To Saudi Arabia and its Arab partners of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the United States in six years of Barack Obama’s presidency has become as unpredictable and unreliable as it is indispensable. When President Obama passes the baton in 2017, it is likely that he will not be recalled fondly, but this is a distinction shared with most of his predecessors.
Current Situation
The United States has large military centers in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and is set to use a base in Saudi Arabia for the training of Syrian rebels. With the possible exception of Qatar, the GCC states share with Washington a strong interest in confronting Islamic extremism. Only the United States could thwart maritime troublemaking by Iran in the Persian Gulf. The United States is the partner of choice in matters of cyber security. Only the United States could have forged the multinational coalition that has undertaken a joint campaign to break the extremist group in Iraq and Syria that calls itself the Islamic State—a coalition that the GCC monarchies agreed unanimously to support.
But those realities have not overpowered the widespread resentment and suspicion among Gulf Arabs that have soured relations in the past few years. At recent meetings in Washington, in conversations in Saudi Arabia in November, and in commentaries in the regional news media, well-informed officials and respected analysts from the GCC states have rolled out a long list of what they view as failures of American policy and, worse, of American will. Even the glossy magazine in a Riyadh hotel room—the kind that never addresses anything controversial—recently carried an article on “America wiping its hands of its responsibilities in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.” It is published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Some of these sentiments will dissipate eventually, unless Iraq collapses completely or Iran emerges as the regional superpower. But even if the region settles down and avoids what the Gulf countries would see as the worst outcomes, disenchantment with Washington has led to the development of some new thinking. It is not unusual now to hear GCC voices saying that it is time for these countries to stop waiting for, or depending on, Washington and to assume responsibility for their own security.
“For decades, Arabs have looked to ‘Baba America’ and its allies for protection, knowing full well that U.S. foreign policy is geared solely toward its own security and geopolitical interests,” Khalaf Ahmad al-Habtoor, a prominent businessman in the United Arab Emirates, wrote in the influential Al Arabiya.
Our region would be well-served if Arab governments and peoples spent less time bashing America and more time learning how best to depend on ourselves. We cannot sit back relying on empty pledges from western leaderships currently attempting to enter into some kind of grand bargain with Iran’s ayatollahs…Do we still imagine Uncle Sam will send in the cavalry? If so, we should think again.[1]
“Everybody is in the mood for a post-America Gulf,” Abdelkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor in Abu Dhabi, said at a recent forum in Washington. He said that the United States now resembles Britain in the early 1970s, when the weakened empire abandoned its longstanding protectorates in the Gulf because it could no longer afford responsibility for them.
Those comments are not outside the regional mainstream. Some are angry at Obama, some are disappointed, some are baffled, but at least for the moment the United States is in disfavor. Whether the criticisms are fair, and whether they are based on fact rather than on emotion, is open to question, but they seem to be pervasive.
