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Middle East News on Nov. 28, 2018
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
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By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.
As Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman tours friendly Arab nations in advance of the Group of 20 (G-20) industrialized nations summit in Argentina, Saudi diplomacy aims to achieve two goals: put the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi behind it and thwart Qatari efforts to benefit from the kingdom’s predicament.
The Saudi campaign is producing predictably mixed results. It is proving successful with nations willing to back it for political, financial or economic gain, such as Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine or nations like the United Arab Emirates, Russia and China that share Saudi Arabia’s illiberal, authoritarian values.
Prince Mohammed and the kingdom’s ties to Western nations, even those like the United States that have opted for maintaining close ties in the face of mounting criticism in their national legislatures, hang in the balance despite having survived the storm so far.
With the US Congress gearing up for potential action against Saudi Arabia, not only because of the October 2 killing of Mr. Khashoggi in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate but also the humanitarian crisis sparked by Saudi military intervention in Yemen, President Donald J. Trump has no plans to meet Prince Mohammed one on one at this weekend’s G-20 gathering.
Much like Mr. Trump’s decision may be perceived as a public slap, it does not suggest that Mr. Trump has backed away from his determination to shield US-Saudi relations and the crown prince from the potential fallout of the Khashoggi killing.
Similarly, Britain this week went ahead with joint exercises of the British and Saudi air forces although the United Kingdom has left open the possibility of imposing sanctions if the killing proves to have been government-sanctioned rather than an operation by rogue elements.
One key focus of the Saudi campaign appears to be Palestine and Iraq, countries not on Prince Mohammed’s travel schedule but where Qatar, that has been resisting an 18-month old Saudi-UAE-led economic and diplomatic boycott, stands to benefit from the Khashoggi crisis and that figure prominently in Mr. Trump’s designs for the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia this month said that it had transferred US$60 million to President Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestine Authority, financially strapped as a result of the Trump administration cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding of the authority as well as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unwra) that supports Palestinian refugees.
Saudi Arabia’s resumption of funding followed several Palestinian statements in the last two months supporting the kingdom’s assertion that it had not sanctioned the killing of Mr. Khashoggi and expressing confidence in the Saudi judiciary’s ability to mete out justice to the culprits.
Saudi Arabia, ostensibly at Prince Mohammed’s behest, had in the past year withheld payments to the Palestine Authority because of its refusal to engage with the United States following Mr. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the authority’s support for Turkey’s leadership in rallying Muslim opposition to US policy.
The resumption of funding is also in line with King Salman’s intervention in the last year insisting that the kingdom was committed to Palestinian rights, including declaring East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.
It also coincided with Israeli acquiescence in the flow of US$150 million from Qatar to Gaza, controlled by Islamist Hamas, in a bid to alleviate the crippling impact of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the region and prevent tension between Israel and the group spinning out of control.
Beyond countering expanding Qatari influence, the Saudi move is likely to increase the kingdom’s leverage in pressuring the Palestine Authority to back off its refusal to entertain a mooted US Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that has yet to be made public but would be stillborn without Palestinian participation.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are competing for influence in Iraq, another battleground that is important to both the United States and the kingdom because of the close ties between Iraq and Iran.
Senior Saudi and Qatari officials have frequented Baghdad in recent weeks as Iraq’s new prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, puts his cabinet together and pushes and ambitious economic development plan that is dependent on foreign investment.
Even though Iraq is likely to balance relations between the two Gulf rivals, it is also not going to trouble its burgeoning relationship with the kingdom by speaking out on the Khashoggi issue.
Prince Mohammed, despite protests in Tunisia, the only country on the crown prince’s itinerary that has not brutally suppressed freedom of expression, and a legal challenge in Argentina, which could curtail his future travel plans even if it does not stop him from attending the G-20 summit, has proven in recent days that he is not universally persona non grata.
Nonetheless, his reception in Argentina by world leaders is likely to be a litmus test of the degree of reputational damage that he and the kingdom have suffered. Mr. Trump’s apparent hesitancy to meet separately with the crown prince could set the tone if indeed the president sticks by his initial decision.
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
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The Persian Gulf and the Role of Outside Powers: The United States
Origins
The presence of vast energy resources and location at the center of the Middle East account for the Gulf’s geo-strategic importance and its attraction to major powers. U.S. involvement and military presence dates back to the early part of the last century, and includes a host of political, economic, and geo-strategic objectives. Prior to the Gulf War, U.S. military presence was largely over the horizon, accommodating the sensitivities of local culture.
Since its independence, the United States has had interests in and relations with the Middle East. Morocco was the first country to establish relations with the new nation, and in 1866 American missionaries established the Syrian Protestant College in Lebanon that later became the famed American University of Beirut.
During the early part of the 20th century, business entrepreneurs were responsible for the major oil discoveries in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, it was Alfred Thayer Mahan, the noted American naval officer and strategist, who coined the term “Middle East” as that area between Arabia and India “with its center—from the point of view of the naval strategist—in the Persian Gulf.”
US relations with that center began on September 21, 1833, when it signed a treaty of amity and commerce with Oman. Since then, U.S. involvement in the Gulf region has widened and deepened, given the increasing relevance of Gulf petroleum to the world economy, and the geostrategic importance of the region during the Cold War.
In 1971, Britain ended its military presence east of Suez, but the United States did not immediately replace it as the region’s dominant security provider. For the purpose of this analysis, the decade of the 1970s has a distinct practical function. It represents a period of transition from British to US hegemony in the Gulf.
Current Strategy
In today’s United States, this is illustrated by the especially vibrant debate surrounding the future of US grand strategy. Although there are shades of difference among proponents of alternative grand strategies, two perspectives have consistently dominated the current debate: offshore balancing versus deep engagement. At the core of this debate there is a profound disagreement on the benefits deriving from continued US security commitments abroad.
Supporters of offshore balancing and of deep engagement differ on the extent to which the United States should be directly responsible for guaranteeing international security.
This debate also includes the discussion of significant political and economic aspects of grand strategy, however, both camps recognize the special importance of the future nature of US military strategy.
Despite their many differences, people in both camps have consistently identified the Persian Gulf as one of the three regions, along with Europe and East Asia, vital to US national security. This domestic consensus on the strategic importance of Gulf stability has also been reflected in the policy documents of successive US administrations.
By the end of 2011, all major US military units left Iraq. US President Barack Obama had promised the complete withdrawal of US troops from the country during the 2008 US presidential campaign. The military withdrawal from Iraq was part of the Obama administration’s larger policy of ”pivoting” toward Asia.
The meaning of the pivot toward Asia has been often equated to US disengagement from the broader Middle East and the Persian Gulf in particular. This is an inaccurate reading of the Obama administration’s strategy, especially with regard to the administration’s post-2011 security commitments to the Gulf.
The real outcome of the pivot, in fact, was to give increased priority to Asia in addition to, and not instead of, priorities in the Gulf. The United States had no intention to disengage militarily from the Persian Gulf.
Dr Jorge E. Núñez Email: j.nunez@mmu.ac.uk Twitter: London1701 Blog: https://london1701.blogspot.com Instagram: griseldacurti Facebook: Griselda Curti Tumblr: drjorgesblog
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By James M. Dorsey
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn and Tumblr.
When Saudi General Khalid bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz went shopping in the late 1980s for Chinese medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear, chemical or biological warheads he made no bones about keeping the United States, one of the kingdom’s closest ally, in the dark.
it was “my task to negotiate the deal, devise an appropriate deception plan, choose a team of Saudi officers and men and arrange for their training in both Saudi Arabia and China, build and defend operation bases and storage facilities in different parts of the kingdom, arrange for the shipment of the missiles from China and, at every stage, be ready to defend the project against sabotage or any form of attack,” General Bin Sultan, a son of the late Saudi crown prince and defense minister, Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, and commander of the US-led international alliance that forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991, recounted in his memoire.
The incident coupled with more recent Saudi statements and the kingdom’s inability to present from the outset a credible and sustainable version of events surrounding the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the premises of its Istanbul consulate is complicating it’s negotiations with the United States for the acquisition of designs for nuclear power plants, a deal valued at up to US$80 billion depending on how many Saudi Arabia ultimately decides to build.
Prospects of a massive deal go to the heart of US President Donald J. Trump’s jobs and deals-focussed America First policy. Yet, growing criticism and distrust of Saudi Arabia in the US Congress and intelligence community as a result of the Khashoggi crisis and the kingdom’s handling of the Yemen war that has sparked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two are likely to strengthen efforts to thwart an agreement that honours Saudi insistence on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it could buy it more cheaply abroad.
The Saudi insistence has fuelled concerns that the kingdom may divert their fuel for military purposes. Those kinds of fears coupled with Iran’s ballistic missile program drove world powers to first sanction Iran and then conclude a 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement earlier this year, charging that it did not provide sufficient guarantees that Iran would not be able to develop a nuclear weapon.
Democrats in the US Congress have described refusing to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear technology as proper punishment for the killing of Mr. Khashoggi that the kingdom insists was done without the knowledge of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
While the Trump administration has as yet not abandoned long-standing strict US nuclear export safeguards to secure a deal with Saudi Arabia, it has also not unambiguously said that it would uphold them.
Like with his rejection of hard-hitting sanctions in the wake of the Khashoggi killing, Mr. Trump is likely to ultimately argue that if the United States does not conclude a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, countries like China, Russia and South Korea, that have less strict controls will. The argument amounts to the equivalent of committing a wrong because if one doesn’t, someone else will.
Saudi officials have repeatedly insisted that the kingdom is developing nuclear capabilities for peaceful purposes such as medicine, electricity generation, and desalination of sea water. They say that Saudi Arabia is committed to putting its future facilities under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Yet, with a US$56 billion military budget for 2018, Saudi Arabia is stepping up the development of a domestic military industry. The kingdom aims to source 50% of its military procurement domestically by 2030, up from its current two percent.
Speaking to CBS earlier this year, Prince Mohammed appeared to put conditions on Saudi nuclear assurances by warning that “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”
In putting forward demands for parity with Iran by getting the right to controlled enrichment of uranium and the reprocessing of spent fuel into plutonium, potential building blocks for nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia was also seen as potentially backing away from a 2009 memorandum of understanding with the United States in which it pledged to acquire nuclear fuel from international markets.
Nuclear energy cooperation was one of a host of agreements concluded last year by Saudi Arabia and China during a visit to Beijing by Saudi King Salman. The agreement included a feasibility study for the construction of high-temperature gas-cooled (HTGR) nuclear power plants in the kingdom as well as cooperation in intellectual property and the development of a domestic industrial supply chain for HTGRs built in Saudi Arabia. The HTGR agreement built on an accord signed in 2012 that involved maintenance and development of nuclear power plants and research reactors, as well as the provision of Chinese nuclear fuel.
A report by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) released shortly after the king’s visit warned that the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement had “not eliminated the kingdom’s desire for nuclear weapons capabilities and even nuclear weapons,” the report said.
Much like the era of General Bin Sultan, potential Chinese sales to Saudi Arabia of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles remain one of the murkier areas of Sino-Saudi military cooperation.
Military experts say that satellite imagery of missile bases in Saudi Arabia in recent years and other open-source circumstantial evidence, including Saudi press coverage of graduation ceremonies at the kingdom’s Strategic Missile Force school in Wadi ad-Dawasir, attest to ongoing transfers.
Saudi Arabia in 2014 showcased Chinese-made Dongfeng-3 missiles that have a range of up to 5,000 kilometres. Media reports said the missiles had been purchased in 2007, possibly with US acquiescence.
“Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in conventional ballistic and cruise missiles to provide the kingdom a shot of strategic deterrence,” said non-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis. Mr. Lewis’ conclusion was confirmed by Anwar Eshqi, a retired Saudi major general and advisor to the Saudi military.
“The Saudi military did indeed receive DF-21 missiles from China and the integration of the missiles, including a full maintenance check and upgraded facilities, is complete, “ Mr. Eshqi said referring to the People’s Republic’s East Wind solid-fuel, medium-range ballistic missile.
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
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