Last week’s US/GCC “summit” (I’m not sure it counts as a real summit when 4 of the 6 GCC leaders didn’t bother showing up) ended so expectedly that, well, I just plain forgot to blog about it. What I wrote before the “summit”:
As I said on the program on Saturday, one possible outcome of this week’s summit is some kind of very broad, very vague framework document that codifies existing verbal defense arrangements without creating a formal treaty obligation. Alongside that, you may see some formal agreement to sell advanced weaponry to the GCC countries, like the F-35, as well as the announcement of some detailed collaborative efforts on specific issues, like cybersecurity and maybe missile defense, where US and GCC interests (and their assessment of the threat from Iran) are more or less on the same page. That will allow everybody to declare victory and wax positively about the strong relationship between America and her Gulf allies, even though nobody will really be getting what they want.
is pretty much what happened, except they didn’t even produce a vague written security framework or, as far as I can tell, cut any new arms deals (there was instead some mention of “expediting” arms transfers, whatever that means). Instead, President Obama offered his “ironclad commitment” to protecting America’s Gulf allies from “external aggression,” and the parties concluded some actual deals on piecemeal things:
Obama on Thursday pledged to take their partnership to another level with greater cooperation on everything from ballistic missile defense, maritime security and cybersecurity to joint military exercises and training. Counterterrorism coordination will tighten to stem the flow of foreign fighters to terrorist groups, protect vulnerable infrastructure and halt terror financing, he said. In a joint statement, the countries vowed to address regional challenges including Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
Predictably, you then saw both the Obama administration and the GCC giving the whole two-day session a positive spin, with one GCC official saying that it “exceeded expectations,” despite the fact that GCC members didn’t get the security pact they wanted and the US seemingly got nowhere on the socio-political reforms that it wanted to talk about. In short, everybody got together and agreed to iron out their differences by restating current policy and sticking with the status quo that supposedly has everybody so pissed at each other.
Middle East Institute analyst Thomas Lippman thinks that one reason nothing much happened at the summit yet everybody seems to be back in love with each other may be because the GCC representatives came to terms with just how little leverage they have when it comes to moving Obama on Iran:
One reason is that Obama made clear that he is committed to seeking a nuclear agreement and more constructive relations with Iran and would not be deterred by anxiety or petulance among the Gulf Arabs. He left them with a choice between going along and making an open break, which none of them is in a position to do. Indeed, the outcome reflected a reality confronting Saudi Arabia and the others: They need the United States more acutely than the United States needs them and therefore they have very limited leverage with Washington. They are heavily dependent on the United States for their security, and they would gain little from the few overt actions they could take, such as expelling U.S. military forces from bases in the region. And the United States has a dwindling need for Gulf oil. Since 2009, the major importer of oil from Saudi Arabia has been China, not the United States, which gets most of its oil from domestic sources and from Canada and Mexico.
The absence of some kind of new weapons deal surprises me a little. The US generally likes selling weapons to allies, particularly to allies that are rich enough to buy those weapons without relying on credit floated by Washington and particularly when they’re complicated weapons like the F-35. It makes defense contractors happy (and makes sure they keep employing people), it makes the allies happy, and it helps bind those allies to us since they can’t exactly spend billions of dollars to buy our weapons systems and then decide to go to, say, Russia for maintenance and spare parts. Of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of weapons sales to come (in particular, the promise of “greater cooperation” on ballistic missile defense and maritime security that came out of Camp David presents opportunities for weapons sales in the future).
I wonder, though, if the last few days in Yemen haven’t shown why the administration elected not to sell F-35s to the Gulf countries. The five-day humanitarian ceasefire there ended on Sunday, and by Tuesday the Saudis were back to bombing:
Tuesday’s airstrikes in Sana, which began before dawn and continued into the afternoon, targeted positions and arms caches of Houthi militias and forces aligned with deposed strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh in the city’s south and east, according to residents and officials. A humanitarian cease-fire ended late Sunday and bombardment recommenced soon after in the port city of Aden and elsewhere, including the northern province of Saada.
The airstrikes in Sana, some of which triggered powerful secondary explosions, set off panicky civilian flight in the district of Niqum, with hundreds of families abandoning their homes and adding to the estimated half-million people internally displaced by the conflict. Some people made makeshift encampments in the garbage-strewn streets.
It’s no secret that the US hasn’t been very keen on the GCC-Egyptian intervention in Yemen, which has been killing scores of civilians and has only made Yemen more unstable to the benefit of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The UN is even warning that the destabilizing effect of the Yemen conflict is contributing to increased Al-Shabaab activity in nearby Somalia. UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon announced today that there will be peace talks on the Yemen crisis next week in Geneva, which both sides welcomed and then immediately began to weigh down with conditions (the Hadi government wants Houthi rebels to withdraw from the places they’ve conquered before the talks begin, while the Houthis want Hadi to stick to the power-sharing arrangement he’s supposed to have agreed to after the Houthis captured Sanaa last September, and neither side seems inclined to accede to the other side’s conditions). Meanwhile, the Saudis apparently struck a humanitarian aid office in Yemen’s Hajja Province, and there’s been actual ground fighting along the Saudi-Yemeni border. This fight looks like it’s nowhere near over, and ISIS and AQAP (and Shabaab, maybe) are loving it.
Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, Washington didn’t like the idea of its most advanced aerial combat platform being used in some intractable and poorly conceived military intervention whose only tangible results have gone directly against US security interests in the region. We’ve already sold plenty of weapons to the Saudis that they can use (and have used) to kill civilians and help out Al-Qaeda and ISIS; why sell them any more?
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 