by Mark N. Katz
Two storylines about Saudi-Russian relations have recently dominated the airwaves. One is that Moscow and Riyadh are sharply divided by several issues: not only Syria and Iran, but also Crimea and the Russian belief that the Saudis are supporting Muslim opposition inside Russia. The other is that Saudi [...]]]>
by Mark N. Katz
Two storylines about Saudi-Russian relations have recently dominated the airwaves. One is that Moscow and Riyadh are sharply divided by several issues: not only Syria and Iran, but also Crimea and the Russian belief that the Saudis are supporting Muslim opposition inside Russia. The other is that Saudi Arabia is about to buy $2-4 billion (reports vary) worth of Russian arms for Egypt.
It seemed unlikely to me that both these reports could be true. If Moscow and Riyadh can’t see eye to eye on issues of mutual concern, then their relationship is bad and the Kingdom would not buy such a large amount of weaponry for Egypt from Russia. On the other hand, if the Saudis do indeed intend to buy billions of dollars in Russian arms for Cairo, then clearly Saudi-Russian relations must not be as bad as has been reported. The question, then, is: what’s the true story?
A visit to Moscow last week convinced me that both storylines are indeed true. Seasoned Russian Middle East watchers I spoke to indicated that Saudi-Russian relations really are very poor. In 2013, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (who was then the Saudi intelligence chief) met twice with President Vladimir Putin to try to persuade him to end Moscow’s support for the Assad regime in Syria. The prince reportedly offered several inducements, including billions in arms purchases for the Saudi military and billions more in Saudi investments in Russia. Putin, however, rejected these offers.
The Saudis, one Russian source indicated, seemed to think that Moscow would change its policy on Syria if it were offered enough money. But for Putin, Syria is a Russian domestic political issue. To be seen as ending support for a long-time ally such as Assad would undermine Putin inside Russia. Thus, the Russian president refused Bandar’s offers.
Crimea’s secession from Ukraine only served to further worsen Saudi-Russian relations. Riyadh’s expression of concern over Russia’s treatment of the Muslim Crimean Tatar population has only fed Russian fears that the Kingdom wants to foment Muslim unrest inside Russia. The Saudi-Russian relationship, then, is indeed poor.
That said, Russian observers are convinced that Riyadh will make a large-scale arms purchase from Russia for Egypt. Riyadh strongly backs the Egyptian military leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (who was just elected president), and is extremely unhappy that Washington does not . After the Obama administration cut back American arms supplies to the Egyptian government for cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood (which el-Sisi ousted from power last summer), Riyadh became determined to find another supplier. Russia happens to be the arms producer that can most readily fulfill this need. Riyadh’s buying Russian arms for Cairo, then, is more a sign of Saudi annoyance with Washington and has no implication for improving Saudi-Russian relations more broadly.
Indeed, according to one source, receiving Russian arms will not even serve to greatly improve Russian-Egyptian relations. Egyptian army officers prefer to work with the US, and do not want to go back to working with Russia as their predecessors did from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s (the Egyptian Army officers I spoke to confirmed this). Egypt’s Saudi benefactors would also support the officers’ position.
A development that could serve to improve Saudi-Russian relations, one Russian observer noted, is the very recent trend toward improved Saudi-Iranian relations. One Saudi grievance against Russia is that it has close ties to Riyadh’s rivals in Tehran. But if Saudi-Iranian (as well as US-Iranian) relations improve, then Riyadh will have less reason to resent the Russian-Iranian relationship. Of course, even if Saudi-Iranian bilateral relations improve, the countries are likely to remain at loggerheads over Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain. With Moscow continuing to support or sympathize with the actors Tehran is backing in the first three of these states, the prospects for improved Saudi-Iranian relations, and improved Saudi-Russian relations, are limited.
Thus, just as the poor state of Saudi-Russian relations will not prevent Riyadh from buying Russian arms for Cairo, even large-scale Saudi purchases of Russian arms for Egypt will not lead to any appreciable improvement in ties between Moscow and Riyadh.
Photo: Prince Bandar bin Sultan (R), and then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin enter a hall for a signing ceremony in Moscow July 14, 2008. Credit: RUSSIA/RIA NOVOSTI/ALEXEI DRUZHININ
]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
[...]]]>by Thomas W. Lippman
An Arabic-speaking friend who has been doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf for decades and seems to know everyone there invited me to lunch the other day. He wanted to know if I could make sense of developments in Saudi Arabia over the past six months.
I almost laughed — he knows more before he gets out of bed in the morning than I ever will. But it was a measure of the collective bafflement of people whose business it is to know what is going on in the kingdom that my friend turned to me. His was the sixth such request I had fielded recently. The others were from diplomats at two foreign embassies, representatives of an international industrial conglomerate and a giant oil company, and an Obama administration official who has access to classified material.
It was flattering to be sought out by such people, who normally would be sources for me rather than the other way around. I would have liked to help them if I knew the answers, but the conversation was not reassuring. All this highlights how much Saudi Arabia, traditionally cautious and understated, has thrown knowledgeable people into confusion by its actions and decisions over the past several months. It is no secret that the leaders of Saudi Arabia have been upset with the United States over several policy differences in the past year; it’s less clear if the Saudi leaders understand how difficult it has become for their friends outside the kingdom to discern where they want to go and how they plan to get there.
The fundamental objectives of Saudi strategic policy are well known: contain Iran, put an end to the Assad regime in Syria, stamp out the Muslim Brotherhood, fight Islamic extremism, forge coherence out of the squabbles within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and encourage the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. What’s harder to discern is how the kingdom’s actions and decisions over the past six months have advanced this agenda.
This period of turbulence seems to have begun with the decision last November to reject the seat on the United Nations Security Council that the kingdom had sought for years. The Saudis said the U.N. had failed in its duty to stop the carnage of Syria’s civil war and to bring about a negotiated settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. It is true that those conflicts remain unresolved, but it was and is hard to see how Saudi Arabia’s decision made any difference. The Syrian war had been going on for some time, and the plight of the Palestinians dates to 1948; were the Saudis unaware of that while they were avidly pursuing the seat they rejected?
In the months since then, Saudi-watchers have been confronted with one surprising development after another. These include, in no particular order:
This list is not complete, but it is instructive. People outside Saudi Arabia who try to follow the kingdom’s affairs, and I include myself among them, should remind ourselves at all times how little we really know. This is not a country where the king and senior princes have to explain themselves, and they usually don’t. Even when they do, their explanations may or may not be the whole truth. It’s not as if a committee of the legislature could subpoena them. What all these pieces add up to may become clear over time — or maybe not. Meanwhile we should be wary of drawing conclusions.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Paul Pillar has a blog up at the National Interest on the possibility that Saudi Arabia and Iran are moving toward some form of rapprochement. The latest development, as Paul points out, is the long-awaited invitation this week by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal to his Iranian counter part Mohammad [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Paul Pillar has a blog up at the National Interest on the possibility that Saudi Arabia and Iran are moving toward some form of rapprochement. The latest development, as Paul points out, is the long-awaited invitation this week by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal to his Iranian counter part Mohammad Javad Zarif.
The Saudi-Iranian relationship is, of course, critical to any prospect of stabilizing the region, particularly the Levant, as Riyadh and Tehran have been the principal external supporters of the main protagonists in Syria’s catastrophic civil war. As noted by Paul, the Saudis’ decision to return their ambassador to Beirut offers another signal that they are interested in preventing the conflict next door from further destabilizing Lebanon, and perhaps a broader willingness to reduce Sunni-Shia tensions across the region.
Tom Lippman has been following the evolution of Saudi policy on this blog since last Fall when former and then-serving senior officials, including former Saudi ambassadors to Washington, Princes Bandar and Turki, were denouncing Obama’s failure to take strong military action against Syria after chemical weapons killed hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb last August. Beginning with Riyadh’s refusal to take its seat on the UN Security Council, you can find Tom’s analyses over the succeeding months here, here, and here.
At the end of March, however, Obama tacked on to his tour of Europe a stop in Riyadh for a meeting with King Abdullah, and while the press coverage of the visit maintained that things had gone poorly — Obama was greeted by lower-level officials and didn’t even get dinner — subsequent events suggest that there may indeed have been a certain meeting of the minds.
Thus, within a couple of weeks, Prince Bandar, reportedly much disliked by the Obama administration, was relieved of his post as the country’s intelligence chief — in which position he had been directing Saudi efforts to support the Syrian insurgency — while Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a favorite of Washington’s who had already replaced Bandar on Syria, appeared to have further boosted his position among the top policy-makers. Around the same time, the Obama administration announced that it was going through with the transfer of ten Apache helicopters to Egypt despite the military-backed regime’s deplorable human rights performance. Washington’s previous suspension of certain kinds of military assistance and cooperation with Cairo after the military coup that ousted the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, had infuriated Riyadh, which became and remains the regime’s most important financial backer and cheerleader.
Other U.S. gestures that may be meant to appease Saudi Arabia and put it in a more cooperative frame of mind include permitting the first-time delivery of advanced anti-tank, anti-armor TOW missiles (probably from Saudi Arabia’s own stocks, I am told) to allegedly carefully CIA-vetted “moderate” Syrian rebels, the upgrading of the Syrian Opposition Coalition’s (SOC) offices here to quasi-diplomatic status, and the reception of its president, Ahmad Jarba, here in Washington. Although he didn’t get the surface-to-air “MANPADs” he was seeking, Jarba did get a personal meeting with Obama, another sign of the kind of increased U.S. support — even if mainly symbolic — that Riyadh has been urging for months and months.
Moreover, we haven’t heard very many public complaints about U.S. policy in the region from Saudi princes since Obama’s visit. Meanwhile, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel is in Jeddah for the first meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) “joint defense council” where he is no doubt assuring his hosts that Washington is not about to sell them out and will continue plying them with lots of very expensive and sophisticated weapons systems, as well as guarding their borders and sea lanes with U.S. firepower for the indefinite future.
As noted by Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the GCC meeting was made somewhat more confusing by a major shake-up in Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry that, among other things, saw the departure of Prince Bandar’s half-brother, Deputy Defense Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan, who, according to Henderson, was Bandar’s “perceived alter ego”, particularly with respect to Riyadh’s Syrian operations. Henderson speculates that all of this may have to do with the continuing maneuvering around the succession of King Abdullah, but its coincidence with the invitation to Zarif “suggest that Saudi Arabia may be reconsidering its regional strategy.” He places the emphasis on the “may” in that sentence, arguing “…it is almost certainly too early to say that the kingdom is softening its tough approach to Iran, especially after its unprecedented April 29 parade display of Chinese-supplied missiles capable of hitting Tehran — a gesture that followed the largest military exercise in Saudi history, involving 130,000 men.” On the other hand, I would add, one always wants to go into negotiations after a show of strength.
Although Paul doesn’t mention these latest events, they form a larger context in which to understand his argument. And, if, as Paul suggests, we are seeing an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement on the horizon, it’s pertinent to recall Obama’s own words about his ambitions for the region when he spoke with the New Yorker’s David Remnick earlier this year:
“It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he told me. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.
In any event, here’s Paul’s post.
Photo: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani shakes hands with Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Tehran, Abdul Rahman Bin Garman Al Shahri on March 3, 2014. Credit: ISNA/Hamid Forootan
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