A US soldier in front of a Patriot surface-to-air missile battery at Prince Sultan Air Base in Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia, in 2020. (Credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP)
The meeting could have gone unnoticed. On Wednesday, officials from the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) met in Riyadh to discuss defense and cooperation. In the current context, the announcements were closely scrutinized.
For months, the war in Gaza has activated the “axis of resistance,” which threatens international maritime trade with repeated attacks by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as regional stability, while Iran directly attacked Israel in retaliation for strikes on its consular annex in Damascus, only to receive a response from Israel a few days later.
This situation could rapidly slide towards a regional conflagration and destabilization, which the Gulf states and the United States want to avoid at all costs. While Washington has been rather shy about getting directly involved in the defense of its Gulf partners in recent years, the Pentagon is now making it known that it intends to help strengthen and expand its defense systems.
'A decisive moment'
Announcing two working groups, one on maritime security and the other on air and missile defense, a senior US Defense Department official said in a briefing on Monday that the focus would be on the Yemeni group's activities at sea and the aftermath of April 13. That evening, Teheran launched an attack of unprecedented scale and scope, directly targeting Israeli territory with more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles. “A decisive moment for the Middle East,” said the American official, recalling the collaboration put in place to defend Israel, involving intelligence sharing on the part of several Gulf countries, according to several media outlets.
It is this cooperation that the United States would like to endorse while increasing the range of regional air defenses. Washington hopes to integrate the various national systems to provide earlier warnings in the event of an attack. A way of deterring new Iranian offensives, and at the same time reassuring its Arab partners.
Although they have always feared being on the front line in the event of a direct confrontation with Iran, the Gulf monarchies have nevertheless initiated a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic to prevent such a scenario. The Saudi kingdom normalized relations with its former rival in March 2023 with the surprise signing of a Beijing-sponsored agreement. In this context, the American presence in the region, considered an essential threat by the Iranians, becomes as embarrassing as it is reassuring for its Arab allies.
Saudi Arabia, like the United Arab Emirates, has reportedly restricted Washington's use of its territory to carry out strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Nevertheless, the Pentagon is considering withdrawing part of its fleet from the region in the coming months, leaving its partners to ensure maritime security in its place. With this in mind, the United States wants to encourage the Gulf States to develop their surveillance and patrol capabilities at sea. Another way of delegating responsibility for security.
Regional security plan
The idea is not new: In July 2022, US President Joe Biden toured the Middle East with a proposal for a new regional security architecture under his arm. Following on from the efforts of his predecessors, notably Donald Trump, to create an anti-Iranian front including Israel, which led to the signing of the so-called Abraham normalization agreements in 2020 with the Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, Biden also intends to rally the region's heavyweight, Saudi Arabia.
The fact remains that, while Riyadh is seeking a bilateral security pact that would set in stone the defense of the kingdom by the United States in the event of an attack, until now the White House would not consider this option without the attached component of normalization with Israel. By Washington's own admission, Tel Aviv's refusal to make the slightest concession on the Palestinian question could help to remove this possibility. For Arab countries, whose populations tend to stiffen at the mention of Israel, the possible use of Israeli technologies in the regional defense system has been left unclear on the American side.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.