Ryan Cooper writes over at The Week that the United States should abandon Saudi Arabia as a Persian Gulf ally. The rationale boils down to the following reasons: (1) the human rights record of Saudi Arabia is awful; (2) wealthy Saudis sponsored Bin Laden and the clerics export a form of Islam that fuels our enemies; (3) the Yemen war works against U.S. interests; (4) we don’t need the oil from the Middle East any longer because of fracking revolution.
What went unstated is what are U.S. interests in the region. U.S. interests in the region have mainly been counted as three: (1) maintaining the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, (2) maintaining the Jewish State in the region, and (3) preventing another great power from dominating the region.
The U.S. pried Egypt out of the Soviet orbit during the Cold War. It is certainly the case that nations chose to play one super power off against another in order to maximize their financial and military support. Egypt is no different. The U.S. had to rely on the Saudis as the bulwark against revolutionary Iran after the fall of the Pahlavi regime. Revolutionary Iran was and is an enemy of the United States. A capitulation to Iran by throwing Saudi Arabia over the side would hardly be in U.S. interests.
Fracking has turned the United States into the world’s swing producer, but the United States is not self sufficient in energy. Thus, the claim that the U.S. is no longer dependent on Middle East oil is bogus. An appeal to autarky is foolish. This is socialist banana republic thinking. The U.S. is too integrated into the world economy to think that risking tumult in global oil supplies is something that won’t affect the United States.
As to the case of the Yemen proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Because ISIS and al Qaeda have acquired a foothold in Yemen as a base of operations is a complete smokescreen. Al Qaeda has been operating in Yemen since the 1990s, before the current proxy war. ISIS has global appeal to jihadis world wide (Boko Haram, which had no institutional ties ISIS has pledged allegiance). They are likely to back a winner.
My only conclusion based on the recommendations made in the article is that Cooper has been infected with the idea that Iranian hegemony in the Gulf would be stabilizing. There are not a few in the State Department and the foreign policy team in current administration holding out hope for this. However, those that do, fail to understand the religious dynamics of the region. The goal of the international community is to prevent the region from being consumed in a broad Sunni-Shia conflict. Putting out fires are what superpowers do. There is no grand solution to the multitude of interrelated conflicts in the region, but limiting the chaos is what the benign hegemon does. Britain did it since the 18th century. And the U.S. has been carrying that mantle since 1945, no one else is stepping up to do it.
This is the fundamental failure of those who seek ultimate solutions. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Cooper’s essay is an example.