CFR Daily News Brief 3/28 Top of the Agenda Obama Seeks to Narrow Rift With Saudi Arabia

Daily News Brief March 28, 2014

Top of the Agenda Obama Seeks to Narrow Rift With Saudi Arabia U.S. president Barack Obama arrives Friday in Riyadh, where he will meet with his Saudi counterpart, King Abdullah, in an effort to smooth bilateral relations. Saudi Arabia has diverged from the United States' strategies in the Middle East, supporting jihadists in Syria, trying to contain rival Iran, and supporting the military-backed government in Egypt. Obama seeks to reassure Saudi Arabia that the United States remains committed to its security as it pursues a nuclear deal with Iran and reduces its regional military presence in the region (NYT). The kingdom faces domestic turbulence as well. King Abdullah, in his early nineties, decreed on Thursday that seventy-nine-year-old Crown Prince Salman will succeed him. Jobs and housing are in short supply for a rapidly growing population, and economists say reforms are needed for the oil-dependent economy (WSJ). Activists renewed calls to defy the ban on female drivers while advocating broader political reforms (AP). Analysis "If the United States manages to secure a viable nuclear deal with Iran, it would reduce the risk of war and create pressures and opportunities to build more constructive relations—anathema to a grand strategy built around regional confrontation with Tehran. Still, the fact that Saudi Arabia has so publicly lambasted the Obama administration suggests that the Saudis don't actually fear abandonment all that much. If they did, they might be more keen to find ways to reassure rather than to confront Washington," writes Marc Lynch for the Washington Post. "Two camps are emerging: one led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which maintains that political Islam is a perilous force that should be confronted; and the other led by Qatar and Turkey's ruling party, which believes in political Islam's ability to transform the region. 'This confrontation has not reached its peak yet,' [Tarek Osman] says. Saudi Arabia's policies might be pursued in the name of stability. But they could well achieve the opposite," writes Roula Khalaf in the Financial Times. "Younger rank-and-file Brothers in Saudi, like those in other Brotherhood franchises outside Egypt, are starting to lose hope in peaceful political change. That frustration can lead to apathy. But it can also lead to violence—and if it does, the Saudi government's decision to declare the group a terrorist organization will have been a self-fulfilling prophecy," writes William McCants in Foreign Affairs.