Analysts rushed to comment that the enlargement is anti-democratic and China-centric; however, a close look at the enlargement shows that the enlargement is not only about China but more of a consensus of the five powers, including, more importantly, India and Russia in addition to China. Of course, China is the most potent power in the bloc and might increase its influence over time. However, the current expansion shows that none of these countries are states that India and Russia reject, as they include Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two powers that have warm relations with India and an increasingly close relationship with Russia. Moreover, Brazil was already willing to accept Argentina as a member of BRICS in case it would help the neighbouring country in its quest for foreign reserves.

Indeed, these analysts ignore the warm relations between India and the two Gulf states, underestimate the tension between China and India, and tend to show the current members of BRICS under great Chinese influence, which is not necessarily true as India and China have significant issues, including but not limited to border crises. Otherwise, China President Xi Jinping’s meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the BRICS Summit in South Africa would not present a significant diplomatic incident.. The tension worsened in 2020 and cost the lives of 20 Indian soldiers.

Is BRICS+ the new G7?

In its current form, BRICS represents around 40.72 percent of the world population; if the new members accept the offer, the representation will rise to 45.95 percent, a significant rate as China and India’s share is around 35.48 percent. Similarly, the current GDP share of the BRICS is around 25.77 percent, while the expansion would bring it to around 28.99 percent, another significant increase as 17.86 percent of the current club’s GDP comes from China alone. On the other hand, the G7 represents around 27 percent of the world’s GDP and around 10 percent of the world’s population.

BRICS has long been considered an alternative initiative to the Western system as it includes Russia and China as leading powers, despite its loose institutionalization. One of the BRICS targets is to de-dollarise trade and bypass US sanctions on global trade. Indeed, BRICS created a development bank to encourage trade in local currencies and support developmental projects, an alternative to the Western-centric IMF and World Bank.

While BRICS, in its current form, does not challenge UN-based institutions, it can be considered an alternative to the G20 or G7, if not a rival. The G20, too, is not a very effective platform but a place where world leaders discuss significant issues and attempt to form a global agenda. Indeed, G20 meetings have recently been defined as “empty talks” by analysts.

China and the Gulf

While none of the new members states that China would reject their membership, showing their membership as pure Chinese influence is inherently wrong as they include two members of the GCC with India who already share close ties. The close ties between India and the GCC can be seen from the G20, too, as India invited the UAE and Oman as this year’s G20 guests, in addition to Saudi Arabia, a permanent member of the G20.

While India is particularly close to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because of the number of expatriates in the Gulf, China is interested in these states for more strategic reasons. China made headlines in May when it brokered a normalisation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, inviting Iran and its regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the UAE together to the bloc is interesting as the bloc does not want to include only the “isolated” countries from the Western system, preventing it from being a platform of excluded powers.

Even though the existence of Russia and China and their influence in the bloc signal anti-Americanism, BRICS, even in its 11-member form, is not inherently anti-American. Indeed, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stated, “We do not want to be a counterpoint to the G7, G20, or the United States.” This is an important message for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as they do not want to exclude themselves from the American security umbrella but also want to diversify their security and strategic importance to gain leverage against the US. Thus, by joining this kind of organisation, they hit two birds with one stone.

Not long ago, in 2022, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were granted dialogue partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an even bigger anti-Western organisation than the BRICS. Iran was granted full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Council in 2023. Therefore, despite Iran and its Gulf rival Saudi Arabia and the UAE not sharing warm relations and having situated themselves on different poles, if Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s role is upgraded to full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Council and Saudi Arabia accepts BRICS offers, these two non-Western organisations would be platforms where they can have dialogue and use it as leverage with the West. As these two clubs will be new platforms where non-Western states have leadership, they can offer more equal negotiations between Iran and its Gulf neighbours, as none would have better privileges over others.

Of course, considering the new members, including the closest US MENA partners such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, one wonders if they are really asking for an alternative to US hegemony. In its 11-state form, the new bloc can benefit the organisation and the new members, including those directly linked to the US security umbrella. While Russia and China attempt to counterbalance the US-based Western system, most of the new members, most importantly in our case, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, attempt to diversify their geopolitical engagements with the rest of the world while still giving greater attention to the US and the West. The greater attention paid to the US and the West can be seen from their reactions to the offer, particularly Saudi Arabia’s. While UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed published a statement showing his appreciation of the offer, Saudi Arabia is yet to accept the offer and stated it will study the deal and give an appropriate decision,” a message to its Western allies that their priorities are still the West and also could be a bit disappointed by the offer to Iran too.

In short, considering the share of China and India’s oil and gas exports from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with India’s warm relations with these states, the invitation of these two states can be considered Indian-influenced as much as Chinese. Moreover, considering South Africa’s relations with Ethiopia and Brazil’s relations with Argentina, one can say BRICS’s enlargement is not solely Chinese dictation but more of a common ground for all members.

China’s top diplomat and current foreign minister Wang Yi arranged an unexpected Saudi-Iran peace agreement in March this year between Riyadh’s mercurial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud and Iran’s aging Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were all invited (and agreed) to join the emerging markets BRICS grouping of non-Western countries, with their membership to come into effect on January 1, 2024. China is overhauling President Xi’s ambitious Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) global infrastructure development programme and Beijing is seeking project funding from rich Muslim countries. Beijing therefore pushed the Iran-Saudi peace deal and supported Saudi Arabia’s application to join the BRICS to help it gain access to Saudi backing for the BRI. Another reason for growing Gulf-China ties is Beijing’s intensifying technological competition with Washington.

Growing US-China technology competition

The US is stepping up its efforts to contain China’s geopolitical and technological development in East Asia and outside it. In October 2022, Washington launched controls intended to prevent China from acquiring certain categories of semiconductor chips made with US equipment anywhere in the world, partially to prevent Beijing from using them to develop advanced new artificial intelligence systems. The US has since escalated these export restrictions on semiconductor chips to unspecified Middle Eastern countries, according to US multinational technology firm Nvidia late last month.

Meanwhile, a source at Nvidia’s commercial rival Advanced Micro Devices  told media it had also received an official letter from the US government containing similar restrictions. The chips concerned were high-powered models used to improve machine-learning tasks for artificial intelligence programmes like ChatGPT.  Gulf Arab states have been increasingly seeking to import advanced versions of these to create their own artificial intelligence models, but their growing technoscientific ties to China are a source of rising US unease.

China-US tensions were recently raised further following US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s recent combative trip to China, during which the Commerce Secretary explicitly said the US would remain hardline in its approach to limiting Chinese access to advanced technologies. Beijing didn’t pull any punches either, with US-blacklisted telecommunications company Huawei releasing its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone during Raimondo’s visit. Huawei’s smartphone business was crushed by US technology export restrictions in 2019 and the new handset showcases the firm’s partial evasion of these as well as its intension to reestablish itself in the sector.

 On China’s tightly controlled internet Chinese citizens posted memes turning Raimondo into a brand ambassador for Huawei; a play on her department’s role in enforcing technology restrictions on Chinese firms like Huawei or Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), the partially state-owned Chinese company which allegedly built the semiconductor chip powering Huawei’s homemade phone. In response, US lawmakers have called for investigations to see whether SMIC broke US sanctions and supplied components to Huawei, while South Korean firm SK Hynix started a probe after discovering parts it manufactured were present inside Huawei’s new handsets.

US Fears About China-Middle Eastern Technological Cooperation

President Biden has made containing China’s technological rise — and any subsequent global spread of Chinese technologies, standards and norms about cyberspace — a central part of his administration’s foreign policy. At the same time Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as some of the biggest customers of US chip firms like Intel and Nvidia, the latter of whose high-powered products are much sought-after for their use in artificial intelligence research. The UAE has bought thousands of US semiconductor chips for a homegrown Arabic artificial intelligence model called Falcon, made by Abu Dhabi’s Technological Innovation Institute.

Meanwhile Saudi Arabia is spending $120 million to buy these to build its own ChatGPT-style large language model at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, despite using Chinese researchers. Gulf state leaders want to own and control artificial intelligence developments within their own countries, while using Chinese and US know-how to create their own local systems. There is also an element of Arab countries’ balancing the two sides to avoid dependency upon either one of them; Riyadh has allowed Huawei’s cloud arm to create a data centre in Saudi Arabia to support government services and artificial intelligence language models in Arabic despite using US-made chips to train them.

Gulf governments’ laxer approach to China likely lies behind August’s US imposition of restrictions on top artificial intelligence chips being exported unnamed Middle Eastern countries; such deliveries are unlikely to be going to already-hostile states like Iran. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s decision to rely on Chinese researchers to help Riyadh build its artificial intelligence models is especially likely to have angered President Biden, who personally dislikes the de facto Saudi leader, a sentiment the volatile crown prince reportedly returns.

Beijing will be intensely interested in the chance to send researchers to Saudi Arabia study US chip technologies so it can parallel engineer its own devices when they return home. Saudi Arabia and potentially other Gulf states therefore represent a weak spot in the global technological blockade President Biden is attempting to erect around China’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence sectors. Despite their diplomatic importance to the US, the Gulf states could therefore find their early enthusiasm for artificial intelligence hitting similar curbs to China’s if they continue to weaken US efforts to contain China’s technological rise.

At the end of November 2022, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that the “golden era” between Great Britain and China was over. China may not have been too bothered by this news however, and has been busy making influential friends elsewhere.

In early December, Chinese president Xi Jinping met with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a group made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – to discuss trade and investment. Also on the agenda were talks on forging closer political ties and a deeper security relationship.

This summit in Saudi Arabia was the latest step in what our research shows is an increasingly close relationship between China and the Gulf states. Economic ties have been growing consistently for several decades (largely at the expense of trade with the US and the EU) and are specifically suited to their respective needs.

Simply put, China needs oil, while the Gulf needs to import manufactured goods including household items, textiles, electrical products and cars.

China’s pronounced growth in recent decades has been especially significant for the oil rich Gulf state economies. Between 1980 and 2019, their exports to China grew at an annual rate of 17.1%. In 2021, 40% of China’s crude oil imports came from the Gulf – more than any other country or regional group, with 17% from Saudi Arabia alone.

And the oil will likely continue to flow in China’s direction. In 2009, it was predicted that China would require 14 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. In fact, China reached that figure in 2019 and is expected to need at least 17 million barrels per day by 2040. At the same time, the US became a net oil exporter in 2019 and thus achieved a longstanding foreign policy goal: to overcome its dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels.

China has benefited from increasing demand for its manufactured products, with exports to the Gulf growing at an annual rate of 11.7% over the last decade. It overtook the US in 2008 and then the EU in 2020 to become the Gulf’s most important source of imports.

These are good customers for China to have. The Gulf economies are expected to grow by around 5.9% in 2022 (compared with a lacklustre 2.5% predicted growth in the US and EU) and offer attractive opportunities for China’s export-orientated economy. It is likely that the fast-tracking of a free trade agreement was high on the summit’s agenda in early December.

Strong ties

The Gulf’s increased reliance on trade with China has been accompanied by a reduction in its appetite to follow the west’s political and cultural lead.

As a group, it was supportive of the west’s military action in Iraq for example, and the broader fight against Islamic State. But more recently, the Gulf notably refused to support the west in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also threatened Netflix with legal action for “promoting homosexuality”, while Qatar has been actively banning rainbow flags supporting sexual diversity at the Fifa men’s World Cup.

So Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia was well timed to illustrate a strengthening of this important partnership. And to the extent that anything can be forecast, a deepening of the Gulf-China trade relationship seems likely. On the political front, however, developments are less easy to predict.

China is seeking to safeguard its interests in the Middle East in light of the Belt and Road initiative, its ambitious transcontinental infrastructure and investment project.

But how much further might the Gulf states be prepared to sacrifice their longstanding security pacts with western powers (forged in the aftermath of the second world war) in order to seek new ones with the likes of Beijing? Currently, America has military bases (or stations) in all six Gulf countries, but it is well documented that the GCC is seeking ways to diversify its self-perceived over-reliance on the US as its primary guarantor of security (a sentiment within the bloc that was pronounced while Obama was president, less so with Trump, but on the rise again with Biden).

In the coming period, the GCC will need to decide which socioeconomic path to pursue in the post-oil era where AI-augmented, knowledge-based economies will set the pace. In choosing strategic ties beyond trade alone, the Gulf states must ask whether the creativity and innovative potential of their populations will be best served by allegiances to governments which are authoritarian, or accountable.

Emilie Rutledge, Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

So if it isn’t all about oil, what is driving the president’s Middle East trip? On the one hand, I think he is trying to pressure Iran into coming back to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, the 2015 nuclear deal. If Biden could close that deal Iran would put 2 million barrels a day on the market immediately, which would likely begin bringing down prices at the pump in short order.

On the other hand, I wonder if Biden is playing defense, trying to keep long-time US partners from switching to China and Russia.

Biden’s central foreign policy initiative as of last February is to defeat Russia in Ukraine or at least to make it pay an enormous price for its invasion of Ukraine. Biden has orchestrated a widespread boycott of the Russian economy by America’s European allies, and the provision of military and other aid to Ukraine.

While Biden has had some success in overcoming German skittishness about getting involved in that effort, and has gotten all of the EU except for Hungary on board with ending imports of petroleum from Russia, his efforts have fallen on fallow ground in the Middle East.

No diplomatic partner of the US in the latter region has shown any interest in joining Biden’s crusade against the Russian Federation.

Even the one actual U.S. ally in the region, Turkey, despite being part of NATO, is declining to boycott Russia, though it does sell drones to Ukraine. The most Turkey is willing to do is to negotiate with Russia to allow Ukrainian grain exports, from which Turkey would benefit.

Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel has pledged to defend the US, and so they are not allies, unlike Turkey, which fought alongside US troops as part of NATO in Korea and again in Afghanistan

Israel has been careful not to offend Russia, only yielding to US pressure on a few minor votes at the U.N. Egypt is cozying up to Russia and China, and desperately needs Russian wheat if it is to avoid another revolution.

Saudi Arabia is actually importing discounted Russian oil at a third off for its own citizens’ use and then exporting more of its own petroleum at world market prices, making a pretty penny on the transaction. The Russian oil is so deeply discounted because of US sanctions on both the petroleum and on Russian bank transactions, making it difficult to move.

Not only are US partners not stepping up to boycott Russia, some are actively swinging to Russia and China for security and trade relations because they have developed doubts about the US commitment to them. President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran deal shook the Arab Gulf states to their core. They liked Trump better, but were aware that he could not exactly be depended on in a crunch, seeing how he threw Qatar under the bus in 2017 and was willing to break up NATO.

Russia is part of OPEC+, the extended Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and coordinates on pricing efforts. What if Russia could prevail upon OPEC to tighten oil exports, bringing higher prices and more revenues both to Moscow and to the central OPEC states?

By meeting with the Saudi royal family and, on Saturday, with the Gulf Cooperation Council, Biden is attempting to forestall a stampede of these countries to China, with which most of them already do a great deal of business, and which never bothers them about not having free and fair elections. How security-linked the trip was is obvious from the agreements the White House signed in Saudi Arabia.

Reuters quotes Jake Sullivan, the National Security Adviser, as saying of Biden, “He’s intent on ensuring that there is not a vacuum in the Middle East for China and Russia to fill.”

Of course, Biden is also striving for further Israeli integration into the Middle East. Saudi Arabia announced Thursday evening that it was granting all countries overflight rights, which benefits Israel’s El Al, which can now save fuel by not having to skirt the kingdom.

He also wants to cement the ceasefire in Yemen, and finally end the Saudi/ UAE war on Yemen, about which Congress has been upset.

Finally, Biden is trying to establish security ties between Israel and the Gulf oil monarchies so as to make a united front against Iran. Some Washington hawks dream of a Middle Eastern NATO against Iran.

This hope is forlorn. The United Arab Emirates just announced an upgrade in diplomatic relations with Iran and said it is not interested in making a common front against Iran. Dubai is said to be a major money launderer for Iranian funds. Qatar has and will keep correct relations with Iran. The Arab states can’t coordinate too closely with Israel without giving away their own military secrets, and they are too suspicious to do that, even with each other. Being too close to Israel is also a security risk for the Arab states, whose peoples are deeply interested in the fate of the Palestinians, unlike Biden and many of the royal families.

If Biden wants to get a deal with Iran, he should take off some of Trump’s maximum sanctions, which have nothing to do with the country’s civilian nuclear enrichment program, especially the sanctions on the central bank, which hurt civilians. Tehran is not afraid of the Gulf postage stamp countries, even if they do have better relations than before with Israel.

As for defending US interests in the Middle East against Russia and China, it is too soon to say whether Biden’s personal diplomacy has done much to stop these countries from diversifying their security bets.

It’s generally reckoned to be one of Donald Trump’s few major foreign policy achievements. On August 13 2020, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel signed a historic agreement normalising relations between the two states, and in the weeks that followed, other Arab states followed Abu Dhabi’s lead in what became known as the Abraham Accords.

The accords, which have now been ratified by UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, were hailed by many as a major diplomatic breakthrough in Arab-Israeli relations, recognising – as they did – “each state’s right to sovereignty and to live in peace and security”. Yet, although the accords expressed the need to continue “efforts to achieve a just, comprehensive, and enduring resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict”, most observers recognised the agreements as another step in the broader abandonment of the cause of Palestinian statehood, simply through normalising relations without a resolution of the Palestinian question.

As one analyst put it:

In the absence of progress or any realistic hope of achieving [Palestinian statehood], standing by the Palestinians has ceased to be a priority for the Gulf monarchies in the face of clear and present threats from Iran, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, combined with the emergence of common economic and security interests. Relations with Israel have simply become more urgent than the Palestinian question.

This calculation was made against the backdrop of uncertainty ahead of the November US presidential election. Now, less than nine months later, as Israelis and Palestinians enter a new round of violence, questions about the abandonment of the Palestinian cause by signatories of the accords have begun to emerge.

Bad optics

The latest violence and airstrikes against Gaza have been afforded blanket coverage on international news outlets and have provoked serious criticism at signatories for their lack of support for Palestinians. As you would expect, there has been condemnation of Israel’s actions in Jerusalem and Gaza from all Arab states. But it has typically been “very weak” among signatories to the accords.

As the violence has increased, official responses from states who normalised relations with Israel have largely been absent. Meanwhile, in the UEA – which has very strict regulations on social media activity – prominent influencers in the UAE have praised Israeli behaviour, even during the storming of the al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest site in Islam.

Wassem Yousef, a prominent Emirati cleric, posted a number of tweets blaming Hamas for the escalation, referring to the increasing violence as an “epidemic”. The cleric has previously declared that Palestinians do not “really deserve Jerusalem”, expressing support for Emirati normalisation with Israel.

A strong concern for the UAE – and other signatories to the accords – is the fear about the proliferation of Islamist groups across the region, with a particular focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. This was clear after the Arab Spring uprisings and the counterrevolutionary measures taken to bottle up fundamentalism. So curtailing the actions of Hamas – which possesses intellectual and theological ties with the Brotherhood – is an important feature of Abu Dhabi’s broader world view.

But the absence of serious criticism of the Israeli response may also open up unrest among their populations. According to a recent survey on the normalisation of ties with Israel, ordinary citizens have low levels of support for such developments. In Lebanon, where far the highest level of support for normalisation is found, only 20% favoured peace. Elsewhere, support was under 10%, with only 3% of Jordanians supporting normalisation.

This doesn’t mean any of the states concerned will fully withdraw, given the benefits to be gleaned from maintaining relations. But the optics of providing visible support to Israel at a time when Gaza is under bombardment are potentially damaging. What this suggests is a possible return to the days prior to the accords when relations between Israel and the Arab states conducted their relations behind closed doors.

Turkey and Iran

Meanwhile Iran and Turkey, which strongly criticised the accords as “dagger in the back” of all Muslims and a “betrayal” of the Muslim world, have reacted strongly, with both Ankara and Tehran roundly condemning the violence.

In doing so, the countries – which have strong economic and trade ties – are speaking the words many across the Middle East wished their own leaders would use to condemn Israeli violence. Once again, the Palestinian cause has become a tool through which regional powers can derive legitimacy.

Conspicuous by his absence is the US president, Joe Biden. Less than six months into his presidency, the Biden administration has embarked on a bold foreign policy, engaging in dialogue with Iran over the nuclear deal, and working to resolve the Yemen crisis.

Yet the failure to engage with the Israel-Palestine question lays bare the deep schisms in US politics – where the Israel Lobby continues to exert huge influence – and the legacy of the Trump regime. Undoing Trump’s empowerment of the right-wing of Israeli politics is far trickier than undoing his other policies.
All the while, ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue to pay the heaviest price.

Simon Mabon, Professor of International Relations, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNBC International: “Gulf countries should use the leverage they have over Israel, expert says”

( Middle East Monitor) – The Arabian Gulf has turned into an arena for confrontation and possible conflict between Iran and Israel now that it has become certain that Iranian elements attacked the MV Helios Ray. The suspicious vehicle-carrier belongs to Israeli businessman Rami Ungar, known for his strong relationship with Mossad Director Yossi Cohen.

According to Iranian newspaper Kayhan, which is close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the ship is likely to be affiliated with the Israeli spy agency and is involved in suspicious activities in the Arabian Gulf near Iran’s territorial waters. This makes it a big target that was probably spotted a while ago, despite its cover as a British cargo ship.

Kayhan celebrated the attack and its high level of professionalism as a response to Israel’s attacks on Iranian soil, the most recent of which was the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November. However, the more dangerous matter is that the newspaper linked the wave of normalisation in the Gulf countries and the higher level of Israeli intelligence and security activity targeting Iran to justify the attack on the Helios Ray and warn against similar attacks likely to be launched by elements affiliated with the resistance. It did not give any names or details.

Israel did not deny its involvement in attacks within Iranian territory, both those that targeted nuclear facilities and ports such as Bandar Abbas. This opens the door to conflict between Israel and Iran, not least because Israel announced a month ago that it had sent one of its submarines through the Red Sea, bound for the Arabian Sea, without revealing its mission or the reason for its presence there.

The cold war between Israel and Iran in the Arabian Gulf has become more visible, and it is feared that the repercussions will extend to the Gulf States, turning it into a proxy war whose flame ignites the Gulf ports and oil facilities. This could cause great damage to the economies in the region.

According to the website Marine Traffic and Dryad Global group, concerned with maritime security, MV Helios Ray was heading from the Saudi port of Dammam towards Singapore. However, Israel has launched its own investigation by sending a security delegation to the UAE. This means that the potential fireball is rolling towards the Arab countries and their ports, far from Israel and its direct interests.

The Arab countries are expected to pay the price for the war between Israel and Iran, as the latter will not take into account the interests of its Arab neighbourhood. Moreover, Israel does not care about the security, well-being, and interests of the Arabs. Hence, the attack on the Israeli ship on Thursday was just one episode in the long series of confrontations between Iran and Israel that will not end without causing great damage to the Gulf economies. This makes Israel and its “security” activity in Gulf waters a threat that is no less harmful than the policy pursued by Iran in the Gulf and the Red Sea.

Israel has mostly exacerbated the crisis in the Gulf region, fuelling conflicts therein and opening the door to more political and security complications. Indeed, it has opened the door for new players concerned about Israeli moves, such as Pakistan, which is suspicious about Israeli influence getting closer to the Arabian Sea…

This article first appeared in Arabic in the New Khaleej on 2 March 2021

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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WION: “Iran: Country ‘strongly rejects’ Israeli accusation of mysterious blast”

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt announced their boycott on the small peninsula on June 5, 2017.

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has pushed for an end to the isolation of Qatar because it has destroyed the Gulf Cooperation Council, an alliance of six Sunni Gulf oil monarchies formed in 1982 to block Iran. The Trump administration has attempted to craft an alliance of Israel and the GCC states against Iran.

With the diplomatic efforts of Jared Kushner, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel last summer. This step has made it easier for Israeli submarines to ply the oil Gulf, and opened the way for closer Israeli technological and presumably signals-intelligence cooperation with Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates — all with an eye to deterring Iran.

h/t Wikimedia.

Qatar has been paying Iran $122 million a year for use of its air space, since Qatar Airways could not fly north over Bahrain or west over Saudi Arabia. Having to fly east before turning for Europe has also hurt Qatar Airways profits. Qatar also imported food from Iran during the first year of the blockade. The dependence of Doha on Iran meant that the Gulf Cooperation Council could not take a united hard line against the ayatollahs in Iran.

Likewise, even if it wanted to, Qatar was not in a position to normalize relations with Israel (though it has correct relations with that country anyway).

Although Jared Kushner is claiming credit for the breakthrough, behind the scenes the Saudis are saying that they took the step because they did not want the Qatar situation to be ongoing as the Biden administration took power. Barak Ravid reports at Axios that the Saudis wanted to “clean the table” in advance of Biden’s inauguration.

Biden and his prospective team have been deeply critical of Saudi Arabia over the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, over the kingdom’s horrible human rights record domestically, and over the war that Riyadh is pursuing against Yemen, which has produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

King Salman seems intent on mollifying the Biden team, and ending the boycott of Qatar is a relatively painless step. Now, when Biden officials meet with the Qatari ambassador, they won’t hear a litany of complaints against the Saudis. It is a relatively small thing, but Saudi Arabia is in big trouble with Washington and the king may think any little bit will help.

King Salman personally sent a letter of invitation to Sheikh Tamim of Qatar to attend Tuesday’s summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It will be the first time in 3 years that the emir has attended.

This thaw may also suggest a diminution of the power of crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who helped engineer the blockade in the first place. Likewise, it suggests that Saudi Arabia is now overruling the United Arab Emirates, where crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Zayed had been even more committed to isolating Qatar than Bin Salman.

The attack on Qatar was the last battle of the Arab Spring. In 2011-13, the youth revolts in the Arab world were supported by Qatar, and as the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence (taking the presidency in Egypt in 2012), Qatar, long a backer of the Brotherhood, provided them aid.

Saudi Arabia and especially Bin Zayed deeply oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, seeing the fundamentalist, populist party as inherently revolutionary and republican with a small ‘r,’ i.e., they are like the Baptists in the southern colonies who joined George Washington to fight the British crown. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have given billions to the military junta of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt to root out the Brotherhood, after al-Sisi overthrew its elected government in 2013. The UAE has also backed military strong man Khalifa Hiftar in Libya against the more fundamentalist government in Tripoli.

Since Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan is also a backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, there has been a cold war for the past nearly a decade between the UAE-Saudi Arabia axis, which supports enlightened secular dictatorship as the model for the region, and the Turkey-Qatar entente, which supports a democratic sort of government in which Muslim fundamentalists can compete for power, just as the Christian Democrats compete for seats in the German parliament. The Middle East is basically Frederick the Great versus the Berlin Republic.

Since the Iranian government is basically the Shiite version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the UAE and Saudi Arabia want to isolate and roll it back, too. It isn’t part of the Turkey-Qatar entente, but they are considered “soft” on Iran by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

One of the Quartet’s demands was the shuttering of the Al Jazeera satellite news channel, which is funded by the Qatari government but has substantial editorial independence. Al Jazeera is pro-democracy and is willing to interview Muslim Brotherhood figures and not simply demonize them. This editorial line, of presenting “all sides of a story,” drives the UAE and Saudi Arabia crazy.

One of the sad things that has happened to Arab culture in the past decade is that the Saudis and the UAE have bought up many the newspapers/ news sites in the region, and the junta in Egypt has ramped up censorship, so that independent news reporting is very rare. Al Jazeera is thus one of the last independent voices, and the 2017 boycott was intended in part to close it down so as to give the Saudis and UAE full spectrum dominance in the region’s media.

The agreement to end the blockade on Qatar will not heal the rift entirely. The Gulf Cooperation Council was in part a security pact. How can the Qataris ever trust the Saudis and the UAE to have their backs? Some proposed a unified electrical grid throughout the Arab littoral of the Gulf. But any such system would open Qatar to being left in the dark if the campaign was renewed. That is, cooperation and vulnerability go together, and Qatar can’t cooperate too closely with people that tried once to destroy it lest it become highly vulnerable.

I also don’t expect Qatar’s correct relations with Iran to change, whatever hopes Mr. Kushner may have in that regard.

The boycott was imposed in June, 2017, with the active encouragement of Donald Trump. Only in the fall of 2017 did Trump back off and begin making up with Qatar. The blockading Quartet countries nevertheless kept the pressure on, preventing Qatar from importing food through Saudi Arabia or from using their air space. They also plotted to destabilize the Qatari currency and trumped up charges against the country of backing terrorism (which is ridiculous).

Back in 2017, the blockading Quartet may have plotted the overthrow and death of the reigning Emir, Sheikh Tamim b. Hamad Al Thani. Ironically, Kushner may have been in on the plot. The Turkish parliament halted any such plans by voting to send hundreds of Troops to Qatar as a signal that the powerful Turkish military would not put up with such a regime change.

Likewise, the US secretary of defense, James Mattis, and the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, worked behind the scenes to protect Qatar. The small state hosts the al-Udeid US Air Force Base, with some 12,000 military personnel, from which US sorties are flown against ISIL in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Qatar is also a major natural gas exporter, in which ExxonMobil, of which Tillerson was the CEO before joining the Trump administration, was well aware and he hoped for an increased share for his old company of this valuable resource.

It should be remembered that Kushner has only partially helped fix what he and Trump broke.

Qatar survived, and has now had a victory of sorts. The major credit likely goes to the incoming Biden administration. We’re seeing signs that Biden’s determination to fix some of the dysfunctions of US Middle East policy is already having an effect, two weeks before he even takes office.

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Bonus video:

Al Jazeera English: “Saudi Arabia, Qatar ‘agree to open airspace, land and sea border’”

The Trump administration appears to have rushed the sale through on hearing that Joe Biden had won the presidency. It has to be approved by both houses of Congress, but could be blocked by Biden, who disapproves of the UAE’s war on Yemen.

The deal includes 50 F-35s, the most advanced fighter jet in the world, along with 18 advanced drone systems, in addition to air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons. The deal appears to have been approved by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu as part of the “Abraham” peace accord, although it is opposed by the Israeli political and military establishment because it contradicts their doctrine that only Israel in the Middle East should have the latest and most advanced American weapons.

The Yemeni news site is critical of the sale, noting Amnesty International’s condemnation of the Emirates’ military interventions in Yemen and Libya, its use of drones, and its record of hitting civilians at rates that suggest either malevolent incompetence or deliberate disregard.

One study found that in the Saudi-UAE bombing raids on Yemen, up to a third of the facilities destroyed were civilian in nature and had no military significance. It seems to me that sometimes they destroy bridges precisely because they are dual use– necessary to civilians to transport food but available to the Houthi guerrillas for their war effort. If blunting the latter means starving the former, Abu Dhabi seems to think, too bad.

The UN’s food czar, David Beasley, warned Wednesday that 80% of Yemenis are in desperate need of food aid and that millions are on the cusp of dying of starvation. Yemen is in the fifth year of a war on it launched by Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and their allies in a bid to defeat the Helpers of God guerrilla movement, which took Sana’a, the capital, in 2014. The belligerents maintain that the Ansar, or “Houthis,” are backed by Iran, but in fact they are a local movement that has mainly used local resources. They attracted some relatively minor Iranian support only after the Saudis and the UAE invaded.

Although Pompeo represented the arms sale as aimed at Iran (pop. 81 million), there is no prospect of Iran attempting to fight a conventional war with the UAE. Moreover, the Emirates has excellent behind the scenes relations with Iran and its banks laundered a lot of Iran’s money since the latter is under sanctions. I don’t think Iran enters into the picture.

The Emirates is a major oil exporter and has used its petroleum wealth in an attempt to establish regional hegemony in south Yemen and on Yemen’s Arabian Sea island of Socotra. It pushed the Sudanese officer corps to make peace with Israel. Abu Dhabi backs the forces of Libyan warlord Khalifa Hiftar. It is said to have destabilized Somalia because that country’s president was felt to be too close to Qatar, a rival of the UAE. It has also backed the brutal authoritarianism of the al-Sisi-lead military junta in Egypt, to the tune of billions of dollars of aid.

The sale is Trump and Pompeo’s way of allowing the UAE to continue with this imperial authoritarian project in the region, which they appear to believe benefits the US.

So the Emirates is not very much like Rhode Island. Maybe more like ancient Greece’s city-state of Sparta.

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Bonus video:

U.S. approves sale of F-35 jets to UAE | News Bulletin | Indus News

1. What Trump got out of the announcement:

a. It will please the Israel lobbies and he hopes it will help him in Florida, which has a large Jewish-American population, many of them retirees. This voting bloc has soured on Trump because of his poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic, inasmuch as they are a high risk population. In other words, they know he is trying to get them killed. In general, Trump is way down in Florida, with Biden polling at 51% in high quality polls in which Trump comes in as low as 38% and no higher than 46%. The UAE is a small country with a citizen population of only about a million people (and another 8 million guest workers), and despite its high-tech weapons purchases, has never posed a military danger to Israel. In fact, Abu Dhabi has had many friendly behind-the-scenes dealings with Israel. So this treaty is more a recognition of reality than a real breakthrough, and it is unclear that Trump will get much of a bump from it.

b. It cements an American-backed anti-Iran axis consisting of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel. Trump has erected an international trade and financial embargo on Iran, but is opposed in this by China, Russia and the European Union. The Saudi-UAE-Bahrain axis offers basing for US military forces as well as for electronic surveillance, and the addition of Israel increases all those capabilities.

2. What the UAE gets out of the agreement: Abu Dhabi will now be adopted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an umbrella for thousands of pro-Israel organizations, which is the most effective lobby in Congress. It may qualify for higher level military technology transfers as a result. Markets may also open to it. After Hurricane Katrina, Dubai Ports suggested that it could rebuild and take over the port of New Orleans, but faced public backlash. Its image will now be substantially burnished. The price of Trump’s economic pincer on Iran is that some UAE tankers have suffered mysterious fires likely as a result of Iranian sabotage. The Emirates already benefit from a US security umbrella, but that protection is now even stronger. The Emirates will likely be read in to US and Israeli intelligence on Iran if it hasn’t already been.

3. What Israel gets out of the agreement: The Arab League boycott of Israel was never effective, and it has been a long time since any Arab country posed a credible conventional military threat to Israel. Egypt has had a peace treaty since 1978, and Jordan since 1994. Still, Arab non-recognition was a way of pressuring Israel to cease colonizing the West Bank, and the UAE has just reduced that pressure.The UAE is a major petroleum and finance center, and offers, as Forbes notes, opportunities for Israeli investment and business partnerships that could be very lucrative. Gaining an avowed ally against Iran in the region is also a strategic benefit.

4. What the Palestinians get out of the agreement: Nothing. Netanyahu’s annexation plans had already been scotched by Jared Kushner and by his own partner in the national unity government, Benny Gantz. He practically speaking gave up nothing. The Palestinians remain under Israeli military occupation. Israel continues to steal Palestinian land and water and to divert these resources to Israeli settlers, which it actively sends in as squatters. Palestinians are routinely attacked by these armed settlers, including just this week. Palestine recalled its ambassador from Abu Dhabi and a Fateh spokesman, Abbas Zaki, denounced the treaty as “a losing bet” and an act of “subordination to the enemies of the Arab nation.”

5. What it means for Iran: Very little. The Emirates play both sides against the middle, and it is alleged that Dubai banks have been major launderers of money and conduits for Iranian economic enterprises, as a way of avoiding US sanctions. That is unlikely to change, though it may have to be hidden even better. Despite their US-provided F-16 fighter jets and other fancy equipment the Emirates are too small and vulnerable to pose a military threat to Iran. Some 5,000 US troops are already stationed in the UAE. Diplomatically, the anti-Iran axis has been strengthened, since it is now out in the open. But given the crushing economic burden that Trump has placed on Iran, and given China’s new interest in adopting Iran as part of its One Belt, One Road project, Gulf diplomacy doesn’t amount to much. Iran is developing ports on the Arabian Sea, beyond the Straits of Hormuz, to export oil and other goods, making the Gulf less salient to Tehran. With regard to regional public opinion, Iran benefits from being viewed as one of the few remaining strong supporters of the Palestinians. That reputation is only increased as Arab states defect to the US and Israel. One reason Saudi Arabia did not immediately join the Emirates in this step is that, unlike the other Sunni Gulf monarchies, it has a substantial citizen population of over 20 million, and many (not all) strongly support the Palestinians.

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Bonus Video:

BBC News: “Israel and UAE strike historic peace deal – BBC News”