As Philip Gordon, who until last month served as senior Middle East director at the National Security Council, observed, there is always “the question of what’s an ‘external threat.’ Nobody can say exactly what it means. That’s the problem with it.”
Mr. Gordon’s predecessor, at the National Security Council, Dennis Ross, who negotiated extensively with the Gulf Arabs while serving as Obama’s senior adviser on the region, said, “The Saudis see Iran trying to encircle them with its Quds Force killing Sunni Muslims in Syria, mobilizing Shia Muslim militias in Iraq, providing arms to the Houthi rebels in Yemen or fomenting unrest among Saudi Shia . Fundamentally, the Saudis believe that America’s friends and interests are under threat, and the U.S. response has ranged from indifference to accommodation.”
At the summit, the GCC leaders were pleased by the commitment the president made that the United States and the GCC “will work together to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region.” And in Yemen in 2015, the president is putting the focus on cooperation with the GCC against Iranian subversion, rather than supporting Houthi grievances in the name of human rights, which might be his normal inclination.
In Bahrain four years earlier, he did the opposite, expressing sympathy for a Shia uprising against the Sunni government that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet even while admitting Iran’s role in subversion and arms supply against it, suspending deliveries of weapons to the government of Bahrain, and calling intervention by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to defend Bahrain “alarming.”
After Mr. Obama’s Iran agreement is signed and endorsed by the U.N. Security Council, and he no longer needs the Gulf leaders to be quiescent, it is an open question whether the president will maintain his new posture of solidarity with the GCC as in Yemen, or return to the more typical Bahraini example of supporting uprisings even when they are under Iranian patronage. The more lasting words may be something else he said at the summit — that he does not want “to perpetuate any long-term confrontation with Iran,” reaffirming his grand illusion that Iran can “play a responsible role in the region” if only the Sunni leaders will bring it into a dialogue.
• Steven J. Rosen is director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Project.