The lead-up to President Obama’s summit with several Persian Gulf countries is generating more intrigue and fireworks over the administration’s Middle East policies than the meeting itself is expected to produce.
First came Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s decision over the weekend to apparently renege on an invitation to this week’s summit he had previously accepted.
Then on Monday the White House was forced to defend Secretary of State John Kerry’s ability to convey the White House’s message to U.S. Gulf partners under an attack from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
On Kerry, McCain told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that he has “great respect” for his former Senate colleague, but he’s noticed “in his tenure here in the Senate but also as secretary of state that he sometimes interprets things as he wants them to be rather than what they really are.”
McCain went onto to say that Kerry has failed to recognize that the Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran and his failure to follow-up with his red-line threat in Syria, among other issues, has inspired a “lack of confidence” in the leaders of the Arab Gulf countries that the U.S. has traditionally counted on as allies.
The White House, on a conference call with reporters Monday afternoon, was unusually forceful in its push back, arguing that McCain’s criticism is virtually unprecedented and misguided.
“This type of repeated questioning of the credibility of the secretary of state is not in keeping with the long-standing practice of national security,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “Kerry had a very good meeting in Paris, and the president is very pleased with the progress he was able to make.”
Rhodes was referring to a gathering Kerry convened with leaders of Gulf Cooperation Council countries in Paris on Friday, a pre-planning session prior to this Thursday’s summit at Camp David.
Between Thursday and Sunday, however, there was a breakdown in the talks that led the Saudi king to pull a 180-degree shift and back away from a commitment to attend this week’s Camp David powwow, regional experts attest.
Obama had planned to meet with King Salman one-on-one Wednesday before the group of leaders headed off to the presidential retreat, and as late as Friday, U.S. officials said they expected him to come to Washington before learning that night of his change in plans.
Gulf officials had been pushing the United States to provide advanced weapons, including F-35s and the same type of missile defense and military cooperation it affords Israel, as well as a treaty guaranteeing explicit support against a rising threat from Iran.
The White House is denying that the Saudi and Bahrain kings’ decisions to skip the summit this week is a snub, but regional experts say it’s tough to view it as anything less.
The Saudis are well aware of how pointed and provocative it is to agree to have their top leader attend then beg off later. And they know how to make headlines to voice their displeasure.
In 2013, Saudi Arabia stunned the United Nations and some of its own diplomats by rejecting a sought-after seat on the United Nations Security Council in a fit of pique over what the monarch viewed as a conciliatory U.S. and Western stances toward Syria and Iran, the nation’s top regional adversary.
For months, Riyadh was pleading with the Obama administration to arm the Syrian rebels, and was convinced that Syrian President Bashir al Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people had crossed Obama’s red line. When the president failed to act, the Saudis said “thanks, but no thanks” to a U.N. seat they had been campaigning for since 1998.
The White House on Monday said nothing was amiss with the Saudis after Riyadh announced Sunday that the king had changed his plans and would not come to Washington after all.
“There has been some speculation that this change in travel plans was an attempt to send a message to the United States,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday. “If so, that message was not received.”
Facing an onslaught of questions about the apparent last-minute change-in-plans, Earnest said Obama was not disappointed and that he is pleased that both the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and the king’s son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s national security decision-makers, would represent Riyadh at Camp David.
All of the signals U.S. diplomats have heard from the Saudis in recent days and weeks has been positive, Earnest insisted, encouraging reporters to contact the Saudi government directly and predicted they would say there is no animus behind the king’s decision to pass the summit by.
The Washington Examiner called the Saudi embassy in Washington but did not receive a response by press time.
David Andrew Weinberg, a Saudi expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the diplomatic message in the king’s absence is clear: something rankled the Saudi leadership over the weekend.
“I definitely think there is something more going on here – the indications from the opinion of the go-to Gulf leaders is that the Saudi leadership is upset with Washington,” he told the Examiner.
The Bahraini king’s absence is another red-flag, he argued, because unlike Salman, he is not in poor health.
Most likely, Weinberg said, the king’s decision is a sign that negotiations fell apart about what the White House was willing to provide at the summit in terms of formal reassurances about the United States tangible support.
Senior administration officials Monday afternoon would not confirm reports that a lack of U.S. commitment to provide the F-35s had anything to do with the decision of several gulf leaders not to show up for the talks. The emirs of Kuwait and Qatar are the only heads of state who plan to attend, while the other four Gulf countries are sending top defense officials.
“We do not and never anticipated this to be a summit that only focused on one capability like the F-35, for instance,” one administration official said. “We’re focused on the capabilities that are most relevant to the security challenges…we need to be looking at maritime cyber, ballistic missile defense” as well as the different Gulf countries to operate jointly and coordinate their defense in response to evolving threats.
Rob Malley, White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region, acknowledged that many of the Gulf countries for weeks had pushed for a formal treaty to emerge out of the Camp David summit, but U.S. officials shot that down weeks ago. Such a formal treaty would require Congressional approval and was not feasible in the time period allotted, if at all.
“Some of them wanted a formal treaty but that’s something that we told them weeks ago is not possible,” Malley said. “We worked with them the entire weekend and we didn’t hear any hint of dissatisfaction,” although he said one of the leaders reminded U.S. officials that they would have preferred a treaty.
Instead, the administration may opt for a presidential statement pledging to defend the GCC countries in the face of an Iranian threat. But that type of blanket statement would not hold over into the next U.S. presidency.
Jon Alterman, a Saudi expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Gulf states want to be assured that Iranian ships aren’t going to cross into their waters and put Iranian troops on their shores to occupy them.
“There’s a high ability of the United States to reassure on that front, and I think the United States ability to prevent that from happening is high,” he said. “But nobody thinks the likelihood [of that U.S. assurance at the Camp David Summit] is very high.”
“They want a visceral sense that the United States has their back, and they don’t have that sense,” he added.
