When Sheikh Sabah al Ahmad al Sabah was born in Kuwait in 1929, it was a tiny British protectorate wedged along the Persian Gulf between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It was also facing hard times. Its status as a crossroads trading destination was under regional challenge, and its pearl industry, an economic mainstay, would soon collapse in the worldwide Depression. Yet when Sabah, the 91-year-old emir of Kuwait, died last week at the Mayo Clinic after a long illness, he was hailed by former Secretary of State James Baker as a “forthright and trusted ally” of the United States “helping us build a better world.”
What happened? Well, oil happened, which was first discovered and drilled in Kuwait in the late 1930s. By the time Sabah became foreign minister in 1963, his country was fully independent from Britain and already a global leader in oil production, possessing the sixth-largest known reserves in the world and generating enormous wealth in a population of 4 million. This made Kuwait first among equals in the Persian Gulf emirates, allowing it to punch above its weight internationally.
Sabah’s family had been ruling Kuwait from the mid-18th century, when it was largely a conglomeration of disparate tribes and its principal economic activities were fishing and boat-building. But Kuwait’s strategic location along the Gulf made it attractive to traders operating between the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia. The British East India Company, which dominated the sea routes between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, was at one time headquartered in Kuwait City.
By itself, the sheikhdom was not especially prosperous, but it attracted emigrants from across the region, Arab and Persian alike, giving Kuwait a locally cosmopolitan character, which it retains. Of its present population, only about a third are native Kuwaitis; the rest are largely Arab and Asian expatriates.
At the time of his birth, Sabah was the fourth son of the ruling emir and not expected to succeed him. Educated largely by private tutors, he entered government service in his midtwenties and was soon found to possess unexpected political and diplomatic finesse. Short, stocky, bespectacled, and invariably turned out in the traditional Arab thobe and keffiyeh, he exuded competence as much as panache and was ideally suited to project Kuwait’s burgeoning post-independence powers. Appointed foreign minister at 34, Sabah served almost continually at his post for the next four decades before becoming prime minister in 2003. Three years later, the sudden, debilitating illness of a new emir unexpectedly propelled his half-brother onto the throne he held until last week.
Sabah was a shrewd, tireless, and infinitely patient promoter of Arab unity and, in particular, regional peace and stability. In recent decades, this made him the “trusted friend” of the United States described by Baker and a reliable antagonist of terrorist organizations and local troublemakers, especially Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Of course, this paid off handsomely in 1990-91 when Saddam invaded and annexed Kuwait, which he famously described as Iraq’s “19th province.” and the U.S. and its allies came to Kuwait’s rescue. (Some 13,000 U.S. troops remain stationed there.)
In recent years, the 80-something emir’s energies were largely consumed with mediating the increasingly bitter dispute between Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, home to Al-Jazeera and friend of the expansionist Islamic regimes in Iran and Turkey.
Strictly speaking, Sabah was an old-style tribal chieftain in a tradition-minded Arab society. His vision was impressive, at times, but limited, too: A stalwart proponent of the Palestinians, he wanted nothing to do with the Abraham Accords among Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. At the same time, in a neighborhood of absolute monarchs, he presided over a limited parliamentary democracy in a country with ties to the West, civil liberties, and cultural freedoms.
Tensions between the older and newer Kuwait exploded into mass street demonstrations during the Arab Spring. Will the new emir, Sabah’s 83-year-old half-brother, successfully navigate the winds of change?
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
