NEW YORK // US president Barack Obama will cut short a planned visit to India and travel to Saudi Arabia this week for a meeting with the country’s new ruler, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the White House said on Saturday.
There had been some concern in Washington that the kingdom’s succession process following the death of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Friday could usher in a period of unpredictability in its relations with Riyadh.
A key question was who among the younger generation of royals would be appointed to the key position of deputy crown prince.
However, the White House has been reassured by the selection of its close ally, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, 55, who is known for leading the kingdom’s fight against extremist groups.
His appointment marks the first time the Saudi throne is expected to pass to a royal who is not a son of the country’s founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud.
Prince Mohammed is currently Saudi Arabia’s interior minister and counter-terrorism chief, and responsible for the crackdown on Al Qaeda inside the kingdom following a wave of attacks between 2003 and 2006.
As deputy crown prince, he is likely to be Saudi Arabia’s most influential decision maker on foreign and domestic security matters for years to come.
His influence stems from his success in crushing extremists and cracking down on internal dissent after the Arab Spring. He also belongs to the powerful Sudairi clan of sons and grandsons of King Abdulaziz, which is named for one of the founder’s favourite wives.
Prince Mohammed’s appointment, along with Saudi Arabia’s orderly transition of power on Friday, all point to continuity in regional policy and perhaps even closer cooperation with the US, analysts say.
“There are, and will remain, some tension on other issues – on the US role in Syria, on energy, on the US negotiations with Iran – those aren’t going to go away,” said Daniel Benjamin, who served as coordinator for counterterrorism at the US state department from 2009 to 2012 and now directs the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.
“But I would say that there will be a great deal of optimism with MBN’s continued ascent,” he added, using a common shorthand for the crown prince. “He was the go-to prince on many of the issues most important to the US. [Washington] has a superb counterterrorism relationship with Saudi Arabia and that is overwhelmingly because of MBN.”
After several tense years over disagreements on Middle East policy, relations between Washington and Riyadh began to normalise following the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria last year.
Faced with the threat of attacks by the extremist group, Mr Obama’s administration refocused its regional strategy on stability through traditional allied rulers and counter-terrorism, goals long championed by Saudi Arabia.
Washington and Riyadh will need to move swiftly to address a cascade of regional crises, from the Syrian civil war to the rise of ISIL and the Houthi takeover of Yemen’s capital.
Prince Mohammed, who took charge of Riyadh’s Syria policy a year ago, shifted away from the goal of deposing president Bashar Al Assad and ended support for hardline rebel groups, concentrating instead on the moderate southern front groups.
But the allies could experience another spat of tensions as US-led negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme come to a head this summer.
King Abdullah was incensed when the US did not inform Riyadh that it had initiated secret discussions with Tehran to get the nuclear talks restarted.
The initiative was seen by Arab Gulf countries as a sign of US determination to abandon its traditional stance in the region and free Iran to pursue its interests at their expense.
But the White House eventually convinced the Saudi leadership to “give the US the benefit of the doubt”, said Anthony Cordesman, a senior analyst on US-Gulf security relations at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
“We’ll either have a limited nuclear agreement with Iran where we’ll have to shift our policies to deal with the other aspects of the Iranian threat [in the region], or we will have a failure of that agreement and potentially a major security crisis,” said Mr Cordesman.
“The reality is that the US and Saudi Arabia need each other and that isn’t going to change fundamentally.”
If Washington and Tehran reach a deal, Prince Mohammed may prove to be a pragmatist on relations with Iran, just as he has shown himself to be on Syria policy.
While Tehran and Riyadh’s battle for Middle East influence will not subside soon, Saudi strategists have realised that Iranian influence in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Baghdad is a lasting reality.
Rather than Saudi Arabia dedicating resources to scale back Iran’s influence, the emergence of ISIL as a common threat may lead to increased cooperation between the two countries, according to some observers.
“The rise of the Islamic State in Syria as a common enemy for Saudi Arabia and Iran is likely to continue to push Riyadh to reach some form of compromise with Tehran further down the line,” the Carnegie Middle East Centre director, Lina Khatib, wrote on the research institute’s website on Friday, referring to the extremist group by its self-declared name.
It “has become clear that the major force behind the recent changes in Saudi policy, Mohammed bin Nayef, is the one to determine what Saudi Arabia does next in the Middle East.”
tkhan@thenational.ae
