F. Gregory Gause III
Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East
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Contents
Foreword vii Acknowledgments xi Map xiii
CouncilSpecialReport 1 Introduction 3 RegimeStabilityinSaudiArabia 5 SaudiRegionalPolicyintheWakeoftheArabUpheaval 15 Saudi-U.S.Relations 22
Conclusion 32
Endnotes 33 AbouttheAuthor 40 AdvisoryCommittee 41 CPAAdvisoryCommittee 42 CPAMissionStatement 43
Foreword
The United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia has been one of the cornerstones of U.S. policy in the Middle East for decades. Despite their substantial differences in history, culture, and governance, the two countries have generally agreed on important political and eco- nomic issues and have often relied on each other to secure mutual aims. The 1990-91 Gulf War is perhaps the most obvious example, but their ongoing cooperation on maintaining regional stability, moderating the global oil market, and pursuing terrorists should not be downplayed.
Yet for all the relationship’s importance, it is increasingly imperiled by mistrust and misunderstanding. One major question is Saudi Ara- bia’s stability. In this Council Special Report, sponsored by the Center for Preventive Action, F. Gregory Gause III first explores the foun- dations of Riyadh’s present stability and potential sources of future unrest. It is difficult not to notice that Saudi Arabia avoided significant upheaval during the political uprisings that swept the Middle East in 2011, despite sharing many of the social and economic problems of Egypt, Yemen, and Libya. But unlike their counterparts in Cairo, Sanaa, and Tripoli, Riyadh’s leadership was able to maintain order in large part by increasing public spending on housing and salaries, relying on loyal and well-equipped security forces, and utilizing its extensive patronage networks. The divisions within the political opposition also helped the government’s cause.
This is not to say that Gause believes that the stability of the House of Saud is assured. He points out that the top heirs to the throne are elderly and the potential for disorderly squabbling may increase as a new generation enters the line of succession. Moreover, the population is growing quickly, and there is little reason to believe that oil will for- ever be able to buy social tranquility. Perhaps most important, Gause argues, the leadership’s response to the 2011 uprisings did little to
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forestall future crises; an opportunity for manageable political reform was mostly lost.
Turning to the regional situation, Gause finds it no less complex. Saudi Arabia has wielded considerable influence with its neighbors through its vast oil reserves, its quiet financial and political support for allies, and the ideological influence of salafism, the austere interpreta- tion of Islam that is perhaps Riyadh’s most controversial export. For all its wealth and religious influence, however, Saudi Arabia’s recent record has been less than successful. It was unable to counter Iranian influence in post-Saddam Iraq, it could not prevent Hezbollah taking power in Lebanon, and its ongoing efforts to reconcile Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have come to naught.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship has, unsurprisingly, been affected by these and other challenges, including Saudi unhappiness with Wash- ington’s decision to distance itself from Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the lack of progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Iran. For its part, the United States is unhappy with the Saudi inter- vention in Bahrain and Saudi support for radical Islamists around the region and the world. The two traditional anchors of the U.S.-Saudi relationship—the Cold War and U.S. operation of Riyadh’s oil fields— are, Gause notes, no longer factors. It is no wonder, he contends, that the relationship is strained when problems are myriad and the old foun- dations of the informal alliance are gone.
It would be far better, Gause argues, to acknowledge that the two countries can no longer expect to act in close concert under such condi- tions. He recommends that the United States reimagine the relationship as simply transactional, based on cooperation when interests—rather than habit—dictate. Prioritizing those interests will therefore be criti- cal. Rather than pressuring Riyadh for domestic political reform, or asking it to reduce global oil prices, Gause recommends that the United States spend its political capital where it really matters: on maintaining regional security, dismantling terrorist networks, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
There have been few relationships more important to the United States than that with Saudi Arabia, and it is vital that, as it enters a new phase, the expectations and priorities of both countries are clear. In Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East, Gause effectively assesses the chal- lenges and opportunities facing Saudi Arabia and makes a compelling
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argument for a more modest, businesslike relationship between Wash- ington and Riyadh that better reflects modern realities. As the United States begins reassessing its commitments in the Greater Middle East, this report offers a clear vision for a more limited—but perhaps more appropriate and sustainable—future partnership.
Richard N. Haass
President
Council on Foreign Relations December 2011
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank those individuals and institutions that helped bring this report to fruition. CFR is the most important public policy organization dealing with foreign policy in the country, and it is an honor to publish something with it. CFR President Richard N. Haass and Director of Studies James M. Lindsay provided support and feedback on the project from the beginning. I am very grateful to them. Paul B. Stares, director of CFR’s Center for Preventive Action, invited me to consider this project and was its patron and guide from conception to publication. I owe him the largest debt here. His very competent staff made things run smoothly from beginning to end, and I thank them, particularly Research Associate Andrew Miller and Assistant Director Sophia Yang, for their work. As always, CFR’s expert Publications staff has turned out a very attractive product. It is nice to work with real professionals.
I am indebted to the members of the report’s advisory committee for spending their valuable time reading my prose and making very useful suggestions in the two group meetings we held. They are an extremely distinguished group. The fact that they would take the time to partici- pate in this exercise is humbling to me and evidence of CFR’s unparal- leled convening power. Special thanks go to the chair of the committee, Ambassador Chas Freeman, for his advice and guidance at every step of the process. I also want to acknowledge Ray Close, who read the entire report, offering feedback and support. Of course, the contents of the report and the policy recommendations I put forward are mine alone and should not be attributed to the members of the advisory commit- tee either individually or as a group. I am particularly grateful for their participation and reactions as I know that many of them do not share my conclusions.
I was fortunate enough to spend January through April of 2010 in Saudi Arabia as a visiting fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic
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Studies and Research in Riyadh. I thank the center for its hospitality. I also thank the many Saudis and expatriate residents of the country who opened up their offices and homes to me, helping me to try to under- stand the country’s politics.
This publication was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed herein are solely my own.
F. Gregory Gause III
Map
Source: Norman Einstein, Wikimedia Commons.
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Council Special Report
Introduction
There is arguably no more unlikely U.S. ally than Saudi Arabia: monar- chical, deeply conservative socially, promoter of an austere and intol- erant version of Islam, birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. Consequently, there is no U.S. ally less well understood. Many U.S. policymakers assume that the Saudi regime is fragile, despite its remarkable record of domestic stability in the turbu- lent Middle East. “It is an unstable country in an unstable region,” one congressional staffer said in July 2011.1 Yet it is the Arab country least affected in its domestic politics by the Arab upheavals of 2011. Many who think it is unstable domestically also paradoxically attribute enormous power to it, to the extent that they depict it as leading a “counterrevolu- tion” against those upheavals throughout the region.2 One wonders just how “counterrevolutionary” the Saudis are when they have supported the NATO campaign against Muammar al-Qaddafi, successfully nego- tiated the transfer of power from Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and condemned the crackdown on protestors by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and how powerful they are when they could do little to help their ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
These twin misperceptions of a country on the verge of domes- tic regime change yet able to exercise considerable power both in the Middle East and beyond are not new. Western observers and diplomats have been forecasting the collapse of the Saudi regime for more than sixty years. The death of the founding king, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, in 1953 was supposed to lead to the unraveling of the realm.3 The Arab nationalist challenge of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the late 1950s and early 1960s was then going to sweep it away.4 The fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 led to a spate of speculation that monarchy’s days were numbered in Arabia as well. So those questioning the regime’s staying power these days are in good company.5 The portrayal of the Saudis as lead- ing a counterrevolutionary movement able to snuff out the Arab Spring
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likewise inherits a viewpoint that made Riyadh the center of regional, if not global, power in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo and the “kernel of evil” for its promotion of political Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.6
The Saudis are neither fragile nor all-powerful. An effective U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia should abandon such oversimplifications and confront the realities of both the Saudi Arabian domestic politi- cal system and Saudi regional foreign policy. Although not in crisis, as some have suggested, the relationship is no longer moored to the two anchors that stabilized it in the past: a common Cold War perspective and U.S. operation of the Saudi oil industry. Given the growing number of issues over which Washington and Riyadh have differing perspec- tives, it is time to recognize that the relationship is now more transac- tional than automatically cooperative.
In this new atmosphere, Washington needs to be clear about its pri- orities if it wants to get anything done with Riyadh. The United States should cooperate on issues where common interests are clear, such as stabilizing Yemen, containing Iran’s regional power, and destroying al-Qaeda and its regional affiliates. It should encourage the Saudis to reconsider policies such as isolating the Iraqi government and stoking Sunni-Shia sectarian animosities that could harm both U.S. and Saudi interests in the future by making clear that overall cooperation on secu- rity issues requires these steps. Finally, U.S. policymakers should make clear that nuclear proliferation by Saudi Arabia would put at risk any future collaboration on security issues.