Angry Planet - Why America Can't Quit Saudi Arabia

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

The alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia helped define America’s role in the Middle East after World War II. Lately, Saudi Arabia has tested the limits of that relationship. This week on War College, Shadi Hamid walks us through the complicated alliance and what it means for the world.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. First of all, there are allies, but we have the misfortune of having, I would say, somewhat bad, unreliable, and counterproductive allies who don't share necessarily our interests and almost certainly don't share our values. So do we really want our, Arab allies to be jumping in and kind of doing and doing whatever they like, when that can be contrary to American national security interests. I mean, that's number one. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt.

Saudi Arabia is one of America's oldest and most important allies. since the end of World War II, America and the Kingdom have fostered an alliance that shaped the Middle East. That relationship has always been strange and strained, but it took a huge blow after Saudi Arabia assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the wake of the killing, people began asking questions about the alliance, and Saudi Arabia's young and allegedly progressive new leader Muhammad bin Salman, or MBS. So who is MBS? What's so troubling about Saudi Arabia, and why is it so important to you a strategy in the Middle East. Here to help us untangle all of this is Shadi Hamid. Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Islamic exceptionalism,

how the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Matthew. Thanks for having me. All right, so let's get some basic stuff out of the way. How did America and Saudi Arabia come to be such close friends? Yeah, so we have to go back quite a while for that. And one of the key moments was when King Abdulaziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia, met with FDR. This was in February, 1945 on the USS Quincy. And according to accounts that we have of their meeting, they really got along and they developed a strong relationship. And that was really aware this implicit and sometimes explicit bargain about how Saudi Arabia would supply oil and in return their security would be in some sense guaranteed by the U.S.

and the U.S. would strongly support the House of the House of Saad. So really ever since then, that has been the bargain and that has held, even though, as we can talk about, oil has become less important. decades, that was really the anchor of the U.S.-S.-Saudi relationship. And it is still important for world markets, even if for the U.S., Saudi oil is less important today because of the Shale revolution and other domestic changes. Oil for a very long time was very important to this relationship, and it no longer is. Right?

So how has that changed things? Yeah, so it's interesting that if you look at the recent debate after Khashoggi's assassination and it's become one of the top, probably the top foreign policy issue that we've been debating in Washington. Oil has not come up much in those discussions and even Donald Trump himself has not brought up oil. And as we know, Trump does sometimes like to talk about taking people's oil and things like that. And that does reflect something quite a serious change. and the very way we talk about Saudi Arabia has shifted, where that isn't what we're obsessed about,

that isn't what we're preoccupied with. And now the question of human rights and whether we're comfortable with the government that is acting so recklessly abroad, and the Saudi intervention in Yemen is probably the major foreign policy concern that we have now vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia I think for other countries, so for example, certain European countries, Japan, others, the question of Saudi oil does loom pretty large, and we're affected indirectly because if our allies are affected by shifts in Saudi oil production, then we will because it affects a broader oil market.

But the conversation, I think, has moved on from that. All right. So at this point, what is each side getting out of this arrangement? What are the strategic, what's the strategic importance of, of, of this relationship? So I think that this is where many of us disagree with each other on how important it is, and I've gotten some of those debates myself. what does Saudi Arabia really offered to the U.S. specifically? Now, they are, they are and have been a close Arab ally. And one of the major things they contribute is on counterterrorism cooperation, fighting al-Qaeda, countering ISIS, countering extremism more generally, or at least that's the idea. So that does matter. and I don't want to dismiss that.

Counterterrorism cooperation will always be important with certain Arab allies, no matter how bad those allies are or unreliable, we still have to work with them, right? For the Trump administration in particular, an important component is this new Saudi Arabia, and by new Saudi Arabia here, I mean Saudi Arabia under the young crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, how they have been trying to, to mend relations with Israel. And there has been talk about, you know, secret meetings and different channels that the Saudis have been involved in. And also the fact that Saudi Arabia did not really speak out when the U.S. moved its embassy.

And you would have thought that Saudi Arabia as a supposed leader in the Muslim world and the custodian of the two holy mosques and Mecca and Medina would take a strong stand on questions surrounding Jerusalem. but to Trump's relief, and this is what one thing Trump likes a lot about Muhammad bin Salman, is that he doesn't seem to care much about the Palestinian cause, at least relative to previous Saudi rulers. So that's one thing that we can kind of add to the list, at least from the standpoint of the Trump administration. And also a big thing, too, is countering Iranian influence in the region. But then we can have this debate about whether Muhammad bin Salman is actually any good at that.

And I would argue that Iran has benefited from Muhammad bin Salman's overreach and overstepping and reckless foreign policy, whether that's in Yemen or whether the bungling of the response to the Khashoggi assassination, and the fact that Saudi Arabia hasn't really even done a good job of pretending it's seen. senior leaders weren't involved. And that's really hurt Saudi Arabia in the court of international opinion. And you can only imagine the Iranians kind of standing afar and minding their own business and not saying too much about it because they know they benefit from this. The Yemen war has been very destructive.

It's led to one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes really in recent decades. And that has given Iran an opening as well in terms of supporting the Houthi there and really sucking the Saudis into a quagmire. I mean, the Saudis spend billions and billions of dollars monthly on the Yemen War with little to show for it. Why is it so important to them? Why are they stuck there? That is a good question.

And I think many of us are asking ourselves why they are so intent on prosecuting this war and what seems to be a counterproductive way. But if we look at Yemen more generally, why the Saudis care about Yemen and the Houthi challenge. So the Houthis are an insurgent group that were able to take over the capital, and they control a big chunk of the country. So it's understandable that the Saudis don't want a hostile power controlling a major capital along their border. So that's certainly understandable, but they're not fighting the Houthis in an effective way. And in Yemen more generally, there are concerns about al-Qaeda having pockets of control and influence,

and any time you have a civil war that rages on for years, that does provide an opening for extremist groups, and not just al-Qaeda, but also elements associated with the Islamic State or ISIS, gaining ground. So I think that it is a real national security concern, but then it becomes a question of it does matter, but is Saudi Arabia actually addressing this in a productive way? And this war has been going on for several years now, and at some point you have to say, hey, Saudi allies, what do you have to show for this? Is there strategy working? and I think that more and more people in Washington, including in the U.S. Congress, are coming to the conclusion that this is not working. Well, and that discussion is being had amid, I want to be clear for the audience that Saudi Arabia is prosecuting that war largely with weapons it's purchased from the United States and that U.S. Special Operations Forces have deployed in Yemen, and there have been discussions about an expanded,

American military presence there? Yeah, so, well, it is a Saudi-led coalition. The Saudis are the most powerful country in this coalition. The United Arab Emirates are also involved, although they have a somewhat different focus in terms of military operations in Yemen.

But when it comes to U.S. military support, you're exactly right that without current levels of U.S. military support, the Saudis would not be able to prosecute this war. So in other words, if the U.S. decided, let's say, tomorrow morning to not just stop refueling, and there is already moves to limit our refueling support, but more broadly, spare parts, logistical support, military expertise that we offer to the Saudi military, if we decided to halt providing equipment,

providing that level of support, spare parts, at some point the Saudi army would not be able to really function because they have no way to substitute that level of military support that we offer and things like spare parts and logistical support don't get a lot of attention, but they are actually fundamental to running a war. And if we look at the Saudi Air Force in particular, it's extremely dependent on U.S. military provision. So if there was theoretically a complete and total halt of certain kinds of military provisions, I'm going to be very hard for the Saudis to continue. So that is a major point of leverage. And that's why I think, you know many of us myself included have argued that there is tremendous leverage that the U.S. can use if it really wanted to.

But that leverage, so the idea there would be that this leverage would be used to pressure the Saudis to change the way they're prosecuting this war and to also pressure them to focus on the negotiating table. But this isn't just about erasing or eliminating the Houthis, that there has to be. some kind of political solution. And that means sitting down with the Houthis and trying to figure out what that solution might be. But they can't expect to win this and have the Houthis not have any role in Yemen. That's just not realistic. Do you think it's realistic to expect that America will use that leverage to force Saudi Arabia to the table? Well, so far, the Trump administration and the Republican Congress has been quite resistant to any significant changes, but that will presumably shift a little bit when we have a Democratic House in the new year.

And that is going to be the real test. I mean, how much of a focus will this be for Democrats in Congress? They are already signaling that this is going to be a key priority for them in terms of challenging Trump's foreign policy and challenging Trump's a very Saudi-dependent Middle East strategy. Because one thing we have to remember here is that Trump has really made Saudi Arabia the linchpin of his reorientation of U.S. Middle East policy. And Democrats are obviously not happy about that. And anything that they see as too closely tied to the Trump administration is something that they're going to want to challenge. And I think it's also a mistake for the Saudis to become so closely tied to Trump specifically as an individual and so closely tied to his son-in-law advisor, Jared Kushner, then now if you want to display your anti-Trump credentials, one way of doing that is saying that you're not down with Trump.

Trump's Saudi policy. Right, but Saudi Arabia has always been pretty central to American foreign policy in the region, right? I mean, it's not like the Bushes or the Clintons or Obama completely, you know, put them out into the cold. It's always been a very important part of the region. And I'm wondering, big picture, how much do you think the story of the Middle East right now is a story of Saudi Arabia and Iraq? on fighting proxy wars and going after each other with soft power? Yeah, so I think that one major shift that has contributed to a lot of this proxy warfare is not just about the Trump administration, but also the Obama administration,

that you have this idea that Obama, I think, really saw essential to his approach, where he wanted to at least to some degree, and we've disagreed. to what degree exactly, but to disengage from the Middle East or to not be as centrally involved in every major Middle Eastern conflict. And to say to our Arab allies that you can't depend on us for everything. And you have to take responsibility for your own region and you have to step up to the plate. So the idea there being we step back and you step in. And this sounds nice in theory, but in practice it has not turned out very well because who are the people who step into the vacuum? First of all, there are allies, but we have the misfortune of having, I would say, somewhat bad, unreliable and counterproductive allies who don't share necessarily our interests and almost certainly don't share our values.

So do we really want our Arab allies to be jumping in and kind of doing and doing whatever they like when that can be contrary to American national security interests? I mean, that's number one. But also it means that our adversaries such as Iran have also taken advantage of this vacuum and really inserted themselves in a number of different conflicts. And like I mentioned earlier, Saudi Arabia has not been that effective encountering. Iran. So Iran finds itself not necessarily in a dominant position, but certainly in a strong position. And so we're not in a good place now. And sectarianism is a part of that, is a part of that story where both countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, use religion to various degrees and to rally up domestic support and to kind of position themselves against the other. And

obviously here we're talking about Saudi Arabia as a major Sunni power and Iran as the preeminent Shia power and Shia Islamist power. And what's interesting about both of these countries is that they're both Islamist regimes. And because Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, has tried to present Saudi Arabia as reforming and changing, we sometimes forget that Saudi Arabia is still one of the more rigidly Islamist countries in the region. That's a perfect pivot to the next thing I wanted to talk about. You know, as you and I were kind of doing, discussing what exactly we're going to talk about this episode. Brookings published a report that you co-authored titled Islam as Statecraft,

how governments use religion and foreign policy. It's a deep dive into the way primarily Iran and Saudi Arabia project power. or soft power in the region through religion. And I want to kind of jump into that. And my first question is, can you explain to us what Wahhabism is and why it specifically is important to Saudi Arabia and what part it plays in this story? Yeah, sure.

So, you know, in this report, which I co-authored with my colleague, Peter Mandiville, we really tried to question this narrative that you hear a lot of the time about how Saudi Arabia has been spreading Wahhabism And Wahhabism is not actually a term that Wahhabis themselves used because it's pejorative. But basically it's an ultra-conservative, Salafi interpretation of Islam. And Saudi Arabia has been perceived as destroying local cultures in various parts of the world, whether in West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Kosovo, Albania, you name it. and they're using their petrodollars to support this very austere version of Islam.

And some of that is certainly true, but it's a lot more complicated. So what we try to do in the report is, you know, how much of this is actually an accurate perception. But certainly Saudi Arabia does use Islam more broadly in various ways. And it hasn't always been this very strict, narrow, quote-unquote, Wahhabi version of Islam. I mean, sometimes Saudi Arabia, not now, but in previous decades, has worked hand in hand with more Muslim Brotherhood inspired organizations. And this was especially the case when Saudi Arabia was trying to counter the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism in the 60s and 70s. and it saw leftism as its major competitor. And the Brotherhood, which is one of the world's oldest Islamist movements,

even though Saudi Arabia's version of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhoods is different, they sometimes would work in common cause to counter what they saw as this more atheistic socialist socialism, which is now very weak in the Middle East, but at one point was seen as an ascendant. So we try to go into some of those shifts over time and how Saudi Arabia has evolved. And since the Arab Spring, we see a shift in that Saudi Arabia has moved very strongly against Muslim Brotherhood interpretations of Islam

because it's come to see the Muslim Brotherhood and what it represents as a threat to the legitimacy of the monarchy, and in part because the Muslim Brotherhood is the only well-organized regional force that draws on its own forms of Islamic legitimacy. And that's a threat to Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia very much still sees itself as representing Islam. And as I mentioned earlier, the custodian of the two holy mosques, the birthplace of Islam, so on and so forth. So to see another force, another organization that has transnational influence, challenging it with a competing understanding of Islam, the Saudis are never going to be okay with that. And we saw the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood with the Arab Spring, obviously. So that's why it really came to the four as a major concern for the Saudi royal family.

Well, and that's another, that kind of touches on another thing, I think is important. here. It's not as if the crown is explicitly saying, build all these madrasas and all these different countries, right? It's a little bit more complicated than that. It's not so top down, right? Exactly. So Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian government, but it's not a unitary actor. I mean, it's become more unitary under Muhammad bin Salman as he tries to consolidate power. But if we look at Saudi Arabia historically, we see really the rule of a royal family and not necessarily one individual who controls everything. And we're talking about thousands of princes, and this is a big family.

And a lot of them do have have had their own fiefdoms of influence and power. And what we see are these Saudi-linked organizations such as the World Assembly of Muslim youth, the Muslim World League, that have ties to members of the Saudi royal family, but they still operate with some degree of independence. So we can't always say that, oh, Saudi Arabia is, so when we say Saudi Arabia is spreading Wahhabism or spreading whatever, what do we mean by Saudi Arabia? Are we talking about the royal family? Are we talking about certain elements of the royal family?

are we talking about the government and the bureaucracy? Are we talking about organizations that are linked to the government? And what we see is a much more complex picture. And it doesn't lend itself, I think, to these over-the-top, simplistic descriptions of the bad Saudi Wahhabis are just going around and spreading this. And I think that's not the most useful criticism of Saudi Arabia. And I'm also glad to see that we're moving a little bit away from that in terms of the public discourse and that it's not all about the Wahhabi, the Wahhabi boogeyman, if that makes sense.

No, it does. And I think that's another important point that you talk about in this paper, this report, that another part of the narrative has kind of always been that Wahhabism leads directly to radical, violent, Islam, right? Leads directly to Islamism. And it's a little bit more complicated than that. Exactly. So in some countries, the influence of Wahhabi ideas has been negative and counterproductive. So that's certainly the case. But again, you know, it's probably overstated because Islamism, if we're talking about Islamism, and here I define Islamism as or Islamist group. as those who believe that Islam and Islamic law should play a central role in public life, there's this idea that Islamism wouldn't evolve in certain countries or it wouldn't entrench itself unless you had bad foreigners exporting it.

And the presumption here is that there are these more pristine pluralistic versions of Islam that have always been there in places like Senegal, other parts of Africa, or Indonesia, Malaysia. and it's only because of the bad Saudis that we see Islamism and these more conservative interpretations of Islam gaining ground. And I would question that simply because Islamism has an attraction to people and in a kind of natural and organic way. We have seen an Islamic revival that has happened throughout the Muslim majority world since the 1970s.

and we can't just say that that's because of an influx of foreign money. Some of it is because ordinary Indonesians or Malaysians or whoever else find aspects of Islamism compelling. And I think sometimes when we as Westerners from a more secular background look at this, we think that Islamism is so irrational or unnatural that we have to find an external cause to explain it, almost as if we can take the power of religious ideas seriously enough and to say, hey, maybe we don't have to like it, but some of these ideas are appealing to people and speak to people's concerns in a powerful way. And I think that is what we've seen in large parts of the Muslim world,

and it's not just or even primarily because of Saudi influence. And this goes back to the kind of contrast I drew earlier between the more Saudi-supported versions of Salafism or ultra-conservative Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood School of Thought. And in many countries, the Muslim Brotherhood has been influential. And you can't tie that to Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has not been the main supporter of Muslim Brotherhood style ideas. And oftentimes those ideas come from local groups and are somewhat indigenous. Well, I think it also points to something we talked about the last time you were on the show, that people in the West forget or don't really understand because we live in a different kind of cultural tradition that Islam is explicitly and always has been explicitly political, right?

Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious leader. And so it's not as simple as you can't separate them so easily, right? Yeah, and so this is an argument I made in my previous book, which was called Islamic exceptionalism. And, you know, as you suggest, I make the argument that Islam is different in this important way and that it does, it has had an exceptional relationship to law, politics, and governance. And, you know, Islam has proven to be more resistant to secularization. And I don't see that changing any time soon. And we can go back, as you mentioned, to the founding moment of Islam and the prophetic model, where Prophet Muhammad wasn't just a man of God or a cleric or a theologian or a prophet.

He was also a politician in a way that, say, Jesus was not ahead of state. Jesus was a dissident against a reigning state. So in that sense, Islam evolves from the very beginning a different way, and it's harder to disentangle the religious and the political. Oftentimes, if you spend time in the Middle East or in South and Southeast Asia, and you ask people, why do you do what you do? What's your motivation? Are you motivated by religion or politics?

And my own experience has been that people sometimes have trouble answering that question because where does the religious end and the political begin or vice versa? And I think that's really important to understand. And one argument that Peter and I make in the Brookings report is that almost every major Muslim country uses Islam and its foreign policy, even the more secularly oriented countries that we think are more progressive and broad-minded and pluralistic, they still try to deploy Islam for their own political ends. Why? Because Islam is powerful, because Islam resonates with people. It's an effective way of getting your message. So even if you're a leader in a country

and you don't actually believe that much in what you're saying and it's somewhat cynical, you're still going to think Islam is quite important because it's effective. All right. Let's swing this back around to Saudi Arabia before we exit, if you don't mind. And I'll ask the hack question. What do you see, what do you think the future holds for the American Saudi relationship? So I think it's going to be hard to go back to the way things were before. some of the outrage over Keshoggi's murder will dissipate. It's already dissipating to some extent as people move on to other issues. And we recently just had the U.S. midterms and so on.

But I think that something like this murder, this assassination of a dissident, it sears itself in your memory. And it's not easy to forget. Also, it's such an outrageous, bizarre story. It sounds like something out of a spy novel. So it's not, and it's really connected with people. And even ordinary Americans who follow the news, when you hear about something like this, you pay attention, right? So I don't think that you can ever undo the effects of this PR disaster for the Saudis. And I think also, you know, as I mentioned, if Democrats continue to make inroads and elections, including in 2020 in the presidential election, I think the question of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, maybe will really be on the table as one of the major points of concern.

I mean, Bernie Sanders has made that into one of his big foreign policy issues, for example. That said, for people who are calling for an end to the U.S.-S.-S.-Saudi relationship, you know, for better or worse, that's not realistic. So I think what we're talking about is a situation where we'll still work with the Saudis. They'll still be an ally. but then it becomes a question of how much we want to use our leverage to pressure them to change their behavior. And this is a really important question because Muhammad bin Salman stands to be in power for decades and decades to come. I mean, he's younger than I am. He's 33.

So we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to be dealing with someone who has no constraints on his behavior, who acts recklessly, who acts contrously, who acts contraband? to U.S. national security interest for, let's say, 50 years. So I think it's a really crucial question for U.S. officials to think in that more long-term sense. That's not to say that MBS is going to disappear from the scene or that he's going to be, you know, pushed aside by his family members. There may be some royal palace intrigue in the future, but even if MBS stays secure in his position as the crown prince and the heir apparent, I think. think there are still ways to try to constrain his behavior by sending a message that the U.S. does have, I hate to use this term, but red lines. And there are certain things that we're not

going to be comfortable with. And that message has to be sent to Muhammad bin Salman if he wants to work with the U.S. Shadi Hamid, thank you so much for coming onto War College and walking us through all this. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. That's it for War College. This week. Thank you so much for tuning in. War College is me. Matthew Galt, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please rate us on iTunes and leave a comment. It helps other people find the show. We'll see you next week.

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