Pages

Search This Blog

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Missile Defense: A Way Forward in the Gulf


Apr 15, 2014 03:00 am | DB Des Roches
Military relations between the United States and her partners in the Arabian Peninsula appear to be at a historic low. Two former Saudi ambassadors to the United States—Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Prince Turki al-Faisal—have explicitly stated the view that the U.S. has been duplicitous over negotiations with Iran and Syria, and accuse the United States of withdrawing critical security support from long-time Gulf allies at a moment of extreme danger.
The Saudis and other partners feel the United States either doesn’t recognize the nature of the Iranian threat, or has decided to swap Arab chess pieces for Persian ones and will walk away from a series of decades-old security commitments.
There is, however, one bright spot in this story—the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman are finally moving towards developing their own integrated missile-defense systems. The United States, which had been urging the GCC countries to develop an integrated system, has paradoxically only seen progress on this elusive goal when the GCC countries decided the United States was a fickle and unreliable ally.
For years, the United States had been trying, with little success, to push and prod the GCC members to develop a networked, layered defense of key strategic assets in their countries as a deterrent to Iranian missile attacks. The GCC countries, however, have a profound internal rivalry which has inhibited all but the most basic levels of defense cooperation.
read morehttp://server1.nationalinterest.org/commentary/missile-defense-way-forward-the-gulf-10248

No comments: