The rise of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states as regional powers with international reach raises a new set of challenges for policymaking in the Middle East and North Africa as the region emerges unsteadily from the Arab Spring. Chief among them is the growing evidence that Gulf officials increasingly seem prepared to “go it alone” and act unilaterally or, at best, as a loose regional bloc to secure their interests in transition states. This became clear in the launching of air strikes on Wednesday against Houthi rebels in Yemen by a coalition of Gulf and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. The air strikes are an effort to restore the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose own appointment as president had been engineered by the GCC states in a carefully negotiated transition of power away from ousted former President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012.
Although unconnected with wider strategic realignments, such as the media’s focus on the so-called “pivot to Asia,” U.S. relations with its Gulf partners came under unprecedented strain during the Obama presidency. Beginning with the withdrawal of U.S. support for embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the start of the Arab Spring and continuing with (muted) American criticism over the security response in Bahrain as the ruling family restored order with GCC support, officials in the GCC states began to question U.S. motives as never before. As early as May 2011, influential Saudi foreign policy commentator Nawaf Obaid wrote of a “tectonic” shift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship and lamented that “Washington has shown itself in recent months to be an unwilling and unreliable partner” against the supposed regional threat from Iran. In a sign of the growing autonomy of Saudi and other Gulf states’ policy calculations, Obaid warned that “in areas in which Saudi national security or strategic interests are at stake, the Kingdom will pursue its own agenda.”
As Gulf states’ frustrations with U.S. policy toward the Arab Spring mounted, declaratory and policy pronouncements became shriller. The failure to take military action against the Bashir al-Assad regime in Syria following the August 21, 2013, use of chemical weapons in Ghouta was greeted with dismay in GCC capitals, as were the signs of a rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran following the election of Hasan Rouhani as president in June 2013. Saudi Arabia’s decision that October to turn down one of the 10 rotating, nonpermanent seats on the United Nations Security Council weeks after snubbing the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly revealed the depth of regional alarm at the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Shortly after the November 2013 breakthrough at Geneva that produced an interim agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, former Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud told an audience at the European Council on Foreign Relations (subscriber-only content) that “How we feel is that we weren’t part of the discussions at all, in some cases we were — I would go so far as to say we were lied to, things were hidden from us.”
Although U.S.-Gulf relations improved somewhat with the shared threat from ISIL and cooperation in the military campaign in Iraq and Syria in late 2014, and the U.S. has announced logistical and intelligence support to the air strikes in Yemen, the Gulf states will continue to adopt more assertive and autonomous regional positions in the immediate future. This reflects, in large part, the deep skepticism of Gulf officials toward the Obama administration’s lengthy negotiations with Tehran that began in 2013 and are set to climax in Geneva next week. Since the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979, Saudi Arabia and Iran have emerged as bitter rivals for regional ascendancy in the Gulf, with the Saudis providing large-scale support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Disputes between Riyadh and Tehran, as leading proponents respectively of Sunni and Shia Islam, frequently took on a sectarian dimension that raised tensions sharply across the Middle East, particularly in the decade following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In addition to the Saudi anger at the Iranian nuclear negotiations in Geneva, policymakers in GCC capitals also accused Iran of an escalating intervention in Yemen following the rapid assertion of Houthi rebel control over much of the country. Tensions peaked following the Houthi takeover of the capital, Sana’a, in September 2014 and the ousting of embattled Yemeni President Hadi on the same day in January 2015 as the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. After Hadi escaped to the southern port city of Aden and re-established a base of control in the city, a further Houthi advance earlier this month threatened to overrun the city and entrench Houthi — and, in GCC eyes, Iranian — power in Yemen. This led to Saudi Arabia and nine other Arab states — including every Gulf state bar Oman — to launch air strikes on Houthi strongholds in Yemen under Operation Decisive Storm, as the proxy struggle for influence between Iran and Saudi Arabia escalated into outright regional conflict.
The conflict in Yemen has highlighted the new assertiveness in GCC policies as the Gulf states acted collectively in a bid to secure regional interests. It represents an important evolution in regional security structures, as the locus of decision-making has shifted to (Arab) Gulf capitals rather than external partners in Washington, D.C. Notably, the Yemen operation marked the first use of the joint military command that was created by the GCC in November 2014, alongside joint naval and police forces. It demonstrated further the greater willingness of Gulf officials to take decisive action to project (and protect) their regional interests. Coming just one week before the outcome of the negotiations in Geneva over Iran’s nuclear program, this week’s developments have dramatically raised the stakes in the regional chess game taking place across the Middle East.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Ph.D., is the Baker Institute fellow for the Middle East. His research examines the changing position of Persian Gulf states in the global order, as well as the emergence of longer-term, nonmilitary challenges to regional security. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Middle East Centre and an associate fellow at Chatham House in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter at @Dr_Ulrichsen.