Washington // GCC leaders begin two days of talks with US president Barack Obama on Wednesday that they hope will deliver expanded security cooperation and concrete assurances that Washington will help contain Iran’s regional ambitions.
The White House hopes the new measures will convince the deeply sceptical allies to support a nuclear deal with Tehran.
US officials said the summit would be a wide-ranging discussion of regional issues and would produce a final statement detailing new security commitments by both sides, including further GCC defence integration, as well as new joint military exercises and counter-terrorism.
“We’ll both be discussing US policies and our approaches, but also GCC policies and approaches, and how we can align those efforts on areas of mutual interest,” said the White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Ben Rhodes.
“I would certainly anticipate that there will be some form of a statement emerging from the summit that reflects the common positions of the United States and the GCC on a range of issues.”
Last week, the UAE ambassador said he hoped the summit would produce a written, binding agreement to “institutionalise” the decades-old “gentlemen’s agreement” on security between the US and GCC. While the US statement appeared to fall short of this, the ambassador, Youssef Al Otaiba, on Monday was supportive of the summit, saying on Twitter that the “#CampDavidSummit is an important step to a new era of closer GCC-US relations ties”.
On Sunday, Saudi King Salman said he would not be attending the meeting and instead will be represented by two potential future monarchs who are also their country’s officials in charge of security policy, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef, and King Salman’s son and defence minister, Mohammad bin Salman.
In the US, King Salman’s absence was widely read by observers as a sign of his dismay with what was on offer by the White House. But both Saudi and US officials sought to downplay the significance of the king’s decision not to join the summit.
“We very much feel that we have the right group of people around the table to have a very substantive discussion,” Mr Rhodes said. King Salman called Mr Obama to “express his regret at not being able” to attend, the White House said.
Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is around 30 years old, is the youngest of the new generation of Gulf rulers who will represent their countries at the summit, and is the least familiar to US officials. He has been coordinating the air campaign in Yemen with US counterparts, but a trip to Washington would give him the opportunity to build his own relationships with senior US administration figures.
Since Mr Obama announced the summit last month, US and Gulf officials have engaged in discussions to hash out what exactly the new assurances will entail. The task has been made more difficult by what Gulf officials see as the transactional nature of these discussions that were only prompted by the need to gain support for a nuclear deal. Rather than consulting its regional allies on their concerns at the beginning of the process, the US administration chose to wait until the end of it.
Differing assessments of what the greatest threats to Gulf security are and how to best counter them has also complicated the efforts. On the eve of the talks, the details had yet to be finalised, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
“To be honest, the answers we’ve gotten so far are not reassuring … there’s still a lot of loose ends,” said Abdel Aziz Abu Hamad Aluwaisheg, the assistant secretary general for foreign affairs of the GCC. “The most time will be [spent] on the renewal of the US commitment to Gulf security.”
There were particular concerns over the terms of the deal with Iran, he said, and especially the inspections regime. An invasive inspections regime that would find any hidden military nuclear sites is key, because a strategic concern for the GCC is that all Iranian facilities meet international safety standards because of the implications of nuclear pollution of Gulf waters, which provide drinking water to the GCC.
Some Gulf officials are hopeful, however, that the summit could be the beginning of a longer-term engagement with the US over adapting the Gulf’s security architecture – even if discussions do not produce what they might consider a perfect outcome this time around. The US desire to scale back its military role in the region comes as Gulf leaders are now confident enough to deploy their own armed forces to counter threats. Mr Obama has emphasised that regional partners must shoulder more responsibility for their own security.
Resolving the question of how to balance the Gulf’s new role and interests with Washington’s own role and threat assessments will be crucial. The US has assisted the campaign in Yemen but the administration is wary of being drawn into other conflicts it sees as sectarian proxy wars between the Gulf and Iran that do not directly threaten GCC borders.
There was also a sense among Arab officials and analysts that the summit would not do much to bridge the immediate, and substantial, gaps between the two sides’ views of the region and Iran.
From Syria and Iraq to Yemen, Gulf Arab countries look across the Middle East and see a region in potentially catastrophic flux, with Iran taking advantage of weakened and failing states to push their ambitions, while extremists hold an unprecedented allure.
They also see their traditional security guarantor, the US, engaging with Iran in a way they fear could empower it to pursue its interests at their expense. There is also a nagging fear that the US is hoping to use the nuclear opening to pursue a broader rapprochement with Tehran, as it looks to reduce its footprint in the region.
However, Robert Malley, Mr Obama’s top Middle East adviser, said that was not the case. “We hope [Iran] changes its behaviour, but the deal is solid and good if Iran doesn’t change,” he said.
Mr Obama argues that it would be a positive side effect if a nuclear deal moderated Iranian behaviour, but the central concern is taking nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East off of the table. Gulf countries believe sanctions relief will unshackle Iran’s revolutionary guard in the region.
“President Obama really does have a transformative view of these negotiations and ... by engaging Iran and bringing it back into the international community then you can have further empowering of those who want to engage and weaken” hardliners, said Kristin Diwan, a visiting Middle East scholar at George Washington University. “Gulf states just don’t see it that way.”
Senior US officials said the Camp David agreement would include a renewed focus on GCC military integration as a primary means to guard against Iran, something the US has long pushed for.
“The ability of any country in the region to defend against a missile threat pales in comparison to the ability of the GCC as a whole, as a collective, to defend against this threat if their systems were better integrated,” said Colin Kahl, national security adviser to the US vice president.
Last week Mr Al Otaiba said integration would be conditioned on a more efficient military sales process for the UAE.
US officials also said a priority of the talks was to help counter the asymmetric threat posed by Iran, as well as extremist groups like ISIL. Conventional weapons systems are not “adapted” to terrorist and other threats, White House officials said.
“We’ll also look at ways in which we can improve maritime security, improve critical infrastructure protection and cyber defences, and expand intelligence and other actions aimed at countering foreign fighters and the terrorist threat in the region,” Mr Kahl said.
But these areas do not address the means by which Gulf officials see Iran projecting power and influence, through proxy forces in Arab countries, drawn from Shiite communities with deep political grievances.
“The US has no answers for how to contain Iran in this other sphere, which is much more important to the Arabs,” said Bernard Haykal, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Princeton. “Non-state actors is an entirely new kind of factor the Iranians have perfected – it’s a structural problem I don’t think the Americans have a solution to.”
Even if the summit produces a statement rather than a more binding document, Gulf officials say they would be assured if it goes far enough in addressing their concerns about containing Iran.
White House officials said that they see the Camp David talks as a way to push the GCC to engage Iran directly and achieve a balance of power, which they see as ultimately the only way to ratchet down regional turmoil.
“Part of this is to get the GCC states in a position where they could deal with greater confidence and self-confidence and strength with Iran, not in order to perpetuate a never-ending conflict, but to engage Iran to try to resolve the problems of the region,” said Mr Malley.
tkhan@thenational.ae
