https://agsiw.org/why-u-s-pressure-was-needed-to-get-israel-and-gulf-states-to-condemn-russia/

At the United Nations General Assembly March 2, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined most of the rest of the world in voting for a consensus resolution strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

At the United Nations General Assembly March 2, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined most of the rest of the world in voting for a consensus resolution strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What’s noteworthy about this development is precisely that it is noteworthy at all. One of the most striking features of the global diplomatic crisis created by Russia’s aggression is that the most long-standing and strategically important U.S. Middle Eastern partners had been quietly but noticeably hedging their bets.

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – arguably the three most important and active partners of Washington in the region – all sought to say as little as possible, temper criticism of Russia, and, insofar as possible, stay out of the controversy. This powerful impulse, shared by three very different governments, and the U.S. pressure that was pivotal in inducing them to vote yes at the General Assembly, tell a complex and important story about the evolving U.S. role in the Middle East.

All three U.S. partners limited or avoided criticism of Russia in the early days of the assault. Saudi Arabia said virtually nothing. Israel issued statements of concern about events in Ukraine but without saying who was doing what. And the UAE continued diplomatic outreach and friendly gestures to Russia while calling for a political solution – implying that Russia has legitimate grievances, and that Ukraine ought to compromise. The UAE position sought to balance that with affirmations of the basic principles of the United Nations, international law, state sovereignty, and a rejection of military solutions. Washington was plainly dissatisfied with all these responses. But why did these countries find it so difficult to unequivocally side with the United States and a united front of its Western allies?

The common motivation can be summed up in two words: strategic diversification. The story of how Washington lost the absolute trust of its most significant Middle Eastern friends is long and complex but has key inflection points. The 2003 invasion of Iraq; the refusal of President Barack Obama’s administration to hold Syria accountable for violating its “redline” against the use of chemical weapons; doubts centered around nuclear negotiations and agreement with Iran; and the lack of a military response by President Donald J. Trump’s administration to Iran’s September 2019 missile attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities were all key moments in which misgivings about Washington’s reliability as a primary security guarantor grew among some Arab governments and in Israel.

The 1980 Carter Doctrine pledged that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region … will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force” by the United States. The doctrine is almost certainly still operative – if any foreign military rolled into the capital cities or oil fields of the Gulf Arab states, the United States would surely act. Yet in an era of missile strikes, rampaging nonstate militias, terrorist plots, cyber warfare, and a vast range of next-generation techniques of disruption and sabotage, that unlikely scenario is hardly the substance of Gulf Arab security nightmares. The practical meaning of this doctrine – despite the huge regional U.S. military presence inherited from the era of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions – in terms of the actual threats to Gulf security are unclear. The 1981 Reagan Corollary, which suggested that the United States would militarily intervene to protect the governments of Gulf countries from internal threats (referring to upheavals analogous to the 1979 Iranian Revolution), can probably be considered an anachronistic dead letter.

Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and, for similar reasons, Israel as well, are no longer willing to rely on the United States as the ultimate guarantor of security. This impression was solidified during Obama’s second term and the Trump presidency. Emirati commentators have been most forthright in expressing concerns these countries broadly share: Many of them argue that the legacy U.S.-led “rules-based” international order of the post-World War II and post-Cold War eras is in irreversible decline; that, while the United States remains a primary strategic partner, these small and vulnerable states with much to lose have no choice but to diversify their diplomatic options and strategic toolkits; and that the rise of a multipolar world involving much greater global power and influence, mainly by Russia and China, is inevitable.

Therefore, all three of these countries have been conducting significant outreach to Russia and China while trying to minimize any damage to relations with Washington. For over a year, Saudi and Emirati officials have been blunt that one of their biggest concerns is the potential rise of a new cold war between the United States and China in which they are forced to choose sides. The Ukraine crisis unexpectedly presented them with an analogous dilemma involving Washington and Moscow.

But what does Russia have to offer them? Ironically, one of Moscow’s most important roles is simply that it is not the United States, that it offers an alternative source of arms, intelligence, and diplomatic support, among other functions, while allowing frustrated U.S. partners to use the threat of a Russian option to incentivize more cooperation from Washington. In addition, over the past decade Russia has successfully maneuvered to become, in many cases, the global interlocutor of choice between contesting Middle Eastern forces.

In Syria, the Astana de-confliction process, which effectively shaped the post-conflict reality in strategic parts of the country, has been led by Russia, Iran, and Turkey with no U.S. input. Israel relies on daily military coordination with Russia to help contain security threats in Syria. And Russia is the obvious choice to serve as a repository for prohibited Iranian nuclear materials if the Vienna negotiations produce an agreement to revive the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the UAE are relying on a hard-fought OPEC+ oil production agreement with Russia as the basis for their national development and economic transition planning. They are extremely hesitant to help create conditions whereby they could be compelled to increase production to stabilize the price of oil because of sanctions against Russia, which would disrupt such long-term planning and effectively mean selling at a discount.

It’s telling that the two traditionally pro-U.S. Middle Eastern states with the most well-developed and mature relationships with Russia are also the two that, in another expression of strategic diversification, made common cause with each other through the 2020 Abraham Accords: the UAE and Israel. Seeking meaningful outreach to new global partners, and to each other regionally, is for both states significantly motivated by the imperative of moving beyond a simple reliance on Washington.

Yet the impulse to triangulate between Washington and Moscow may be inspired more by visions of the future than present realities. By seeking to minimize criticism of Russia and requiring significant U.S. pressure to join the global consensus against the invasion, all three countries were clearly indicating that strategic diversification is at least as important to them in the long run as careful tending of the strategic partnership with the United States.

They may have believed it would be easier than it proved. A range of well-connected commentators in all three countries have cast the Ukraine invasion as a regional European concern rather than a global crisis. They do not instinctively feel that they have anything at stake and, indeed, practically speaking they have little to lose or gain in the narrowest sense. So, a degree of neutrality understandably seemed appealing at first to avoid getting sucked into controversies and not to disrupt the development of long-term strategic diversification.

It did not prove so simple. Israel, over which the United States has the most leverage, came under sustained pressure from Washington early on, and especially after it declined to support a February 25 draft resolution in the U.N. Security Council condemning the invasion. The UAE, which presently occupies a rotating seat on the Security Council and is its president for March, notably abstained during the vote. U.S. pressure on Israel became irresistible, even though the coalition government appeared to adopt a division of labor with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett adopting a more neutral tone, while Foreign Minister Yair Lapid expressed a more pro-Western stance.

But the public pressure, let alone behind the scenes, quickly spread to the others. The State Department readout of a March 2 phone call between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan shows Washington’s push for Saudi cooperation in the General Assembly vote. Presumably Abu Dhabi was also encouraged to vote for the March 2 resolution. It’s no surprise to see reports that, at Washington’s request, Israel urged the UAE to join it in voting for the General Assembly vote even though both had avoided supporting the earlier one in the Security Council.

The hedging is by no means completely over. Israel, although it co-sponsored the General Assembly resolution, pointedly sent its deputy ambassador, rather than its permanent representative to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, to the General Assembly meeting and vote, apparently because Erdan had sent journalists a video clip of him embracing Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador, and Lapid wanted to “make sure to stick to the Israeli government’s messaging” on the crisis. The UAE has been moving in the opposite direction, on March 3 reinstating a program for free visas for Ukrainians that had been suddenly canceled March 1. The country also announced the creation of a $5 million humanitarian fund to address the crisis.

After much jostling and prodding, the three key U.S. Middle Eastern partners have, at this stage, all ended up in approximately the same place: part of the global consensus against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while at the same time trying carefully to minimize the damage to long-term relations with Moscow. Israel is somewhat protected by its domestic political clout in U.S. politics. But Gulf Arab countries may have missed an unusual opportunity to strengthen relations with Washington, which isn’t achieved by coming onside because of pressure and with noticeable reluctance. The effort to hedge and dodge by all three governments is understandable. They could not see what they had to gain and were hoping, and possibly expecting, that it would be quickly resolved before their hesitation and ambivalence became an issue with Washington. That did not happen.

Perhaps upon reflection as the full implications of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the robust reunified Western response sink in, the three governments are genuinely reassessing where their broad, long-term interests lie. All three are fundamentally status quo-oriented powers, and that is fundamentally what led them, each in their own way, to align with the United States in the Middle East for the past several decades. Arguably, a resurrection of the U.S.-led Western alliance and, therefore, a reinforcement of the international “rules-based” order it has imperfectly championed since the end of World War II and, particularly, the Cold War would be in the interests of these three states. Relatively small and potentially vulnerable states that are invested in the global and regional status quo and stability could have much to lose from a chaotic transition to a system in which the powerful assert their positions through military means, invasion, and intimidation, with the U.N. Charter tossed in the scrapheap.

How this affects U.S. relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE will now be determined by how the conflict in Ukraine plays out on the ground and how strong the revival of Western unity and resolve in the face of Russia’s aggression in Europe proves. But having finally joined most of the world in an unequivocal condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine, all three are now better positioned to protect a broad range of their interests and not just relations with Moscow or a narrow, and even speculative, push for strategic diversification. However, Washington would also be wise to take stock of how much it seems to have lost the trust and allegiance of key long-standing partners.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-04/ukraine-war-israel-saudi-arabia-uae-iran-and-syria-feel-u-s-russia-squeeze?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

American allies and Moscow’s friends all have good reasons to avoid taking sides in the Ukraine war. But neutrality has its risks, too.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put Middle Eastern friends of Washington and Moscow in difficult positions. Russia’s allies, Syria and Iran, are backing it, but with trepidation. And U.S. allies in Israel and the Arab world haven’t been willing to clearly take Washington’s side.

The unfortunate truth from the perspective of both global powers is that no Middle Eastern country stands to gain from the confrontation.

Israel and the Gulf countries are walking the same tightrope. Over the past decade they’ve concluded that Washington was no longer fully reliable, and have sought to diversify their strategic options. All reached out to Russia, China and one another. They’ve all developed military relations with Russia and are counting on Moscow to be a repository for prohibited Iranian nuclear material if an agreement to halt Tehran’s nuclear weapons development can be secured. Israel also relies on military coordination with Russia to contain chaos in Syria.

The U.S. has the most leverage with Israel. Persistent Israeli attempts to avoid taking sides came under such heavy American pressure that the government changed positions several times to become more critical of Russia.

Israel, along with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, supported a second United Nations resolution condemning the invasion on Wednesday after dodging one at the Security Council on Feb. 25. But the impulse to sidestep commitments to either Washington or Moscow is unmistakable and understandable.

Saudi Arabia has also come under heavy American pressure for trying to say nothing. Riyadh hopes to avoid being forced to increase oil production to stabilize the price of petroleum, now rising fast as a result of the war. It’s trying to protect a hard-fought production agreement with Russia and its own development plans, all of which would be complicated by a production surge.

The UAE has been most openly friendly to Russia despite the invasion. It has continued diplomatic outreach to Moscow, employing terms like “friendship” and “partnership.” It has expressed no unhappiness with Russia except in the UN vote. The government even canceled free visas for Ukrainians on Tuesday, despite the rising refugee flow.

In addition to trying to maintain links with Russia, the UAE has to worry about a global campaign to sanction the hidden offshore assets of Russian oligarchs, because Dubai is a major global stash house for pilfered Russian wealth. So is Israel (along with London and Florida).

Prominent Emiratis have been more forthright than their Israeli and Saudi colleagues in explaining the thinking they all effectively share: They have no stake in the fight, and since the U.S. is no longer the single global superpower, strategic diversification, even with Russia, is ultimately more important than the partnership with Washington.

It’s no coincidence that the two pro-American countries with the most developed ties to Russia are the same pair that went furthest in reaching out to each other in the 2020 Abraham Accords: the UAE and Israel.

Russia’s friends have their own doubts. The Bashar Assad regime in Syria effusively praised the invasion, but it had no choice. Moscow saved the Syrian dictatorship with a brutal military intervention in 2015. Russia remains Assad’s preferred patron because Moscow makes much less onerous demands on Syrian sovereign prerogatives than its other key ally, Iran.

Tehran is torn. The thought of Russian President Vladimir Putin striking a mortal blow against the U.S.-led international order appeals to a country that doesn’t like Washington or the global system. ButIranian leaders are watching anxiously as most of the world rallies together, under American leadership, to support Ukraine and sanction Russia, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization appears reunified and revitalized.

That kind of reunification is a terrible development for Iran, especially since, like Syria, it gains nothing from Russian aggression in Europe.

Iran is further threatened by the prospect that the West could perfect a system of sanctions against Russia that could be turned against Iran as well. Syria, too, fears that sanctions against Russia will impoverish and weaken its main patron and damage its own economy.

But it’s not necessarily all losses in the Middle East. Iran’s oil could be part of a pricing stabilization, increasing the incentive to lift sanctions. And while Gulf Arab countries don’t want to increase production, it would at least mean additional revenue if they do.

The Gulf states and Israel would be wise to remember that the international order they seem resigned to moving beyond was a big advantage for them. Such a rules-based system serves the interests of small and vulnerable states far better than a chaotic transition to a more predatory, might-makes-right order dominated by Beijing and Moscow.

It was precisely their interest in preserving the international and regional status quo that aligned these countries with the U.S. in the first place. The alliance of Western powers and Asian democracies, and the international order it has defended, was useful to them in the 20th century. Its revitalization ought to be just as attractive in the 21st.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-02/saudi-crown-prince-mbs-is-rewriting-history-to-shrink-islamic-past?sref=tp95wk9l

A new national narrative guides a top-down social revolution that’s opening cultural and economic doors while slamming political and civic ones.

Few countries have ever undergone the kind of dramatic transformation underway in Saudi Arabia. In just a few years, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has thoroughly upended cultural norms and expectations in the Kingdom. Now he’s rewriting the national narrative, sidelining the role of Islam and emphasizing Saudi nationalism, history and the royal family.

Last week the nation celebrated a new holiday, Founding Day. It identifies 1727 as the origin of Saudi Arabia. That directly challenges the traditional narrative, celebrated since the country’s modern founding in 1932, that identified 1744 as the foundational moment.

In 1727, the Al Saud clan captured the Emirate of Diriyah, an exercise in pure political and military power. The 1744 date, by contrast, commemorated the alliance between the Al Sauds and the radical puritanical preacher Muhammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab.

His literalistic and reductive interpretation of Islam, known today as “Wahhabism,” has effectively been the state religion and was the main basis for claims of domestic authority and global Islamic leadership.

That’s all been rapidly jettisoned under Crown Prince Mohammed and his father, King Salman.

As far back as 2016, the feared religious police were stripped of their practical authority over the population. And since MBS became crown prince in 2017, there has been a stunning transformation on women’s rights, gender mixing, public entertainment and the celebration of pre-Islamic Saudi heritage.

There are many factors at play.

Like many other nations, Saudi Arabia is adopting a nationalistic, populist Saudi-first narrative that emphasizes domestic concerns over religious and pan-Islamic issues.

But the centrality of religious authority also needed to go to facilitate a badly needed transition to a post-energy economy. Saudi citizens have to be transformed from wards of the state to wealth-producing citizens. And that can’t be done without greater personal freedom, especially for women now empowered to work, drive and operate with much more independence.

Saudi Arabia has decided to try to elevate tourism and entertainment into the second-largest sector of the economy after oil. Part of this is a drive for domestic tourism, an effort to dissuade Saudis and their cash from leaving the country every time they want to enjoy themselves. But it’s also a pitch for international non-religious tourism. There’s even speculation that alcohol could be legalized in certain places to promote that industry.

To the religious conservatives accustomed to holding sway over social mores, this is all anathema. But they have been dramatically cut down to size. And now even their role in the narrative of national identity is being rapidly obliterated through Founding Day and the rewriting of Saudi history.

The third reason that religion has to be displaced is that this remarkable social liberalization and planned economic diversification is being accompanied by an equally intense political constriction and repression.

Such transformations, especially when imposed by monarchs of traditional societies, have often unleashed forces rulers were unable to contain. Examples of royals who ended up being overthrown in the wake of such changes include Haile Selassie in Ethiopia in 1974 and the Shah of Iran five years later.

In order to contain and limit the threat of political backlash, King Salman and MBS have centralized power and ruthlessly cracked down on dissent.

Saudi Arabia no longer resembles the neo-feudal patronage regime of the past, and of other Gulf Arab monarchies. Power was traditionally dispersed within different sectors of the royal family. Now authority has been concentrated in the hands of the king and the crown prince and a small group of officials and advisers.

That’s been accompanied by waves of political repression that has included the Ritz-Carlton detentions of wealthy and prominent Saudis, the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the detention and abuse of women’s and human rights activists and an atmosphere of terror, particularly among elites that prospered under the old order and therefore might be most resistant to change.

As Saudi political scientist Sultan Alamer notes, the new Saudi nationalist narrative is more socially inclusive than the old Wahhabi one, but it’s also more politically authoritarian.

That sums up the gamble that MBS is taking: that he can radically liberalize his country culturally and economically but remain in power by concentrating power and authority in his own hands. It’s among the most audacious political projects in the world. It’s also one of the riskiest.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/03/01/why-are-some-anti-racism-activists-in-america-so-confrontational/

Parts of the left seem no longer focused on achieving equity, justice or fairness – but something else.

The problem I described in these pages last week of Republicans across the US passing laws that limit or define the teaching of American history and racial matters didn’t arise in a vacuum. Some of these politicians are pandering to the racial and cultural anxieties of conservative white voters. But they are also taking advantage of the spread of narratives, buzzwords and ideas on parts of the left that distort and damage the effort to confront and eliminate racism.

This discourse also requires significant scrutiny because it provides a plausible rationalisation for these oppressive laws and does considerable harm on its own.

Parts of the racially oriented left have adopted an analytical framework that probably does more to inflame rather than challenge and defeat racist attitudes. When “anti-racism” activist Ibram X Kendi writes that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”, he isn’t winning many white Americans over.

There’s a hectoring, accusatory tone that is perceived by many well-meaning white Americans as unjustly assuming that they hold racist sentiments or casually perform racist deeds. The counter-argument holds that US society is so permeated with racism that white Americans need to take ceaseless, detailed and meticulous care to not constantly perform subtle acts of racism.

That is not effective anti-racism messaging to the only meaningful target audience: most white Americans. Urging people to come together to improve society, care for each other, and right past and present injustices is a powerful appeal. But telling people, in effect, that they are bad, whether they know it or not, and they must be constantly instructed how not to be bad anymore has quite the opposite effect.

Some “anti-racism” methodology is crudely binary, almost literally Manichaean. All of reality is divided between that which is consciously, actively and primarily anti-racist as defined by this agenda, versus everything else which is, by definition and in some manner, racist.

This is absurdly reductive, effectively creating two basic categories for all social phenomena, that are really synonyms for “good” and “evil”. Race, it seems, trumps everything, even stark disparities of extreme economic stratification. Class analysis is gone, or highly subordinated.

Right-wing history suppression laws and some left-wing racialized narratives both dangerously privilege purported feelings over fact, context and intention.

The new Republican laws often purport to protect (implicitly white) students from being asked to feel guilty about past and present racial discrimination. And in many controversies on campuses or other liberal-dominated structures, the perception of the supposedly aggrieved party is also made effectively the only issue, one that practically cannot be challenged.

Both exude the distinct whiff of totalitarianism. When social systems and governance are reduced to adjudicating between feelings rather than factual claims and goal-directed propositions, judgment is, by definition, arbitrary and unaccountable, and authority derives legitimacy entirely by pandering to emotions.

In any kind of classroom, that will produce a travesty of education. School teachers and, even more, university professors cannot perform their function without provoking and sometimes even disturbing their students. Yet, American culture, both left and right now frequently seeks to shield students from aspects of reality and protect their supposed sensitivities.

Even intention or context can be obliterated from the evaluation of an allegedly offensive word or deed. Some words, images or ideas are effectively deemed so toxic that to utter them in any direct way is considered not merely offensive but punishable. For example, it is now virtually impossible for anyone, with the very contingent and partial exception of some African Americans in highly limited contexts, to write or speak the highly offensive pejorative known as the “N-word”.

As with many anti-racist errors, this began with an indispensable task. The term itself is uniquely noxious in American culture, and summarizes centuries of the most terrible oppression and vicious hatred. It is as close to dynamite as any word in American English, and must be handled with great caution.

US society badly needed, and has developed, fairly strict conventions delineating terms for respectable use of this epithet. And such norms must be enforced. However, to virtually eliminate the word altogether quickly degenerates into travesty because of its (overwhelmingly negative but considerable) cultural and historical significance.

The absurdity this can reach is illustrated by the case of Jason Kilborn, a Chicago law school professor who has been disciplined and vilified by his own university for mentioning this pejorative in a hypothetical discrimination lawsuit, by no means an unlikely scenario. The implicit assertion is that any use of this offensive, but all-to-real, word is, by definition, abusive of some students’ feelings. This infantilizes students and society and forecloses rational judgment. It reduces ethics on race to a box-ticking set of established norms and performative behaviors that are practically meaningless. At this extreme, it can start to resemble a cult with its own rituals, mantras and ever-shifting but obligatory strictures.

Consider the recent heavy use of the hateful word in open court by prosecutors at the federal hate-crime trial of the men who killed Georgia jogger Ahmaud Arbery. The case hinged on their intentions, and their long history of racist pronouncements proved it was indeed a hate crime.

Even those who support a sweeping blanket prohibition on ever uttering or writing this word in any context and with any intentions would surely allow an exception for that trial. But the existence of even such an extreme exception demonstrates that context and intention are what matter most – as long as people remain willing to think. The prosecutors used a racial slur. But “how” did they use it?

When the use of any word, stripped of context and intention, can be almost entirely prohibited, thinking is inevitably constricted, serious ethical consideration grinds to a halt, important conversations are shelved, and an automatic response replaces meaningful judgment. Many important books and films cannot, in that case, be read or taught, not to mention the extremely important genres of rap and hip-hop music.

For both left and right, strictures imposing arbitrary limits on teaching and speech – and therefore thinking – are ultimately exercises in power. Right-wing anti-teaching laws are especially dangerous. But less dramatic arbitrary coercive force is also exercised on the left without the authority of the state but by significant institutions.

Either way, these quixotic cultural crusades, both left and right, are not about teaching, equity, justice or fairness. They are really exercises in social control, and therefore, formal or informal political power. That’s the most toxic lesson of all.