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Monday, March 28, 2016
Clinton, Trump, and Riyadh
How Saudi Arabia Sees the U.S. Presidential Election
Fahad Nazer
FAHAD NAZER is a Political Analyst at JTG, Inc. and a Non-Resident Fellow at The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
The White House recently announced that U.S. President Barack Obama [1] will visit Saudi Arabia [2] in
April as part of an overseas trip, with additional stops in Germany and
the United Kingdom. The statement came as no surprise; the United
States and the countries that constitute the Gulf Cooperation
Council—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab
Emirates—had agreed to convene sometime this year [3] after
their Camp David summit last May, during which they issued a joint
statement reaffirming the United States’ commitment to the Gulf’s
security.The visit does come at an awkward time, however. In the wake of recent statements by Obama and by the candidates in the U.S. presidential primaries, Washington’s commitment to the region is under increasing scrutiny. In a March article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic [4], Obama is quoted as criticizing Saudi Arabia’s foreign and domestic policies and questioning whether Arabia is still a friend of the United States. The article elicited an overwhelmingly negative response from Saudis on social and traditional media.
The most noteworthy reaction thus far has been that of Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence for almost 30 years and was ambassador to both the United States and the United Kingdom. In a scathing opinion piece in the English-language daily Arab News, Faisal strongly criticized the president’s assessment of the efficacy of U.S.-Saudi relations, taking particular issue with Obama’s apparent inclusion of Saudi Arabia on a list of allies that he characterized as “free-riders [5].”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/saudi-arabia/2016-03-28/clinton-trump-and-riyadh
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