Daily Times

Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011, Rachel Bronson asked, “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia?” Her answer was, “The notion of a revolution in the Saudi kingdom seems unthinkable.” However, on September 30 the next year, the senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Bruce Riedel concluded that the “revolution in Saudi Arabia is no longer unthinkable”.
To pre-empt such a possibility, in March 2011, in a ‘military’ move to curb the tide of the Arab popular uprisings that raged across the Arab world from sweeping to its doorsteps, the kingdom sent troops to Bahrain to quell similar popular protests. That rapid reactive Saudi military move into Bahrain heralded a series of reactions that analysts describe as an ongoing Saudi-led counterrevolution. Amidst a continuing succession process in Saudi Arabia, while major socioeconomic and political challenges loom large regionally, the kingdom is looking for security as far away as China, but is blinded to the shortest way to its stability in its immediate proximity, where regional understanding with its geopolitical Arab and Muslim neighbourhood would secure the kingdom and save it a wealth of assets squandered on unguaranteed guarantees.
In his quest to contain any fallout from the ‘Arab Spring’, Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz selectively proposed inviting the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco to join the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), leading The Economist on May 19, 2011 to joke that the organisation should be renamed the ‘Gulf Counter-Revolutionary Club’. For sure, including Iraq and Yemen would be a much better addition if better security was the goal. Ahead of US President Barack Obama’s official visit to the kingdom by the end of this March, Saudi Arabia was looking “forward to China as an international magnate with a great political and economic weight to play a prominent role in achieving peace and security in the region,” according to Defence Minister and Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud who was in Beijing from March 13 to 16 “to enhance cooperation with China to protect peace, security and stability in the region.” He was quoted by a statement from the Saudi Press Agency.
Prince Salman was in Japan from 18-21 last February, hopefully to deepen bilateral cooperation “in various fields”. On February 26, India and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement to strengthen cooperation in military training, logistics supplies and exchange of defence-related information. On last January 23, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia signed a defence cooperation agreement, the first of its kind. While a strong Saudi-Pakistan defence partnership has existed for long, it has been upgraded recently. Prince Salman and Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal arrived in Pakistan on February 15. Pakistani army chief General Raheel Sharif was in Saudi Arabia earlier. Director of South Asia Studies Project at the Middle East Media Research Institute, Washington DC, Tufail Ahmad wrote on this March 11 that “the upswing in the relationship marks a qualitative change”, hinting that the kingdom could be seeking Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities to “counter a nuclear-capable Iran” despite Islamabad’s denial, which “is not reliable”. The kingdom is moving “to transform itself as a regional military power,” Ahmad wrote.
On this March 14, The Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia has given $ 1.5 billion (Dh 5.5 billion) to Pakistan. In February a senior Pakistani intelligence official told The Financial Times that Saudi Arabia was seeking “a large number of [Pakistani] troops to support its campaign along the Yemeni border and for internal security”. The official confirmed that Pakistan’s agreement, during Prince Salman’s visit, to support the establishment of a “transitional governing body” in Syria was an important aspect of the deal.
On this March 5, the kingdom led two other members of the six-member GCC, namely the UAE and Bahrain, to withdraw their ambassadors from Qatar, risking the survival of the GCC. Hunting two French and Lebanese birds with one shot, the kingdom early last January pledged a $ 3 billion royal grant, estimated to be two times the entire military budget of Lebanon, to buy French weapons for the Lebanese Army.
The Saudi multi-billion dollar support to the change of guard in Egypt early last July and the kingdom’s subscription to Egypt’s make or break campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) inside and outside the country following the ouster of the MB’s former president Mohammed Morsi reveal a much more important Saudi strategic and security unsigned accord with Egypt’s new rulers.
On the outset of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the kingdom also bailed out Bahrain and the Sultanate of Oman with more multi-billion petrodollars to buy the loyalty of their population. More multi-billion petrodollars were squandered inside the country to bribe the population against joining the sweeping popular Arab protests. Yet still more billions were squandered on 20 percent of all arms transfers to the region between 2009-2013 to make the kingdom the world’s fifth largest importer of arms while more Saudi orders for arms are outstanding, according to a new study released on this March 17 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
While the US will continue to “guarantee Israel’s qualitative military edge” over all the 22 Arab nations plus Iran, Iran is developing its own defence industries to defend itself against both the US and Israel, rendering the Saudi arms procurement efforts obsolete. Had all of those squandered billions of petro-dollars been spent more wisely, they could have created a revolution of development in the region.
Not assured by US assurances: ahead of Obama’s visit, the Saudi message is self-evident. They are looking, on their own, for alternative security guarantees, or at least additional ones. They don’t trust their decades-long US security umbrella anymore. The US sell-out of close allies like the former presidents of Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen shed doubt on any ‘assurances’ Washington would be trying to convey during Obama’s upcoming visit. President Obama is scheduled to be in Riyadh by the end of this March to assure Saudi Arabia of what his Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns on February 19 told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies that the US takes Saudi security concerns “seriously”, “US-Saudi partnership is as important today as it ever was” and that “Security cooperation is at the heart of our agenda” with the GCC, reminding his audience that his country still keeps about 35,000 members of the US military at 12 bases in and around the Arabian Gulf.
However, “the Saudi voices I hear do not think that what they see as the current lack of American resolve is merely a short-term feature of the Obama Presidency: They spot a deeper trend of Western disengagement from their region,” Sir Tom Phillips — – British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia 2010-12 and an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Programme — – wrote on February 12. Obviously, the Saudis are not assured, neither internally, regionally or at the international level because as Burns said on the same occasion, “We don’t always see eye to eye” and it is natural that Gulf states would “question our reliability as partners” given US efforts to achieve energy independence and US warnings that traditional power structures, such as the Gulf monarchies, are “unsustainable”.

(To be continued)

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. She can be reached at nassernicola@ymail.com