Obama seeks to assure King Abdullah in a time of regional unrest

In an exclusive interview with The National, the top White House Middle East policy advisor, Philip Gordon, says the US and Saudi and other Arabian Gulf countries still share fundamental interests and a strong alliance.

A rift between the US and Saudi Arabia opened after Barack Obama supported the Arab Spring uprisings even as they brought Islamists to power. TJ Kirkpatrick / Bloomberg / March 13, 2014

Foreign Correspondent

NEW YORK // In 2009, Barack Obama met Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah near Riyadh to pay his respects in the “place where Islam began”, as US officials put it, before travelling to staunch ally Hosni Mubarak’s Cairo to deliver a historic address to the Muslim world.

After his predecessor George W Bush’s disastrous occupations in the region, Mr Obama’s tour of the Middle East was meant to change perceptions and signal a reset, with arrogance replaced by respect and dialogue. Mr Obama was even accused by some at home of kowtowing to Arab leaders at the expense of US interests.

But now, with the status quo of five years ago upended, the Middle East in turmoil and America seeking a new posture in the region, Mr Obama visits Saudi Arabia on Friday for the first time since 2009 to assuage deep-seated fears in Riyadh about Washington’s intentions.

In an exclusive interview with The National, the top White House Middle East policy adviser, Philip Gordon, said that while the US and Saudi and other Arabian Gulf countries may prefer different tactics when it comes to regional challenges, the allies still share fundamental interests and a strong alliance.

“It is perfectly reasonable…for good friends to sometimes have differences over approaches on issues, but the president will stress this with the king: we have much more in common when it comes to our interests than to differences,” Mr Gordon said.

“Defending allies from external aggression, ensuring the free flow of energy supplies, and confronting extremism and dealing with non proliferation – those are our core interests and we believe they are Saudi Arabia’s and our other friends’ in the Gulf core interests as well.”

But changing priorities for Washington in a time of budget cuts, surging domestic shale gas production and a desire to scale back its role in the region after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq has stoked Saudi fears that their relationship, based on security and help containing Iran in exchange for energy production, was coming to an end.

A rift opened when Mr Obama supported the Arab Spring uprisings even as they brought Islamists to power, and peaked last fall when the US president decided not to punish Iranian ally Syria with airstrikes after a poison gas attack outside Damascus. Then Mr Obama announced that he would ease sanctions against Saudi archrival Iran as interim negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme were given a chance.

Mr Obama also laid out a new scaled-back Middle East doctrine for the US in October while administration officials spoke of a “rebalance” of US priorities to East Asia.

Saudi officials reacted with rare public criticism, accusing the US of failing to take their allies’ interests into consideration as they sought to accomplish a major policy objective of ending Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme through diplomacy, which Riyadh fears will allow Tehran to more freely pursue an agenda of regional domination.

But since then US officials have launched a campaign of reassurance through high-level regional trips by cabinet secretaries, significant arms sales and missile defence systems, and briefings after each round of negotiations with Iran.

Friday’s talks are “the tail end of an effort to reassure the Saudis and other Gulf countries that there’s no other rival to US power in the Middle East”, said Brian Katulis, an expert on US national security policy in the Middle East at the Center for American Progress think tank in Washington.

These efforts appear to have allayed immediate Saudi concerns, with a senior Saudi official telling Reuters that relations with Washington are robust, broad and institutionalised.

The realisation seems to have set in that only the US can provide a security umbrella in the Gulf, Mr Katulis said.

“The Saudis themselves are trying to demonstrate that they can be a much more reliable partner than they exhibited in the fall.”

While Riyadh and Washington have found some common ground in countering extremist groups in Syria’s civil war, Mr Obama will try to find more shared ground on the issue as well as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mr Gordon said.

Convincing King Abdullah to trust that the US is not sidelining Riyadh’s concerns about Iran’s regional ambitions for the sake of a nuclear deal will likely prove more difficult.

US officials are still deeply concerned about Iran’s “destabilising activities…starting with Syria but across the board in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen… and we remain determined to confront Iran when it comes to all of those issues”, Mr Gordon said.

“The question is, and we’ve had frank conversations with partners in the Gulf, how can we continue to do that while also dealing with the nuclear issue?”Over the next two months, Riyadh will likely give its blessings to let the diplomatic track run its course, Mr Katulis said.

But analysts are doubtful that the negotiations will be successful by their deadline in May and Mr Obama will have a much more difficult task of convincing Gulf allies as well as Israel and the US Congress to allow them to continue.

“I think it’s good to not overstate the possibility of the Iranians making the necessary decisions themselves to make these negotiations a success that would allow them to re-enter the international community,” said Richard LeBaron, a former US ambassador to Kuwait and now an expert on US-Gulf relations at the Atlantic Council think tank.

The political transition in Egypt after the removal of former President Mohammed Morsi could also be contentious topic.

While Washington has continued to support Egypt’s interim government, it has suspended the delivery of some big-ticket military items until certain benchmarks of a democratic transition are certified.

For Saudi Arabia, which declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation and, along with the UAE, has spent billions of dollars helping support the Egyptian economy, keeping the Brotherhood from re-entering politics is a priority.

But Washington fears that the Islamist group will become radical and violent if it is kept out of the political process.

“Without stability, which we believe requires an inclusive approach to Egyptian society, there’s not going to be a return of foreign investment or a return of tourism, and therefore an inability to help Egyptians put themselves on a sustaining basis,” Mr Gordon said.

The issue of how to approach the Muslim Brotherhood has split US allies in the Middle East into competing blocks, with the UAE and Saudi considering the Islamists a dire threat to stability, and Qatar and Turkey supporting them. This rift could make Mr Obama’s efforts to work with the GCC as a unified group on many critical issues, such as sectarianism and extremism as well as Iran, more difficult.

“Times have changed and we’re going to have to figure out a way to develop a way to communicate and a way to act and work together that reflects those changing times,” Mr LeBaron said.