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| Arabia |
| Our Friends in Riyadh |
| 2008-05-14 |
| By KAREN ELLIOTT HOUSE Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Like a longtime business partnership formed in simpler days and now confronting a more aggressively competitive marketplace, the 75-year-old relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. – being celebrated this week by a visit from President George W. Bush – is visibly fraying. President Bush and King Abdullah will, of course, mark the occasion with protestations of friendship and mutual fealty. But there's little doubt that a relationship that's always been based much more on mutual dependencies than on shared values is increasingly being tested – and found wanting – by political forces in both countries. Saudi Arabia no longer is able to exert as much control over oil prices as global demand rises, the dollar falls, regional uncertainties abound, and speculators' predictions of ever higher prices become self-fulfilling. More important, the neighborhood around Saudi Arabia has become much more threatening since the U.S. waged Desert Storm to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and eliminate his threat to the Saudi oil fields. More recent efforts to remove Saddam from Iraq and institute a democracy have proved an agonizing display of America's political-diplomatic, though not necessarily military, impotence. Furthermore, Iran, which Saudi Arabia rightly sees as the major threat to the kingdom these days, continues to cause mischief across the region – in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar – in short all around the kingdom's borders. Yemen, a poor neighbor, poses an ongoing immigration and security problem not unlike that of Mexico for the U.S. Moreover, Saudis fear subversion from Iraq as the U.S. winds down its troop levels and are building a wall. So far the U.S. has been unsuccessful in curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions, or in creating any effective counter to that nation's ability to use Hamas in the Palestinian territories or Hezbollah in Lebanon to humiliate moderates whom the U.S. or Saudi Arabia support. "Iran will become even more aggressive," predicts a Saudi official in an interview here this week. "This coming year will be very nasty for everyone." Nor can the U.S. protect the regime from its own domestic challenges, ranging from religious zealotry to pressure for modernization to rising unemployment and a tidal wave of youth (40% of the population is under 15 years of age) – all of which makes the regime's task of acting only with consensus that much harder. In sum, the mutual needs of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia remain as great as at any time over the past 75 years, but the abilities of both parties to make the partnership mutually productive are diminishing, perhaps irretrievably so. It's difficult to see how this trend can be reversed, regardless who occupies the White House a year from now. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |