President Obama hopes to salvage at least a modicum of messaging power from his private meeting with Arab Gulf countries at Camp David Thursday.
Billed by the White House as a summit to demonstrate joint security cooperation, the significance of the gathering took a beating in the press earlier this week after Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud reneged on an earlier agreement to attend, a move widely viewed as a snub.
“A consensus has been emerging that this is a snub, and it is hard to see it otherwise,” said Jon Alterman, an expert on Saudi affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “After all, the whole idea of taking a group of Gulf leaders to Camp David is to personalize the experience more and to allow the president to deepen his relationships with an important group who feel a certain distance from him.”
But the White House insisted that Obama was not disappointed, especially because Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s defense minister and the king’s son, were coming in his place.
After a meeting with Nayef and Salman Wednesday, Obama praised Saudi Arabia for its cooperation on counter-terrorism.
The relationship, he said, “has been absolutely critical not only to maintaining stability in the region but also protecting the American people” as well as the fight against the Islamic State.
While the administration plans to tout its military cooperation with the Gulf countries Thursday, the real reason behind the daylong retreat is to reassure the nations that a nuclear deal with Iran won’t hurt their security.
It’s a tough sell for countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain that worry that a nuclear agreement between the U.S. and Iran would reap a windfall for Tehran in sanctions relief, and in turn, strengthen Iran’s ability to dominate the region.
With the White House in the final weeks of its pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran — U.S. negotiators have resumed talks with Tehran and the P5+1 countries of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia and China — the Saudis were reportedly hoping for some tangible security assurances to defend themselves against an attack from Iran.
The possibilities included supplies of ballistic missiles, sales of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and a binding U.S. treaty committing to intervene on their behalf if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb or makes any threatening moves.
Secretary of State John Kerry met with King Salman in Riyadh last week and assured the Saudis that Obama would be open to new security guarantees and more sophisticated arms transfers, according to an insider account from Marc Ginsburg, who served as an ambassador to Morocco and was a Middle East adviser during the Clinton administration.
“As it turns out, one could drive a Mack truck through the word ‘open,’ Ginsburg wrote in a piece in the Huffington Post Monday.
In essence, Kerry oversold, and the White House had no intention of seeking congressional approval for a formal mutual defense agreement with Gulf Cooperation Council member states at the Camp David summit, or any willingness to consider an anti-Iran ballistic missile exchange or a transfer of the F-35s, Ginsburg asserted.
The White House played down any suggestion of a disconnect and said there will be a broad statement coming out of the summit on assurances the U.S. has made to the Gulf states, as well as common positions on a range of issues, including plans to “better integrate the GCC ballistic missile defense architecture,” according to a White House official.
“We do not and never anticipated this to be a summit that only focused on one capability, like the F-35, for instance,” White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters. “… I think it would be a mistake to say that there was some list of very finite capabilities that were the only things on the table here.
“And frankly, we’ll continue to have discussions with them about aircraft in the context of their security needs but we’re actually looking at a much broader menu of capabilities that are going to be necessary to meet the evolving threats in the region.”
Both Rhodes and White House press secretary Josh Earnest have said the summit will focus on how the U.S. can help the Gulf states operate their militaries jointly and coordinate responses, specifically when it comes to cyber, maritime and ballistic missile defense systems.
Rhodes also defended the U.S. commitment to come to the defense of Gulf countries, which he said the administration has repeatedly demonstrated.
“We’ll be exploring ways to strengthen that assurance at the Camp David summit,” Rhodes said.
Rob Malley, a coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region at the National Security Council, went further, acknowledging “an amorphous sense that [the Gulf states] want to make sure the U.S. is there — will be with them.”
“If our engagement in the fight against [the Islamic State], if our very robust engagements with the GCC didn’t convince them, I think Camp David and everything that they’ve heard from us so far should have persuaded them that that concern is unfounded,” he said. “They just want to hear that we’re there and that we care. And I think that that’s what Camp David is actually going to do.”
