Twenty years of grievances

The logic behind Arab states and Turkey seeking strategic autonomy from the United States, its commercial implications and the coming strategic chaos.

Commercial Takeaway: The UAE and Saudi Arabia will likely be cautious about new investments in the West, and less welcoming of Western investments in critical infrastructure in their own countries. The Gulf countries, along with Egypt and Turkey, are likely to diversify their weapons purchases away from the US, albeit gradually, a trend that has already been underway. These traditional US allies are also likely to allow countries evading US sanctions to use their own currencies in a bid to boost their relations with other economic centres, including Latin America, Pakistan, Russia, China and India. As China is the main global economic power, it will likely be the main beneficiary of this adjustment, especially if it can use its economic weight to bring about reconciliations in countries such as Sudan, Yemen and Libya.

Traditional US Middle Eastern allies Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are seeking to join the BRICS, along with Iran. For these Middle Eastern states, the US has been a poor security guarantor. Here is a short list of their grievances.

• The 2003 Iraq invasion and failure to contain Iranian influence: The US was warned that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would empower Iran. The Bush Administration took no notice, and went ahead with insane policies like de-Baathification, gutting the Iraqi military and state and opening the doors for Iran’s gradual takeover of the country. The US continued to allow Iran’s military expansion in Iraq and beyond, to Syria and Lebanon.

• The 2011 overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: Arab allies were shocked by the willingness of the US to abandon a key ally in Egypt, who had helped keep Israel secure and prevent the emergence of both militant Islamist movements and Arab unity ideologues. The US was willing to let Mubarak die in jail despite his many services. The Egyptian Army was not and did its best to restore to Mubarak a modicum of decency (even though it was the military that had overthrown him, with the support of the US).

• Ignoring Turkish interests in Northern Syria: It was evident from early on during the Syrian civil war that Turkey viewed Kurdish militias as a greater threat than Islamic State. Kurdish militias armed by the US were wedded to an ideology that was secular, socialist and nationalist – separatist, making it a threat to a Turkey that sought to be Islamic, corporatist and pan-nationalist, with influence over the Turkic world as well as Arab and Kurdish regions. The US simply failed to consider how much of a threat the Kurds were to Turkey’s sovereignty, ideology and territorial integrity. Furthermore, the US under Obama failed to stand with Turkey against Russia in Syria, only for the US under Biden to ask Turkey to stand with Ukraine in Russia’s backyard. Turkey saw clearly that it can and should pursue its own national interest by balancing relations with the US with relations with Russia and China.

• The 2011 abandonment of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh: Saleh was a maverick, who both fought al-Qaeda and supported it, dancing on the heads of snakes, as he put it, to stay in power. With Saudi support, he was able to keep a balance in Yemen, maintaining an unstable peace that was acceptable to the Saudis. He was still a reliable partner for the US, sharing intelligence on al-Qaeda even as he tolerated its presence and used it to extract US support. Unseating him paved the way for a takeover by Iran’s allies in the Ansar Allah (Houthi) Movement. This was permitted on Saudi Arabia’s doorstep. The Houthi now have a say over all shipping in the Red Sea thanks to Iranian weaponry, with Iran able to block access through the State of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. This put Saudi Arabia in an impossible strategic bind.

• The failure of US air defence systems to protect Saudi Arabia: In response to that bind, Saudi Arabia stepped into the war in Yemen in 2015 to secure what it long viewed as its own backyard and prevent Iran’s allies from taking over the country – an objective in which it succeeded, as more than half the country remains outside the Houthis’ control. However, the US was either unable or unwilling (my view is unable) to provide adequate air defence systems. The Houthi managed to repeatedly strike at Saudi airports, refineries and energy infrastructure with no consequences from the US. Eventually, these strikes forced the Saudis to accept a ceasefire.

• The US’ protection of Qatar: When Donald Trump came into office promising a new day, he demanded that Arab states stop their support for Islamist ideologies that lead to jihadism. Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia correctly identified Qatar as one of the key hubs for that support. Qatar is a Wahhabi country, websites overseen by its clerics promote a view of Islam that is hardly distinguishable from that of al-Qaeda, it regularly hosts clerics seen as extremists in their own countries, its support for the Muslim Brotherhood is extensive, and the Muslim Brotherhood has often been the finishing school from which Islamists graduate to actual terrorist organisations. When the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia took action against Qatar, however, the US State Department and Pentagon thwarted them and prevented them from changing the Qatari regime. Then Trump sold Qatar massive amounts of weapons and allowed Turkey to establish a military base there, eventually forcing Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia to reconcile with Qatar.

• The failure to protect energy infrastructure and international shipping: In 2019, Iran launched a series of attacks against international shipping in the Arabian Sea and the Sea of Oman. Attacks have continued since then, with changes in tactics and targets, but with Iran consistently showing that it can threaten international freedom of navigation. In September 2019, Iran’s allies, using Iranian equipment, attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq installation, one of the key nodes in the global oil supply chain. Ansar Allah claimed the attack, as well as other attacks on key bits of oil supply infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Gulf Arab allies had reason to understand from the US that energy security and international shipping were protected by the US, and constituted US red lines. When no response came under the Trump and Biden administrations, Saudi Arabia and the UAE saw clearly that the US was no longer a reliable security guarantor.

• Making the Iran nuclear deal, and breaking it: The original 2015 nuclear deal was made with almost no consultation with Gulf Arab allies – the initial negotiations for the preliminary deal were done secretly, behind the backs of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The 2015 deal also critically excluded any agreements on Iran’s regional role, which was of greater concern to the Arabs than the nuclear issue. Iran had consistently used the nuclear issue as a negotiating tactic, forcing the West to engage with it on that issue to the exclusion of its regional role, which is far more important for the goal of building an Iranian empire extending from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean. The Arab states fully joined in Obama’s original sanctions that were intended to bring Iran to the negotiating table. With their ties with Iran ruined, and as they fought Iran’s allies in Syria, the US turned around and made an agreement with Iran. Then it broke that agreement and sought escalation, but without actually protecting the Gulf Arab states from the consequences of that escalation. Simply put, US policy was capricious and reckless.

• Failure to keep the peace in Sudan: For Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Sudan’s location makes it critical to their own national security. Imperfect order under Bashir is better than perfect chaos under the alternatives to Bashir. The war in Sudan makes both countries vulnerable to refugee flows and threatens their national security as it creates a vacuum in which jihadi groups that target both countries may eventually operate.

• The Ukraine war: The lesson from the Ukraine war for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states was: do not become another Ukraine. Do not follow US advice and receive US equipment to an extent that leads to conflict with more populous and larger neighbours. For the Gulf states, it became evident that the price of following the US’ lead would be the destruction of their domestic economy, a reconstruction bill in the hundreds of billions, and the surrender of key assets to foreign capital so that reconstruction could be funded. Better to follow an independent policy on Iran and ignore the US.

• Sanctions on Russia: These sanctions showed Gulf Arab states especially that their foreign reserves and investments, which, along with their energy reserves, are the source of their influence in the West, are not in fact secure in the West. Furthermore, they showed the oil exporters that their role in the oil market does not afford them any protection against Western interests or ideology. If Russia can be sanctioned for acting forcefully in its own sphere of influence, why can Saudi Arabia or the UAE not be sanctioned over their role in Yemen or Bahrain, or for human rights violations, or for climate change?

From the perspective of Arab states, America is no longer the reliable ally that it was against socialism, Arabism or Islamism, when the US worked to check the rise of Arab socialist states, channelled jihadis to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and prevented Iran from disrupting energy shipping in the 1980s. Today’s America does not take the Arab states’ interests into account. It does not listen to their concerns. It does not effectively protect them.

The Arab states are too militarily dependent on the US to trigger a breakdown in relations, and the US remains too powerful economically and militarily for them to risk that. However, they will move away from the US gradually, diversifying their weapons purchases, deepening their economic ties with rival or neutral centres of power – from Latin America through Africa to India, Russia and China – and setting their own policy for dealing with Iran independently of the United States. They no longer view the US as a reliable security guarantor, but as a dangerous friend that they are temporarily stuck with – until the US, they believe, implodes under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

As such, these states are now seeking strategic autonomy from the US. These countries will not become allies of Russia, China or India. Rather, they will simply pursue the policies that suit them best, in partnership with some of these countries in some places, while still anchored to the US due to their military dependence on it. It will be a very chaotic process, with a dizzying array of piecemeal alignments. In Sudan, the UAE and Russia are siding with the RSF. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are siding with the Sudanese Army. In Libya, Egypt is considering reconciling with Turkey at the expense of Russian ally Haftar. In Yemen, the Saudis and the UAE are on opposite sides, while both are nominally opposed to the Houthi. This is an era of strategic chaos. The question is, can China offer enough economic resources, on terms that are commercially acceptable to it, to bring about more orderly alignments of interests in those countries? That appears to be the only path towards order.