This week’s visit to Tehran by the Kuwaiti emir, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, is about more than Iranian-Kuwaiti relations. It might even be a pivotal moment in the shaping of Iran’s ties with the Arab countries across the Gulf. Kuwait, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), is acting as a conduit for the collective unease that the GCC’s six member states, particularly Saudi Arabia, have about Iran’s regional policies.
Kuwait: At the Crossroads of Change or Political Stagnation
Though Kuwaitis have been striving for change, particularly since 2011, their country’s political structures remain more or less unaltered. Yet change is inevitable, writes Shafeeq Ghabra in this MEI Policy Paper. At issue is a semi-democratic system that has proven ineffective at dealing with problems such as government mismanagement, corruption, a lack of economic transparency, and inequality toward tribes and undocumented immigrants.
Geography alone should make the Arab world Iran’s key foreign policy focus. Of Iran’s 13 immediate neighbors, seven are Arab countries.[1] But Tehran’s approach to the Arab world, with its 22 states extending from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, varies widely in intensity, and Iran’s objectives are equally varied depending on the country in question.
It might be a mistake to jump to conclusions about the removal of Prince Bandar bin Sultan from his post as chief of Saudi Arabian intelligence. When it comes to senior jobs held by the royals, the Kingdom’s decision-making process is entirely opaque and there is no way to know at this point whether the flamboyant former ambassador to the United States was pushed out or bailed out.
Osama bin Laden may be dead, but his ghost was in Riyadh the other day, hovering over Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah as he issued a decree making it a crime for any Saudi citizen to take part in a war outside the kingdom.
The obvious motivator was the civil war in Syria, where hundreds of young Saudis have been spotted in the ranks of the most radical jihadi groups battling both the government and other less extreme rebels. But the roots of the king’s action, and the problem it was designed to address, can be traced to the 1980s war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia & the Arab Gulf’s Disappointment with U.S. Policy
Whether Saudi Arabia takes a seat on the United Nations Security Council or not, the initial snub is aimed primarily at the United States. In particular, U.S.-Saudi relations are in for an exceptionally difficult period—perhaps a return to the policies of King Faisal bin Abdulaziz. It appears that Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf now share the view of Sir Charles Johnston, a British diplomat in the 1960s, who offered the following assessment of U.S.
Last week, MEI scholars Allen Keiswetter, a retired Foreign Service officer, David Newton, former ambassador to Yemen, and Roby Barrett, author of Yemen: A Different Political Paradigm in Context(2011), gathered for an informal discussion about Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference (NDC), which began in March.
The openly difficult relationship between Saudi Arabia and Muslim Brotherhood chapters across the region has become a salient feature of Middle East politics since the advent of the “Arab Spring.” This mutual mistrust has increased in the wake of the Kingdom’s recent support for the military takeover in Cairo and the generals’ subsequent repression of the Brotherhood there. But how is the Islamist organization affected by this dynamic in Syria, where the Muslim Brothers and the Saudis both battle against Bashar al-Assad?
Whenever a Saudi Arabian king or senior prince publicly criticizes U.S. policy, they inevitably touch off speculation about how the Saudis may be rethinking their security alliance with the United States.
Gulf Governments Offer Financing for U.S. Strike on Syria
Like pieces fitting together in a jigsaw puzzle, Arab governments – presumably from the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council – offered to finance a U.S. military strike on Syria, according to comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry during testimony September 4 with the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In an exchange with Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) on the potential cost of U.S. military action in Syria, Kerry said,
When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, issued unequivocal pledges of support for Egypt’s military government and its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, their move was widely depicted in the news media as a logical extension of the kingdom’s opposition to revolutionary movements in the Arab world. This simplistic view overlooks the fact that Saudi Arabia has responded differently to different uprisings—it supports the rebels in Syria, helped to crush them in Bahrain—and that aligning itself with Egypt’s new rulers could be a risky strategy.
Since the 1970s oil boom, the Gulf region has been one of the principal destinations for workers from South Asia, with the result that today Indians constitute a large percentage of the non-nationals living in the region. Indeed, at five million out of an estimated 15 million people, the Indian community forms the largest expatriate group in each of the Gulf countries. Most Indian immigrants are from the south Indian state of Kerala, while many of the rest originate from Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar.
When the young Shaykh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani became ruler of Qatar last month after his father stepped aside in a seamless transition, one of his first official acts was to seal the generational shift by appointing a new prime minister.
