By Scott Ritter
April 24, 2023:
Information Clearing House --
Consortium News " --
While
the world continues to come to grips with the reality — and consequences — of
the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Araba and Iran, another
diplomatic coup is unfolding in the Middle East.
This one is orchestrated by the Russians. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal
bin Farhan flew to Damascus last week, where he met Syrian President Bashar
Assad. This visit followed that of Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad earlier
this month to Riyadh.
The two countries severed diplomatic relations in 2012 at the beginning of a
Syrian civil conflict that saw Saudi Arabia throwing its money behind
anti-regime fighters seeking to remove Assad from power.
The startling diplomatic about face is part of a new Saudi Arabian foreign
policy, embodied in its historic new relationship with Iran, which seeks to
engender regional stability through conflict resolution instead of
military-brokered containment.
As
the
Saudi Foreign Ministry noted on bin
Farhan’s visit to Damascus, the Saudi goal is “to reach a political solution to
the Syrian crisis that would end all its repercussions and preserve Syria’s
unity, security, stability, and Arab identity and restore it to its Arab
surroundings.”
Dramatic Outbreak of Diplomacy
The dramatic outbreak of diplomacy between Riyadh and Damascus is the by-product
of Russia’s growing influence in Middle Eastern affairs and is one of the
clearest signals yet of the declining role of the United States, whose military
and diplomatic posture in the region has greatly diminished over the course of
the past few years.
Russia has long-standing ties with the Syrian government. In 2015, its
intervention during Syria’s civil conflict upheld the Assad government, allowing
it to regain the initiative against the U.S.-and Saudi-backed opposition.
Russia’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, however, was more complex, with the
Saudis having strategically aligned themselves with U.S. foreign and national
security objectives in the Middle East and in global energy policies.
But that dynamic changed after October 2018, when Saudi security agents, alleged
to have been working under the direct orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin
Salman,
murdered Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Saudis took umbrage at the U.S. outcry at the crime, especially when
then-presidential candidate Joe Biden threatened the crown prince, popularly
known as MbS, with isolation and punishment.
“We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the
pariah that they are,”
Biden said during a televised debate in November 2019,
adding that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present
government in Saudi Arabia.”
Biden was later to regret those words when, in July 2022, he was compelled to
fly to Saudi Arabia and ask MbS to increase oil production to lower energy costs
that had skyrocketed because of the consequences of U.S.-led efforts to sanction
Russian oil and gas in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in
February 2022.
While MbS received Biden, the U.S. did not get the results it wanted from the
meeting for reasons that went beyond poor personal chemistry between MbS and
Biden. By then, both Saudi Arabia and Russia recognized that, as major oil
producers, their interests were not well served by competing in a market
dominated by U.S.-driven angst.
This realization matured in the spring of 2020 in the aftermath
of an “oil war” between the two nations
which saw Saudi Arabia precipitously lower the price of oil by overproducing,
only to be matched by Russia.
The Saudi-Russian oil war ended because of negotiations
brokered by then-President Donald Trump and
for a while the world was compelled to live in an environment where the top
three oil producers — the U.S., Russia and Saudi Arabia — openly colluded on
global production quotas.
But then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S.-led energy sanctions and the
recognition by both Russia and Saudi Arabia that the U.S. was not a stable
partner when it came to managing the most important economic resource of their
nations — energy.
US-Saudi Relations Strained
As
Russia-Saudi bonds grew stronger based upon shared goals and objectives, the
strain between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. likewise grew, driven by the total
disconnect that existed between the Biden administration and MbS over Middle
East policy.
Saudi Arabia has embarked on an ambitious project,
Vision 2030,
which seeks to transition the oil-rich kingdom away from its current
over-reliance on energy production to a more diversified economy based upon
modern technologies and non-energy economic initiatives.
A
key prerequisite for this vision is for Saudi Arabia to become a force of
connectivity in the region and the world — something that U.S.-driven policies
promoting regional instability and war made impossible. The Biden administration
had doubled down on a policy in which Saudi Arabia served as the keystone in
confronting Iran along an arc of crisis stretching from Lebanon, through Syria
and Iraq; and into Yemen.
Saudi Arabia confronted the reality that it could not win its war in Yemen
(ongoing since 2014), and that the U.S.-led destabilization efforts in Lebanon,
Syria and Iraq were floundering. With its own economic diversification goal in
mind, it opted to work with Russia to engender the kind of stability needed for
energy-driven economies to flourish.
Russia quietly organized talks with both Saudi and Syrian officials and
diplomats, culminating with the March 2023 visit of President Assad to Moscow,
where the issue of a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia was finalized.
Work remains to be done, however, as Saudi Arabia’s effort to bring Syria back
into the ranks of the Arab League faces resistance from staunch U.S. allies
Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. But the fact is that, thanks to Russian and Chinese
diplomacy, peace, not war, is breaking out all over in the Middle East. Bringing
Syria in from the cold is simply the most recent manifestation of the phenomena.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps
intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms
control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq
overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is
Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
