Saudi King Salman not to attend US-Gulf Summit in Washington!

Saudi King Salman not to attend US-Gulf Summit in Washington!

-Dr. Abdul Ruff

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The decline of US-Gulf relations has entered a new phase now with Saudi King Salman refusing to attend meetings in Washington.

Saudi King Salman announced he will not attend a summit hosted by President Barack Obama next week seeking to shore up wavering trust from Gulf leaders while Washington negotiates with long-time rival Iran and refuses to do enough on Syria.  A partially complete nuclear accord with Tehran has some Gulf diplomats voicing fears in private that Washington is bargaining with Iran at their countries' expense.

However,  a statement by Saudi Arabia's embassy in Washington said that newly-named Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef would lead the Saudi delegation to the summit.

The king's son,  Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, will also attend. Salman was expected to attend the summit and Washington learned of the change of plans late Friday, administration officials said, insisting that the change was not a slight.

Reports say the United Arab Emirates will also send its crown prince to the meetings. The Emirati president, Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was never expected to attend, because of health reasons, US and Arab officials said. The sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said, also will not be attending because of health reasons. Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the USA, declined to say exactly what his government was pushing for from the United States when he spoke at a conference in Washington. "That's not the right approach. The approach is, let's come here, let's figure out what the problems are, how we can work together to address our needs." 

Obviously, the Gulf leaders are quite unhappy with US approach to Mideast where it treats Israel, an illegal identity in the region that targets Arabs, mainly the Palestinians whose lands it has misappropriated.  Issues of Iran and Syria further complicated the mutual misunderstanding and tensions.

Six Gulf Cooperation Council leaders are due to visit the White House on May 13 and attend the summit at the bucolic Camp David presidential retreat the next day.  Washington and the Gulf nations will discuss conflicts across the Middle East including in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The United States claims it is keen to allay Gulf fears that the country is disengaging from the region and tone down anxiety over closed-door nuclear talks with arch-foe Iran. "This is also an opportunity to reaffirm the US strategic partnership with the Gulf States, our shared concern about Iran's destabilizing activities in the region and our mutual commitment to take steps necessary to enhance stability in the Gulf and de-escalate tensions," the official said.

The Arab nations are particularly angry now, experts said, about comments Obama recently made in an interview with The New York Times, in which he said allies like Saudi Arabia should be worried about internal threats - "populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances."

US Secretary of State John Kerry met on May 08 Friday in Paris with his counterparts from the Arab nations that were invited to the summit meeting - Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman - to discuss what the Arab nations were expecting from the summit meeting, and to signal what the U.S. was prepared to offer at Camp David. The summit was described by one diplomat as "long overdue." US administration officials said that the Arab officials had pressed for a defense treaty with the US pledging to defend them if they come under external attack. But that was always going to be difficult; as such treaties - similar to what the US has with Japan or Israel - must be ratified by Congress. Instead, Obama is prepared to offer a presidential statement which is not as binding and which future presidents may not have to honor.

The Gulf  diplomats have also said they are uneasy about what seems to be Iran's growing influence in the region. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Salman would miss the meeting "due to the timing of the summit, the scheduled humanitarian ceasefire in Yemen and the opening of the King Salman Center for Humanitarian Aid," according to the embassy statement. Jubeir "reiterated King Salman's commitment to achieving peace and security in Yemen and his eagerness to the speedy delivery of humanitarian aid to the brotherly people of Yemen," it added.

One does not know if Saudi is eager to claim the leadership  of Mideast.  Upon attacking  Yemen in NATO style, killing many Muslims, Riyadh has now offered a five-day humanitarian truce from May 12. The country said its ceasefire offer is conditional on the rebels reciprocating and not exploiting it for military advantage. Salman said the Saudi-led air war was launched on Yemen to foil a plot by a "sectarian group" to undermine Middle East security. He said the campaign prevented Yemen from becoming a "theater of terrorism." Saudi artillery responded to rocket fire from Yemen that wounded four women inside the country Sunday. More than 1,400 people have been killed since late March in the conflict, according to the United Nations.

Aid agencies have called for an immediate ceasefire in a statement signed by 17 organizations.

The White House has pressed Saudi Arabia to ease an imprecise air campaign on Yemen that appears to have had a limited impact on the ground.  After more than six weeks of Saudi-led air strikes, Yemeni rebels said they would respond "positively" to ceasefire efforts and their allies accepted a US-backed truce plan.

Saudi Arabian announcement that its new monarch, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Salman, would not be attending meetings at the White House with President Barack Obama or a summit gathering at Camp David this week, is an apparent signal of its continued displeasure with the White House administration over US relations with Iran, its rising regional adversary. As recently as Friday, the administration said that Salman would be coming to "resume consultations on a wide range of regional and bilateral issues," according to Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman. But on Sunday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said that d the summit meeting would overlap with a five-day cease-fire in Yemen that is scheduled to start on Tuesday to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid. And that the king would instead send Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the defense minister.  

Salman is expected to call Obama on May 11 to talk about his last-minute decision not to attend the summit meeting. The official said that when the king met Secretary of State John Kerry in Riyadh last week, he indicated that he was looking forward to coming to the meeting. But on Friday night, after the White House put out a statement saying Obama would be meeting with Salman in Washington next week, administration officials received a call from the Saudi foreign minister that the king would not be coming after all.

There was "no expression of disappointment" from the Saudis, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. "If one wants to snub you, they let you know it in different ways," the official said. Jon Alterman, senior vice president with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Salman's absence is both a blessing and a snub: it sends an unmistakable signal when a close partner essentially says he has better things to do than go to Camp David with the president, just a few days after the White House announced he'd have a private meeting before everything got underway. Also, senior US officials will have an unusual opportunity to take the measure of Mohammed bin Salman, the very young Saudi defense minister and deputy Crown Prince, with whom few have any experience."

At a time when US officials were supposed to be reassuring those same countries that the United States would support them, the comments were viewed by officials in the Gulf as poorly timed, foreign policy experts said.

In Paris Kerry said that the United States and its Arab allies, which constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council, were "fleshing out a series of new commitments that will create between the U.S. and GCC a new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives that will take us beyond anything that we have had before."

The king is the latest top Arab official who will not be attending the summit meeting for delegations from members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Salman's decision to skip the summit meeting does not mean that the Saudis are giving up on the US – not all – it is just  a diplomatic  snub and they do not have many other options. Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said "As upset as the Saudis are, they don't really have a viable alternative strategic partnership in Moscow or Beijing." But, he added that there's a growing perception at the White House that the US and Saudi Arabia are friends but not allies like USA and Japan or USA and Israel are, while the US and Iran are allies but not friends.

The Arab countries would like to buy more weapons from the USA, but that also faces a big obstacle - maintaining Israel's military edge. The United States has long put restrictions on the types of weapons that US defense firms can sell to Arab nations, in an effort to ensure that Israel keeps a military advantage against its traditional adversaries in the region. That is why, for instance, Washington has not allowed Lockheed Martin to sell the F-35 fighter jet, considered to be the jewel of America's future arsenal, to Arab countries. The plane, the world's most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has been approved for sale to Israel.

Arab officials said they viewed the king's failure to attend the meeting as a sign of disappointment with what the administration was willing to offer at the summit meeting as reassurance that the United States would back its Arab allies against a rising Iran.