Shifting Middle Eastern sands spotlight diverging US-Saudi interests

by Dr James M Dorsey

A series of Gulf and Middle East-related developments suggest that resolving some of the Middle East’s most debilitating and devastating crises while ensuring that efforts to pressure Iran do not perpetuate the mayhem may be easier said than done. They also suggest that the same is true for keeping US and Saudi interests aligned.

Optimists garner hope from the fact that the US Senate may censor Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the October 2 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul; the positive start of Yemeni peace talks in Sweden with an agreement to exchange prisoners, Saudi Arabia’s invitation to Qatar to attend an October 9 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Riyadh, and a decision by the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut production.

That optimism, however, may not be borne out by facts on the ground and analysis of developments that are likely to produce at best motion rather than movement. In fact, more fundamentally, what many of the developments suggest is an unacknowledged progressive shift in the region’s alliances stemming in part from the fact that the bandwidth of shared US-Saudi interests is narrowing.

There is no indication that, even if Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani decides to accept an invitation by Saudi king Salman to attend the GCC summit rather than send a lower level delegation or not attend at all, either the kingdom or the United Arab Emirates, the main drivers behind the 17-month old economic and diplomatic boycott of the Gulf state, are open to a face-saving solution despite US pressure to end to the rift.

Signalling that the invitation and an earlier comment by Prince Mohammed that “despite the differences we have, (Qatar) has a great economy and will be doing a lot in the next five years” do not indicate a potential policy shift, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash insisted that the GCC remained strong despite the rift. “The political crisis will end when the cause behind it ends and that is Qatar’s support of extremism and its interference in the stability of the region.,” Mr. Gargash said, reiterating long-standing Saudi-UAE allegations.

Similarly, United Nations-sponsored peace talks in Sweden convened with the help of the United States may at best result in alleviating the suffering of millions as a result of the almost four-year old Saudi-UAE military intervention in Yemen but are unlikely to ensure that a stable resolution of the conflict is achievable without a lowering of tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Even humanitarian relief remains in question with the parties in Sweden unable to agree on a reopening of Sana’a airport to facilitate the flow of aid.

More realistically, with the Trump administration, backed by Saudi Arabia and Israel, determined to cripple Iran economically in a bid to force it to alter its regional policies, if not change the regime in Tehran, chances are the Yemeni conflict will be perpetuated rather than resolved.

To Yemen’s detriment, Iran is emerging as one of the foremost remaining shared US-Saudi interests as the two countries struggle to manage their relationship in the wake of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing. That struggle is evident with the kingdom’s Washington backers divided between erstwhile backers-turned-vehement critics like Republican senator Graham Lindsey and hardline supporters such as national security advisor John Bolton. The jury is out on who will emerge on top in the Washington debate.

The risks of the Saud-Iranian rivalry spinning out of control possibly with the support of hardliners like Mr. Bolton were evident in this week’s suicide bombing in the Iranian port of Chabahar, an Indian-backed project granted a waiver from US sanctions against the Islamic republic to counter influence of China that support the nearby Pakistani port of Gwadar.

Iranian officials, including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Revolutionary Guards spokesman Brigadier General Ramadan Sharif suggested without providing evidence that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attack that targeted the city’s police headquarters, killing two people and wounding 40 others.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, believed to be close to the Guards, said the attack was the work of Ansar al-Furqan, an Iranian Sunni jihadi group that Iran claims enjoys Saudi backing.

Iran’s allegation of Saudi complicity is partly grounded in the fact that a Saudi thinktank linked to Prince Mohammed last year advocated fuelling an insurgency in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan that incudes Chabahar in a bid to thwart the port development while Mr. Bolton before becoming US President Donald J. Trump’s advisor called for US support of ethnic minorities in Iran.

In a bid to create building blocks for the fuelling of ethnic insurgencies in Iran, Pakistani militants have said that Saudi Arabia had in recent years poured money into militant anti-Iranian, anti-Shiite madrassas or religious seminaries in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that borders on Sistan and Baluchistan.

The divergence of US-Saudi interests, agreement on Iran notwithstanding, was on display in this week’s defeat of a US effort to get the UN General Assembly to condemn Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia, despite the kingdom’s denunciation of Hamas as a terrorist organization and its demand that Qatar halt support of it, voted against the resolution.

The vote suggested that Mr. Trump may be hoping in vain for Saudi backing of his as yet undisclosed plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that is believed to be slanted towards Israel’s position.

Saudi ambassador to the UN Abdallah Al-Mouallimi said the defeated UN resolution would “undermine the two-state solution which we aspire to” and divert attention from Israel’s occupation, settlement activities and “blockade” of territories occupied during the 1967 Middle East war.

Saudi Arabia’s changing status and the divergence of longer-term US-Saudi interests was also evident in this week’s OPEC meeting in Vienna.

To get an OPEC deal on production levels, the kingdom, once the oil market’s dominant swing producer, needed an agreement with non-OPEC member Russia on production levels as well as Russian assistance in managing Iranian resistance, suggesting

The agreement, moreover, had to balance Mr. Trump’s frequently tweeted demand for lower prices, and the kingdom’s need for higher ones to fund its budgetary requirements and Prince Mohammed’s ambitious economic reforms and demonstrate that the Khashoggi affair had not made it more vulnerable to US pressure.

The emerging divergence of US-Saudi interests in part reflects a wider debate within America’s foreign policy community about what values the United States and US diplomats should be promoting.

With some of Mr. Trump’s ambassadorial political appointees expressing support for populist, nationalist and authoritarian leaders and political groups, the fact that some of the president’s closest Congressional allies back the anti-Saudi resolution illustrates that there are red lines that a significant number of the president’s supporters are not willing to cross.

All told, recent developments in the Middle East put a spotlight on the changing nature of a key US relationship in the Middle East that could have far-reaching consequences over the middle and long-term. It is a change that is part of a larger, global shift in US priorities and alliances that is likely to outlive Mr. Trump’s term(s) in office.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

Is this the beginning of the end of the U.S.-Saudi alliance?

The disappearance of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, is threatening to upend the terms of the decades long alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia, say Zaid Jilani and Ryan Grim in their joint article for ‘The Intercept’ site, titled: “Is this the beginning of the end of the U.S.-Saudi alliance?”

In the past twelve days since Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian resident of Virginia and a Washington Post columnist, was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, politicians, media figures, and foreign policy elites — even those who have fawned over the authoritarian Saudi Heir Apparent Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) — have grown increasingly critical of the US-Saudi alliance.

The US has long given the Saudis a blank check, politically and militarily, and there have been voices advocating for a rethinking of that decades-old relationship for nearly as long as it has lasted. But the widespread belief that the Saudis assassinated Khashoggi inside their consulate has brought those voices squarely into the center. Suddenly, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States is being called into fundamental question.

President Donald Trump initially responded to questions about Khashoggi’s disappearance by saying, “I don’t like hearing about it, and hopefully that will sort itself out.” But a few days later on last Thursday, he began to sound much less confident in his defense of Saudi Arabia, the first foreign country he visited as president. He said that it was beginning to look as though Khashoggi, a critic of the Heir Apparent, was indeed murdered, but worried that jobs would be at risk if arms sales to the country were halted.

In the Senate, Saudi Arabia is starting to lose its traditional bipartisan support, with almost every member of the Foreign Relations Committee calling on Trump to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance. The Washington Post, meanwhile, has devoted extraordinary resources, both in reporting and editorial, to the case of its columnist.

Washington-based lobbying firms that do business with Saudi Arabia — particularly Hogan and Lovells, the Glover Park Group, and Brownstein — are facing a difficult decision, as pressure mounts across the board to break with Riyadh. The New York Times has withdrawn its sponsorship of an upcoming technology conference in Riyadh. Meanwhile, the Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and CNBC “Squawk Box” co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin have announced that they will pull out. A CNN spokesperson announced its withdrawal from the said conference in Saudi Arabia.

The shift in discourse over Saudi Arabia is palpable in the think tank world as well. The vice president for security at the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, called on the United States to freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s disappearance.

 
 Kelly Magsamen, a former Bush and Obama National Security Council staffer, also warned that the affair had the potential to unify a bipartisan “anti-Saudi sentiment.” Just two years ago, the think tank was arguing for keeping the US-Saudi relationship more or less the same.

Prominent right-wing columnist and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot, a longtime defender of the US-Saudi alliance, warned that if the Saudis did indeed kill Khashoggi, there “must be hell to pay.”

The conversation about Khashoggi’s disappearance has been extremely muddled, with conflicting reports from Turkish and Saudi officials over what happened, but the evidence of foul play by Saudi Arabia has piled up. We now know, through reporting by the Washington Post, that US intelligence had picked up conversations between top Saudi officials discussing a plan by MBS to capture Khashoggi and render him back to Saudi Arabia for detention.

Meanwhile, Turkish officials, remaining anonymous, have said that a team of 15 Saudis, many of them part of MBS’ personal guard, traveled in two private planes to Istanbul on the day Khashoggi was scheduled to venture into the consulate, and left that same day. The professional backgrounds of the Saudis give it the clear markings of a kill-or-capture squad, and official Turkish sources have said that Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the consulate. Surveillance video shows Khashoggi walking into the consulate, but never walking out. NBC News reported that Khashoggi checked his phone just before heading in but has not checked it since. (The Intercept has independently confirmed this claim.)

The Saudis, meanwhile, have denied any wrongdoing. Their official line is that Khashoggi left the consulate shortly after his arrival, but they have not offered surveillance footage or any other evidence to back up that assertion.

Last Wednesday, Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Trump over Khashoggi’s disappearance. The letter instructs the administration to determine whether Khashoggi was indeed kidnapped, tortured, or murdered by the Saudi regime and, as the Global Magnitsky Act requires, to respond within 120 days with a determination of sanctions against individuals who may have been responsible.

The letter was signed by the entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee, save for Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, who is preparing his own push for freezing arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Many of these senators have in the past been steadfast allies of the Saudis, and it is unusual for the committee to be united on an issue like this.

Rand Paul said: “The Saudis will keep killing civilians and journalists as long as we keep arming and assisting them. The President should immediately halt arms sales and military support to Saudi Arabia.”

Corker spoke to the Saudi Ambassador Khalid bin Salman and was curiously told that the government cannot provide video footage of the consulate because they only have livestreaming, not recorded video.

“I’ve never heard of an embassy in my life that doesn’t tape,” he said. “And so to me it feels very much like some nefarious activity has occurred by them. But I don’t want to rush to judgment.”

In an email the ambassador sent to a handful of reporters recently, obtained by The Intercept, he sought to downplay fears about Khashoggi’s fate, saying: “I assure you that the reports that suggest that Jamal Khashoggi went missing in the Consulate in Istanbul or that the Saudi authorities have detained him or killed him are false.”

None of that, however, passes the smell test in Washington. If Khashoggi had indeed left the consulate, there would be video or some other evidence of his having done so. The gap between that reality and the Saudi statement is so wide as to be its own insult to Washington, exacerbating rather than lessening the fury at Riyadh for apparently assassinating a Virginia resident who is known personally by many influential figures in town.

Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, on Tuesday said that Khashoggi’s disappearance is “personal to me,” noting that Khashoggi was a resident of his state. He called on Trump to raise his case with the Saudis and Turkey. Democratic Representative, Gerry Connolly, who represents a portion of Virginia, attended a vigil outside the Washington Post on Wednesday to call attention to the case.

On the Republican side of the aisle, Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio have both said that there should be a strong US response if Khashoggi was indeed killed.

Last Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders used a portion of a Washington speech on global authoritarian trends to demand transparency about what happened to Khashoggi and accountability if he was indeed murdered: I would like to take a moment to note the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, last Tuesday. Over the weekend, Turkish authorities told reporters that they now believe Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate, and his body disposed of elsewhere. We need to know what happened here. If this is true, if the Saudi regime murdered a journalist critic in their own consulate, there must be accountability, and there must be an unequivocal condemnation by the United States. But it seems clear that MBS feels emboldened by the Trump administration’s unquestioning support.

Although Sanders did not specify what kind of accountability the US should demand, there are a variety of levers for the Trump administration to pull if it wants to punish Saudi Arabia for the disappearance and possible murder of a US resident.

The United States is currently providing material and intelligence support to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster in that country. As Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, a leading expert on Saudi affairs, has testified, “If the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war [on Yemen] has to end, it would end tomorrow because the Royal Saudi Air force cannot operate without American & British support.”

Sanders opposes this support for Saudi Arabia, which has come from both the Obama and Trump administrations. Efforts in Congress to limit or terminate this support have so far been unsuccessful.