President Obama spent the better half of two days huddling with Arab Gulf leaders this week at Camp David in an effort to soothe their anxiety over his pursuit of an Iran deal, but regional experts said the effort did little to alleviate the region’s unease.
At the close of the summit at the Maryland presidential retreat Thursday evening, Obama pledged America’s “ironclad commitment” to protect the nation’s security, but the sweeping statement was broad and in many ways fell short of expectations.
Gulf experts watching the summit closely said the leaders left feeling pretty much the same way they did when they arrived.
“The people who came to Camp David were polite, as Gulf people always are, and very respectful,” said Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense during the Reagan administration who is a senior fellow at the CNA Corporation. “But at the end of the day, not much was given that hadn’t already been promised.”
The communiqué that the United States released after the summit also offered little salve, they said.
Obama, in an interview with Al-Arabiya Friday, pronounced the summit “very successful” and rejected criticism that the U.S. commitments were too vague and lacked any type of teeth.
“The time was ripe for us to be able to come together as a group, to talk face-to-face about a wide range of these issues, and then to put forward very specific plans in terms of how we can address them,” he said.
“I think it was important for them, at a time when there’s so much chaos in the region, for the [Gulf Cooperation Council] members to hear that the United States is committed, if they are subject to external attack or the threat of attack, to work with the GCC to deter such attacks and to defend the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the GCC countries,” he said.
White House officials Friday touted the training and cooperation commitments between the countries’ special operation forces, greater sharing of information and stronger border security to prevent the flow of foreign fighters and increased enforcement to prevent terrorist financing.
“I would draw you to the specific piece of the joint statement where the leaders pledged to further deepen the United States and Gulf relations on these and other issues in order to build an even stronger, enduring, comprehensive strategic partnership and enhance regional stability and prosperity,” White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz said Friday.
Others point out that there were no promises to provide advanced aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or bunker-busting bombs.
“So in that regard, there wasn’t really much of a breakthrough,” Zakheim told reporters at a conference convened by the Atlantic Council. “The noises on the American side were seemingly positive and the politeness on the Arab side was to be expected, but I just don’t see a tremendous outcome here or a real degree of reassurance.”
Mishaal al Gergawi, the managing director of the Delma Institute, a research center in Abu Dhabi, agreed.
“We have a saying in Arabic, I see you talk and I believe you, I see your actions and I’m less surprised,” he said.
To al Gergawi, the Obama administration’s attempt to try to separate its negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programs from Tehran’s destabilizing activity throughout the region is unsettling to Gulf Cooperation Council states.
They see Iran’s support for the Houthis, who just months ago toppled the government in Yemen, its ongoing backing of Hezbollah terrorist activities and its meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq, all as part of an effort to dominate the region that will only increase once the U.S. and its partners in the nuclear talks lift the sanctions on Iran as part of the nuclear deal, he said.
When the Arabiya reporter pressed the president on why the summit’s communiqué did not address specifically address Iran’s destabilizing threat to the region, Obama argued that in many ways it does.
“In the sense that when we talk about the need for us to address the destabilizing activities and conflicts in the region, some of those are directly related to the concerns surrounding Iran,” he said.
The Gulf states also worry that the U.S. is helping Iran join the international community and benefit economically from it without acting responsibly.
“What we’re really having right now is a kind of slow integration, very backdoorish,” al Gergawi said. “At some point it will be a fait accompli that Iran is pretty much calling the shots on a whole hosts of issues and matters in the region.”
Gulf allies are still smarting over Obama’s failure to enforce his red-line threat against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and they believe the U.S. is sending the wrong signal by engaging with Iran and in essence rewarding Tehran for bad behavior, the experts warn.
The United Arab Emirates, for example, played by international rules when it wanted to pursue a peaceful civilian nuclear energy program. In 2009, it agreed to receive nuclear information and technology expertise from the U.S. in exchange for abiding by stringent inspections monitoring its nuclear activities.
The agreement has become known as the “gold standard” for nuclear cooperation, but critics now argue that the U.S. is sending the wrong message to the UAE and others in the region by engaging with Iran after it failed to abide by international norms and pursued its nuclear weapons program secretly.
“Think of how the UAE feels now?” al Gergawi asks. “… The message it sends to the Gulf is that if you want to have a good relationship with the West, they only respect people who play hard, not people who play by the rules.”
Several critics of the Iranian nuclear negotiations say it will lead to an arms race in the region and point to signals coming from Saudi Arabia that it soon will begin to pursue a nuclear weapon.
“I think the Saudis are very serious,” Zakheim said, noting that he has heard from one Gulf foreign minister that he believes the Saudis have an implicit deal with the Pakistanis to acquire nuclear assistance.
“All options are the on the table,” added al Gergawi, who argues the arms-race mentality is a natural reaction to the Obama administration’s “love affair or fascination” with reintegrating Iran into the international system.
“The U.S. is trying to reassure its allies that it’s not throwing them under the bus, when it really, really feels like that on the ground.”
