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Gause: U.S. Trying to Soften Saudi Hard Line toward Maliki Government

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor
Interviewee: F. Gregory Gause III, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Vermont \

F. Gregory Gause III, a leading Saudi Arabia expert and political science professor at the University of Vermont, says the United States plans to sell some $20 billion in sophisticated military hardware to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States as part of a concerted effort in Washington to get the Saudis to ease their hard line toward Prime Minister Maliki’s government in Baghdad. Gause says even though Saudi public opinion does not favor a deal with Israel, the Saudis might sit at a peace conference including the Israelis if there was something concrete on the table.

During their unusual Middle East mission, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates had dinner with King Abdullah and with the Saudi foreign minister. It looks as if the Saudis are saying they’re considering upgrading their diplomatic mission in Baghdad to an embassy, but it’s still unclear what the dynamics of the U.S-Saudi relationship are. How do you sort out Saudi Arabia’s current role right now vis-a-vis American foreign policy interests?

On Iraq, the Saudis have carried out a change of policy that probably began eight or nine months ago. Up until that time, they were pretty much paralyzed on Iraq. They didn’t know what to do. They were counting on us to settle things down; they didn’t want to play their normal game of backing local parties, which in this case would have been Sunni parties. First, they were worried about the al-Qaeda effect and the blowback into Saudi Arabia. Second, these Sunni groups were killing Americans and that would have put them in conflict with Washington.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.