Source: CNN
By Nicole Gaouette, CNN
(CNN)President Barack Obama lands in Saudi Arabiaon Wednesday as the U.S. alliance with the Mideast powerhouse, long lubricated by barrels of oil, is being questioned on both sides like never before.
The kisses that then-President George W. Bush exchanged with the kingdom’s ruler a decade ago are a thing of the past. The Saudis have little confidence in Obama’s commitment to their security and fear he’s shifting U.S. attentions to its rival, Iran; Obama has described the Saudis as “so-called allies” and has complained their policies fuel anti-U.S. terror and regional chaos.
In the U.S. Congress, a growing drumbeat of criticism about Saudi Arabia is finding expression in efforts to restrict arms sales to Riyadh, expose alleged Saudi involvement in the September 11 terror attacks and allow it to be sued for that day’s destruction and death.
The clamor coincides with increasing domestic energy resources that lessen the U.S. need for foreign oil. Moreover, the allies are divided by a slew of issues including the approach to the wars in Syria and Yemen, the Iranian nuclear deal and the influence Tehran wields in Iraq.
These regional issues will top Obama’s agenda during his visit this week as he looks for backing for the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. And they are dynamics that are set to persist and color the U.S.-Saudi relationship for the next occupant of the Oval Office as well.
For all the friction and diverging interests, though, analysts and former officials say the two countries aren’t at the end of a love affair so much as in an unhappy marriage in which both sides, for better or worse, are stuck with each other.
“Despite all these differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced,” said Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA official. “We need each other.”
Fawaz Gerges, a professor studying Islamic-Western relations at the London School of Economics, called it “an estrangement” that wouldn’t end U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
As unlikely as the union between a rigidly conservative Islamic monarchy with a questionablehuman rights record and a secular democratic republic may seem, neither will be able to cut the ties the bind them.
The two countries are bound by military links and sales, a shared fight against terrorism, the need to leverage each other’s diplomatic clout and, for the U.S., the necessity of ensuring that world oil supplies flow freely.
Economic and energy links
Though the U.S. imports fewer barrels of Saudi crude and petroleum than it did on the day of Obama’s first inauguration, the energy needs of its allies — particularly in Asia — are crucial to global and U.S. economic health.
“U.S. energy independence doesn’t really change the equation that much because of the global strategic importance of the oil supplies,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
Saudi Arabia also carries diplomatic weight in the region that the U.S. has used to serve its interests.
The “Saudis are such an influential actor in the Middle East and broader Muslim world that no secretary of state or president has truly wanted to go it without them,” said David Weinberg, a Saudi Arabia expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
As the Arab Spring has devolved into chaotic violence, Saudi Arabia has provided funds that have stabilized key U.S. allies, including Egypt, Bahrain and Jordan, and it has developed stronger ties with one of its longtime enemies, Israel, the closest U.S. ally in the region.
War on Terror: Offering Arab cover
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On the most kinetic level, the two countries are linked by counterterrorism efforts that will go on for years.
It was reported in 2013 that the U.S. operates an unacknowledged drone base out of Saudi Arabia and is relying on the country to fight al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group that the Obama administration has called the most serious threat to the American homeland.
Separately, the U.S. “needs Saudi Arabia to provide Arab cover for the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” said David Ottaway, a Wilson Center expert on the kingdom. “The overall U.S. war on terrorism in the Middle East cannot be won without Saudi help.”
Categories: America, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, The Muslim Times, USA