Saudi Arabia's diplomatic jab at US President Barack Obama this month augurs change for the oil and gas market. Details will come later. For now, that the jab occurred at all offers much to ponder.
Obama had invited rulers of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries to meetings on security May 13-14 at the White House and Camp David. He also invited Saudi King Salman to a private meeting. Although the Saudi ruler is reported to have indicated plans to attend, the state-run Saudi Press Agency on May 10 reported high-ranking deputies, including the crown prince, would travel to Washington, DC, in Salman's place.
No snub?
Officials from both countries insisted this was no snub. The Saudi delegation, they said, included functionaries well-positioned to address topics on the summit agenda. The assurances weren't convincing. Only two of the rulers invited to Washington, from Kuwait and Qatar, attended. Regrets from two others, the United Arab Emirates president and Omani sultan, could be explained by illness. But also not attending was King Hamad of Bahrain, not known to be under the weather and inclined to oblige wishes of the House of Saud.
Reasons given for Salman's absence offered little solace. The king was, in the official explanation, preoccupied with a suspension of his country's military incursions into Yemen and with the opening of the King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Work. Well, of course. The Saudi king couldn't entrust the ceasefire to his military commanders or reschedule a ribbon-cutting to make time for a private meeting with the US president.
Salman obviously snubbed Obama. More importantly, he sent a pointed message: He would remain in Riyadh looking after military exigencies while the American president talked about things in comparative safety half a world away.
How matters have changed! Not many years ago, a Shia insurgency in Yemen would have made the Saudi ruler eager to visit the American president. For years, Saudi kings have depended on the White House for military defense and, in return, kept oil production and politics in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries mostly aligned with the industrial world's need for a steady flow of affordable petroleum.
Now, American dependability has fallen into doubt. In commentary published on CNN's Arabic web site, Abdulaziz Sager, founder and chairman of the Gulf Research Center based in Jeddah, described US policy in the Middle East as "mired in a contradiction between principles and action on the ground." He wrote of widespread Arab doubt about the Obama administration's commitment to expressed goals of preserving Middle Eastern order and defending allies in the region. And he asserted the Arab world's "sense of suspicion and trepidation" about the agreement on nuclear weapons under negotiation between Iran and members of the United National Security Council plus Germany.
"Having directly experienced the problematic interventionist Iranian policies for decades, the Arab world is simply not ready to give Tehran the benefit of doubt on any regional issue," Sager wrote. "But neither is it ready to trust US assurances that outside a nuclear agreement, the US will indeed put forward a concerted strategy to contain Iranian influence through the region or to defend the GCC states against any Iranian threat."
Sager's words provide important context to Saudi leadership of a 12-country coalition attacking strongholds of Houthi rebels in Yemen. Through an operation resonantly called Decisive Storm, the kingdom has demonstrated it possesses impressive firepower and will use it to keep its southern neighbor from yielding to Shia governance and Iranian hegemony.
The transformation
This is a new, diplomatically bold, militarily assertive, increasingly independent, and possibly desperate Saudi Arabia, which remains-lest anyone forget-the world's most important oil producer. The transformation will change the politics of OPEC and of the Persian Gulf and give new meaning to the potential use of oil as a geopolitical weapon.
For the rest of the world, hiding behind wind turbines won't suffice as a policy response.
