Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
We Are
Witnessing the Decline of Saudi Arabia as a Major Power
March 10, 2016
Five years
ago, when the Arab Spring seemed at its most hopeful point, a Saudi diplomat
told me, scornfully, that it would come to nothing. I had met him in the halls
of the United Nations, where I had been asking diplomats about their views on
Libya. The Saudis were eager to have the UN validate armed action to remove
Muammar Qaddafi. A Saudi news outlet, al-Arabiya, had suggested that the Libyan
military was killing its citizens with abandon. Fog surrounded Libya.
The U.S.
State Department seemed clueless. It did not have any reliable intelligence.
Hillary Clinton, who pushed for war, relied upon the French and the Saudis for
their assessment of Libya. These were unreliable narrators. Saudi Arabia, at
least, wanted the Arab Spring shut down. It threatened its own undemocratic
regime. The diplomat’s scorn grew out of this anxiety.
Like an
angry dragon, Saudi Arabia lashed around the region, throwing money and arms,
encouraging chaos in this and that country. One underestimates the biliousness
of monarchs: at a 2009 Arab League meeting, Qaddafi had cavalierly dismissed
the King of Saudi Arabia as a creation of the British and a protectorate of the
Americans. It was evident that the monarchs would not tolerate his existence
for much longer. Two years later, they—with Western help—dismissed him.
Qaddafi was
a personal affront to the Saudi King. More serious was the imagined threat
America’s Kingdom perceived in Iran. When the Shah of Iran ruled there, the
Kings of Arabia smiled. It was Islamic republicanism they hated, for it
directly threatened them. Saudi Arabia’s fear of Islamic republicanism is what
drives its policy. Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West pushed back against
Iranian influence through the U.S.’ Syria Accountability Act (2003), the
Israeli war on Lebanon (2006) and the nuclear sanctions regime of 2006. None of
these worked.
Just as the
Arab Spring provided the opportunity for the Saudis to intervene in Libya, so
too did it provide the Saudis with the pretext for regime change in Syria and
in other theaters where it fantasized about Iranian influence (Bahrain, Yemen
and Lebanon). The Saudi ambition was to erase Iran’s presence. Five years
later, the detritus of that policy is clear: Libya, Syria and Yemen are
destroyed, whereas Bahrain has been reduced to a prison of dreams. The Saudi
diplomat’s scorn was prophetic.
But much of
the Saudi dream, given encouragement by the United States, has now turned.
Syria and Yemen have been destroyed, but they remain standing. Iran has been
welcomed into the fraternity of nations, whether with the slow erasure of the
nuclear sanctions regime or integration into the Chinese and Russian networks.
Saudi Arabia’s oil civil war has served to bankrupt Saudi Arabia as much as its
adversaries. No flag of truce has gone up yet on the palaces of Riyadh.
Nonetheless, there are inklings that King Salman’s circle is aware of their
grave miscalculation.
Syria.
Russia’s
direct intervention into Syria ended all expectations of a regime change
operation by the West. No Western bombing of Damascus is now possible short of
a full-scale war with Russia. Even Ted Cruz will not be able to get the U.S.
generals to agree to such insanity.
Absent
massive Western bombardment, the government of Bashar al-Assad is not going to
fall. Saudi Arabia’s main proxy force—Jaish al-Islam—lost its leader, Zahran
Alloush, in a bombing run last December. It has not recovered. Saudi Arabia
called in the opposition to Riyadh hastily, stuffed them into the High
Negotiating Committee and warned them that any Geneva meeting would demand
their surrender. The Committee dithered about the peace talks, and then watched
as the Russians and the United States agreed to a “cessation of hostilities.”
It would have been callous of them not to go along with anything that resembled
a humanitarian pause.
Saudi
Arabia was furious. It said it would send in ground troops of its own. But
where would these troops come from? Saudi Arabia does not have an adequate
army. It buys billions of dollars of U.S. weaponry, largely as a boondoggle for
U.S. arms manufacturers. Saudi subjects are happy in the cockpit of a jet
fighter as long as they can bomb countries that do not have jets of their own
or air defenses. Few Saudi subjects would be pleased to die on the misery of a
battlefield. For this, Saudi Arabia hires mercenaries from Pakistan and
Morocco, from the Horn of Africa and Colombia. When Pakistan’s parliament
refused to send troops to fight in Yemen last year, it meant that Saudi
Arabia’s ground forces were unavailable.
Saudi
generals whispered to the King’s circle that they thought an intervention into
Syria was a bad idea. It had to be suspended. No road is open for Saudi
ambitions in Syria.
Yemen.
King
Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman has staked his legitimacy on the Saudi
bombardment of Yemen. The richest country in the Arab world has bombed the
poorest country in the Arab world since March 26 of last year. No strategic
gains have been met by the Saudi bombing. The forces of the Houthis and former
president Abdullah Saleh are the Saudi targets. Their resistance has been
fierce, but it has also been from a position of unevenness. Saudi Arabia has
the best equipment, fully supplied by the West. As human rights groups have
warned, responsibility for the considerable Saudi war crimes in Yemen are
shared between Riyadh and its Western suppliers. Al-Qaeda’s gains in southern
Yemen have been serious. It has used the Saudi air power as its airforce. This
is what Mohammed bin Salman’s war has come to mean.
An exit
from the quagmire in Yemen is not apparent. King Salman wants a dignified way
to withdraw. He summoned a Houthi delegation to Riyadh last week. They are now
in the palaces of the King, listening to their proposals. This is the first
time that the Houthis have sent an envoy to Saudi Arabia, but it is not the first
attempt at a peace process. Mohammed Abdel-Salam, the Houthi spokesperson who
is now in Riyadh for these talks, led the delegation to Oman last year, when
the two sides created a process that led to the ill-starred Geneva talks in
June. But hope now is greater. Starvation stalks Yemen, whose infrastructure
has been destroyed. There is desperation in the country. Saudi Arabia knows it
cannot make gains absent Pakistani ground troops (and even then nothing is
guaranteed). A cessation of hostilities is on the cards.
Oil.
I have
written earlier (part one [3], part two [4]) about the truce in the oil
wars. Certainly oil prices follow the trend lines of all commodity prices,
which have dropped as a result of slack demand. But oil prices dipped further
than those of other raw materials, suggesting that this had more to do with
politics than economics. The meeting in Doha that pushed for a freeze in
production level already raised the world oil price—Brent Crude—from $30 to
$40. A closer approximation to market prices will soon appear. Saudi Arabia had
to make a deal with Russia (and behind Moscow, Iran) to get this relief to its
otherwise rattled exchequer. The cessation of hostilities in the oil market is
one more indication of a weakened Saudi Arabia.
I reached
out to the scornful diplomat to ask him what he thought now about the failures
of Saudi Arabia. He returned my message this afternoon with a dampened
sensibility. “Difficulties are clear,” he wrote. “The Kingdom will have to find
a way forward. The West betrayed us.” The last sentence is of interest. Rather
than take responsibility for its dangerous gambits, Saudi Arabia will start to
blame the West, particularly President Barack Obama, for not bombing Syria and
for the end to the Iranian nuclear sanctions. This is a cliché. It is not near
reality. America’s Kingdom overreached. In doing so, it destroyed several Arab
states. This is not the time for scorn. This is the time for great sadness for
what has befallen great Arab societies, which will have to dig deep into their
resilience to rebuild their communities.
Vijay Prashad
is Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut. He is the author of eighteen books, including Arab Spring, Libyan
Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming book, The Death of a Nation and the
Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His
columns appear at Alternet on Wednesday.
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