Saudi Arabia’s decision to suspend a major military aid package to Lebanon – $3 billion earmarked for the purchase of French weapons – and to revoke another $1 billion pledged to support Lebanon’s internal security services, is an unexpected and dramatic change of policy toward a politically crucial Arab country. At the same time, the UAE has announced a drawdown of diplomatic staff at its embassy in Beirut. There are additionally concerns and rumors about the potential withdrawal of Saudi and United Arab Emirates deposits from the Lebanese Central Bank, which would also be deeply damaging to Riyadh’s Lebanese allies. Lebanese anxiety even extends to concern about the potential deportation of Lebanese workers from Gulf states and the loss of valuable remittances as well as social and economic links.

The proximate cause of this dramatic policy shift by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states is a drift of Lebanese policy strongly toward Iran in recent months. The turning point was Lebanon’s refusal to join a virtually unanimous Arab League condemnation of the recent attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Even Iraq supported the condemnation of the attack, making the Hizballah-inspired Lebanese reticence on the issue all the more anomalous and, from the Gulf state perspective, unacceptable.

The major Lebanese factions have been embroiled in nearly two years of protracted wrangling leaving them unable to agree on a new president. Lebanese political groups are roughly divided into two general coalitions: on the one hand is “March 14,” which is essentially aligned with Saudi Arabia and the West, on the other is “March 8,” linked to Iran and its allies, particularly the Syrian dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad. Hizballah, the pro-Iranian Shia militia and political party, in particular, has been withholding support for a long series of potential presidential candidates (in Lebanon an elected but heavily gerrymandered Parliament selects the president). Initially Hizballah was mainly seeking to secure its quasi-independent substate within Lebanon, complete with its own independent military, communications network, intelligence services, control over key areas such as the national airport, and a wide variety of other prerogatives. But, especially from the Gulf Arab perspective, Hizballah has recently been asserting greater control over Lebanon’s foreign policy in the interests of Iran, culminating in the refusal to condemn the embassy attack.

Another sign of this trend is an uptick in strongly-worded anti-Saudi rhetoric from Hizballah. Riyadh believes that Hizballah is riding a new wave of confidence, and even arrogance, following the Russian intervention in Syria. The Lebanese Shia militia is a core part of the pro-regime forces whose fortunes appear to have been reversed thanks to Moscow’s intervention in the conflict. From the Gulf perspective, it is precisely this reversal of fortunes in Syria that has allowed Hizballah to tighten its grip on the Lebanese state and foreign policy. The prominent Saudi columnist Abdulrahman al-Rashed went so far as to recently describe Lebanon as an “Iranian colony.”

The exasperation of Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as their Gulf allies is compounded by the sense that Iran’s aid to Lebanon, and more specifically its support for Hizballah, buys it tremendous influence and deference from Lebanese parties across the board and from what remains of the state. By contrast, Arab Gulf money seems to be taken for granted, accepted, but without concomitant consideration for the interests of these major donors. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies believe that Iran’s political investments in Lebanon have proved much more cost effective than their own because Tehran’s largesse has been tied to money and equipment for Hizballah’s militia.

Consequently, the Arab Gulf states feel that their financial contributions to the mainstream Lebanese state institutions such as the national military haven’t resulted in a commensurate consideration for their policy imperatives, whereas Iran has benefited enormously precisely by “playing dirty” and funding its own sub-state militia proxies. Following the suspension of the military aid program, according to Gulf sources, Lebanese political figures were perceived as not having moved quickly enough to try to repair the damage, which in turn led to the further measures involving the travel warnings, diplomatic downgrades, and hints of deposit withdrawals. The message is something along the lines of “Do we have your attention yet?”

At this point the answer is certainly yes, although whether the response will be deemed sufficient remains to be seen. Certainly the Saudi decision appears to have surprised, and even shocked, Riyadh’s Lebanese allies, several of whom have urged the kingdom not to “abandon” Lebanon. Prime Minister Tammam Salam announced plans to visit the Gulf Arab states to try to repair relations, and has already delivered a formal letter to Saudi King Salman asking for the decision to be reversed. Other commentators have described the Saudi move as “puzzling.” This dramatic expression of Gulf exasperation with unfolding trends in Lebanese political dynamics could well have far-reaching consequences for Lebanon’s regional role and domestic equilibrium.

From the Saudi point of view, cutting aid might feel like an act of the strong. Why, after all, Riyadh is asking, should we keep paying for Lebanese national agencies and institutions that are increasingly at the service of our Iranian rivals and are, at best, not responsive to our concerns and at worst seem to be hostile to our interests? Two possible obvious answers – that the Lebanese Armed Forces are one of the few nonsectarian social institutions in the country, and that they serve as a potential crucial counterweight to Hizballah – for some reason do not seem to have carried enough weight. Moreover, the Saudi government may be telling itself that cutting aid is what strong powers do to express their dissatisfaction with local clients and allies. Isn’t cutting or suspending aid the first thing Washington does when it wants to get serious with a misbehaving client?

However, there is a difference between the behavior and policy options of distant, global powers and the concerns and consequences facing local or regional ones such as Saudi Arabia. Washington has provided Lebanon with about $1 billion in military support over the past eight years, despite sharing many of Saudi Arabia’s concerns about Hizballah, which is on the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, and refusing to deal with Hizballah officials within the Lebanese government.

The Lebanese allies of Saudi Arabia have begun to respond with uncharacteristic intensity. Pro-Saudi Lebanese factions are essentially the same as the pro-U.S. ones, but they never reacted with anything like this level of alarm and urgency when Washington has, several times in the past, cut or suspended aid. They sense, probably correctly, that the consequences of this cut in Saudi military and security support could have far-reaching consequences for the balance of power in Lebanon, and actually exacerbate rather than reverse the very trends toward Hizballah domination that have so annoyed Riyadh.

Indeed, while the Saudi move may seem an expression of strength from Riyadh’s perspective, from the point of view of many in Beirut it probably looks more like weakness, and possibly even a declaration of defeat. After all, this aid cut seems to leave Lebanon at the mercy of Hizballah and its allies, and other proxies and clients of Iran, since the clout and influence of pro-Saudi factions in Lebanon will be weakened by this loss of income and support. Saudi Arabia will be seen by many in Lebanon as tacitly admitting, through its actions, that it not only does not exercise sufficient influence in Lebanon, it no longer holds out any reasonable hope of doing so under the present circumstances. From the point of view of many Lebanese, that will not be seen as reflective of strength and authority.

This sense will be compounded by the strongly worded warnings issued by Saudi Arabia and several of its key allies, including the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar, that their citizens should not travel to Lebanon and, if they are already there, should leave immediately. The move is an expression of concern about potential retaliation against their nationals by pro-Iranian Lebanese extremists. It further implies that Saudi Arabia and its allies are acknowledging that there is little they can do if their nationals are harmed or abducted in Lebanon.

It’s hard to exaggerate what is potentially at stake regionally if this Saudi move is not offset by other policy initiatives designed to draw Lebanon closer to its orbit or in some other way offset the intensification of Iranian influence and prevent the isolation of political forces in Lebanon that are resistant to Iranian domination. If direct military support to the Lebanese Armed Forces remains suspended, surely Saudi Arabia can, if it wants to, find other means of bolstering its political allies in Beirut and consolidating its presence within the Lebanese equation. It may employ a kind of probationary period sure to emphasize its point, but declining to fund the Lebanese military does not necessarily mean walking away from all Lebanese national and governmental institutions. Otherwise, the fears of Saudi Arabia’s Lebanese allies that they are essentially being abandoned to the tender mercies of Hizballah, Assad, and Iran may prove well founded. If this indeed eventually becomes, whatever Riyadh’s present intentions might be, a tacit Saudi admission of defeat or failure in Lebanon – or if it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with the country falling deeper into the Iranian orbit – the precedent could be profoundly troubling for Riyadh in the long run.

Saudis might well scoff at any analogy between Syria and Lebanon, or the suggestion that if they walk away from one, they could walk away from the other. First of all, they would probably deny that this is what they are doing in Lebanon. And no doubt they would insist that Syria is an entirely different proposition from Lebanon, which has long been subject to the undue influence of Iran through Hizballah. However, if the scenario plays out as Riyadh’s Lebanese allies are warning it might, Saudi Arabia, in effect, could end up essentially acquiescing to, and practically consolidating, Iranian domination of Lebanon by withdrawing crucial aspects of its own leverage. That would surely suggest that there is a threshold wherein Saudi Arabia concludes a political battle has simply been lost and there is no longer any point in, literally, throwing good money after bad.

It’s possible that Saudi Arabia will avoid that dangerous pitfall by implementing other policies that offset the potential negative consequences of the aid cut and other recent measures. There are many different ways in which that important aim could be accomplished. But if the Gulf states don’t take such measures, and these recent moves backfire as Riyadh’s Lebanese allies are warning, the shift in policy toward Beirut could prove a very costly way of making a point.

To no one’s surprise, and certainly not everyone’s disappointment, the latest round of peace talks on Syria this week in Geneva collapsed almost before it began. The Syrian warring factions, after all, never really agreed to discuss anything directly, or even sit together in the same room. Instead, international mediators led by U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, on February 1 started going back and forth between Syrian government officials sitting at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva and opposition representatives gathered at their hotel. De Mistura announced a “pause” in this process on February 3, signaling that even this limited framework isn’t sustainable under the current circumstances. Demands by the opposition that the government lift its siege on various civilian areas in order to allow in humanitarian aid were completely ignored by the regime, contributing directly to the breakdown of the talks.

The global powers involved, particularly the United States, seem increasingly interested in developing a political process to end the conflict. But the armed Syrian factions, their regional backers, and especially the regime of President Bashar al-Assad don’t seem ready to engage meaningfully, appearing to see the value of continued conflict. The regime is seeking a military solution to its predicament, while the rebels are hoping to reverse a series of serious setbacks over recent months to regain the initiative of much of 2015, now lost to these reversals.

Syria remains a key proxy battlefield for rival coalitions led by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Since the recent upsurge in tension between Riyadh and Tehran following the execution of Saudi Shia dissident cleric Nimr al-Nimr and the subsequent sacking of the Saudi Embassy in Iran, the likelihood of progress between these rivals became more remote than ever. In the weeks leading up to the recent flare-up, the diplomatic sidelines of the Syria negotiations had emerged as an unlikely but invaluable venue for Saudi-Iranian dialogue. These talks were the one place where diplomats from the two countries would meet, regularly, predictably, and face-to-face, to discuss crucial issues. If Riyadh and Tehran were going to move beyond their icy relations, this was the most likely context in which such progress, however limited, might have emerged.

The diplomatic encounter continues, with both Saudi and Iranian representatives taking part in the temporarily stalled, talks. But the context for progress on any front, let alone the super-charged question of Syria and the future of Assad, seems to have moved from unlikely to unattainable, at least under the present circumstances. Rather than pressuring their Syrian clients and allies to move toward a political solution, these regional powers seem committed to looking for a comparative advantage from further military confrontation on the ground in Syria.

Indeed, the forces backing the Syrian dictatorship, including Iran and its regional allies, and, crucially, Russia, appear to be committed to seeking a military ”solution” for the regime. Even if the Syrian government cannot end the conflict completely by reestablishing uncontested rule over the whole country, it can at least control the areas most critical to its fundamental policies. This involves securing a thick corridor of about a quarter of Syria, running north from the Lebanese border area, through Damascus and Aleppo, and into the northwestern coastal areas around Latakia. The Assad regime and its allies seem increasingly confident this, at least, can be accomplished. Russia’s military intervention in late 2015 was cynically packaged as an international counterterrorism initiative against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). However, the overwhelming majority of Russian air power has been targeted against the mainstream rebel groupings supported by Saudi Arabia and its two key partners, Turkey and Qatar.

This intervention appears to have successfully shifted the momentum in the conflict in favor of the regime, particularly in the areas it is focused on controlling. During much of 2015, Syrian regime and pro-regime forces consistently lost ground to rebel groups supported by Middle Eastern regional powers, particularly the Riyadh-backed Jaish al-Islam coalition and Ahrar al-Sham, favored by Ankara and Doha. While the situation on the ground was typically fluid and complex, for much of 2015 these groups made steady progress in key and heavily contested areas of the country at the expense of the regime (and also, at times, at the expense of ISIL).

The Russian intervention first stopped and has now apparently reversed this trend. In recent weeks the military momentum appears to have shifted dramatically in favor of the regime and its allies, including ground forces from the Lebanese Shia militia Hizballah, Iraqi Shia militias, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Independent clinically summarized the emerging situation, in a war of competing sieges aimed mainly at targeting innocent Syrian civilians, as follows:
“According to the UN, the Syrian government is besieging 187,000 people in rebel-held towns; the rebels by contrast are besieging only two towns, with 12,000 residents. That is [now] the scale of the [emerging] asymmetry between the sides.”

The situation in many besieged areas is reportedly dire, with opposition activists reporting starvation conditions in a number of localities. The international donor community has pledged billions of dollars for aid to starving and desperate Syrian civilians, but delivering this desperately needed support may be difficult if the warring factions, especially the government, continue to use siege and starvation as a key tactic of war.

The regime appears to have used the latest round of international negotiations as a platform to demonstrate its newfound, or newly-regained, military strength. It sought to demonstrate that it is only interested in a military “solution,” rather than a peace agreement, by launching a significant offensive in several key areas, especially near Aleppo, on February 1 as talks convened. By Wednesday the Syrian military reportedly broke the siege of two crucial government-held villages in an effort to cut supply lines between rebel-held areas of Aleppo and its environs and the Turkish border. Over 300 Russian airstrikes were reportedly part of this major offensive, which was characterized in one editorial as a shameless and overt act of diplomatic “sabotage.”

The regime position is that it does not negotiate with “terrorists,” and that “in Syria, everyone who holds a machinegun [not under the control of the government] is a terrorist.” Russia has identified Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as “terrorist” organizations, although it agreed to the participation of their representatives in the peace talks on an “individual basis.” Moscow thereby agreed that these key opposition organizations could be part of the negotiations in practice (thus “having its cake”) while continuing to identify them as politically intolerable terrorist groups in theory (thereby “eating it too”).

These Islamist groups were brought into the official Syrian opposition negotiating structure at a Saudi-brokered meeting of rebel groups in Riyadh in early December 2015. Particularly at issue was the participation of Ahrar al-Sham, given its frequent insistence on a future political and social order in Syria based on the application of sharia law and, worse, its history of collaboration with the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. The United States wanted evidence that Ahrar al-Sham was renouncing any cooperation with al-Qaeda and was moving away from a dogmatic and implausible fixation on sharia, especially given the heterogeneity of Syrian society. Ahrar al-Sham did eventually sign off on the meeting’s “Final Statement,” which indicated a much broader and more tolerant vision for the future. Ahrar al-Sham thereby became part of the quasi-official High Negotiations Committee formed at the meeting to conduct diplomacy on behalf of a supposedly united Syrian political and paramilitary opposition. It is the HNC that gathered in the Geneva hotel for the recent round of negotiations.

Even before the extent of the regime’s new momentum on the ground became apparent, at least two major problems for the HNC were obvious. First, it is haunted by the challenge that it must confront ISIL and other terrorists as well as the regime, and that the United States prioritizes the battle against ISIL. This presents both theoretical and practical conundrums for the opposition, particularly given that Ahrar al-Sham has a history of sometimes collaborating with Jabhat al-Nusra. This is obviously unacceptable to the United States, and also of serious concern to Saudi Arabia, despite its support of the group. Breaking this pattern of cooperation, and indeed confronting ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, must be an imperative for the opposition if it is to be politically viable in the long run. Yet, at the same time, that process cannot be perceived as in any way playing into the hands of the regime. No one has thus far proposed a comprehensive approach to cutting this Gordian knot.

Second, because of Turkey’s objections, one of the most important, successful, and effective armed opposition groups in Syria, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), has been excluded from the opposition umbrella entirely. The group was not invited to the December opposition meeting in Riyadh, and has no representation in the HNC. Turkey is alarmed by the strong ties between the YPG and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which, for decades, has been fighting a bloody and bitter conflict with Ankara over the future of Kurdish-majority areas inside Turkey. Turkey’s direct air intervention in Syria earlier in 2015 was also marketed internationally as a counterterrorism campaign against ISIL, but like the Russian intervention that followed it, in reality pursued its own interests.

Saudi and Qatari accommodation of Turkish hostility toward the PKK, and by extension the YPG, has greatly damaged the Syrian opposition, particularly at the political level. On the ground, when the opportunity has presented itself, elements within the mainstream Arab Syrian opposition such as the nationalist Free Syrian Army have joined with YPG units taking on ISIL in northern Syria. Moreover, the Kurdish groups have been successful in establishing a de facto independent area that they call “Rojava” in much of the northern region of Syria, an enclave that is liberated from government control and free of the depredations of ISIL. Its main challenges come from the Turkish military and state, rather than the Damascus dictatorship or ISIL fighters.

The exclusion of these highly successful Kurdish forces from the opposition umbrella not only undermines the ability of the HNC to speak on behalf of the effective military and political opposition in Syria, it also reflects and promotes ethnic divisions that are a threat to Syria’s future no matter what defines its political order. Freezing the Kurdish groups out of the opposition coalition might have been viewed in Riyadh as unfortunate but unavoidable because of Turkey’s central role and the depth of its opposition to the YPG. But this perspective is short sighted. Although these divisions don’t strengthen the regime as such, it certainly badly weakens and divides the opposition. In effect, it means that rather than racing a unified front the regime is encountering a fragmented array of competing forces that, even within the HNC umbrella, is politically divided by ideologies, affiliations, and practical interests. These self-same divided but mainstream rebel groups must nonetheless confront the terrorist organizations that are a cancer on the uprising. Finally, the most politically significant and militarily effective Arab and Kurdish opposition groups in Syria are unable to fully cooperate, let alone unite, because of Turkey’s domestically driven objections.

As things now stand, the shared Saudi-Qatari-Turkish policy goal of regime change in Syria is in real trouble, if not profound crisis, as the Assad dictatorship’s contemptuous attitude toward the peace negotiations vividly illustrates. A year ago, the regime appeared to be approaching a state of exhaustion. But now, following a series of dramatic reversals mainly stemming from the Russian military intervention, the regime and its supporters appear to be once again not only confident of survival but sincerely hopeful of a possible military “solution” that secures their control of the key areas of the country for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the fragmented opposition is struggling politically and diplomatically, and even more ominously on the ground militarily. As long as that is the case, Damascus, Tehran, and even Moscow will have few compelling reasons to endure a political compromise that sacrifices the continued rule of Assad and his inner circle, which is a sine qua non of any political agreement from the opposition perspective.

Riyadh and its allies are going to have to oversee some significant rebel gains, both military and diplomatic, in order to alter this equation. If it is as committed to a peace agreement in Syria as it appears to be, then Washington, too, has a strong interest in changing the current balance of power on the ground. Only then are the regime and its supporters likely to seriously consider the need for a negotiated end to the conflict. Unless a real incentive for them to compromise emerges, the Assad regime and its local, regional, and global supporters will almost certainly persist in their current attitude that casts peace talks as little more than a diplomatically and politically useful farce.