further its goals. .... But Bahrain is not the only place in the region where the Saudi counter-revolution is being felt.  Saudi initiative was critical to bringing about the Arab League’s quasi-endorsement of international military intervention in Libya.  That amounts to Saudi endorsement of coercive regime change in another Arab state.  Regime change is unacceptable in Bahrain, but OK in Libya—the main thing is, the Saudis have reaffirmed their ability to suck the United States onto their side in regional disputes (at those in which Israel is not taking a position at odds with the Saudis).   Washington’s deference to Saudi anxieties could prove almost as corrosive to the possibility of America making critically necessary adjustments in its own Middle East policies as Washington’s deference to Israel.