Martin Indyk
16 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
ing role in the American-led order.
Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were always the
key players in Arab politics. But with Iraq
battered, Syria in chaos, and a stagnant
Egypt being whipsawed by revolution and
counterrevolution, the way was clear for
an ambitious, headstrong, and ruthless
young Saudi prince to stake his country’s
claim to Arab leadership. Coming to
power in 2015, at the age o 29, Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known
as MBS, Ärst consolidated his control
over the kingdom’s military and security
apparatus and then launched an ambitious
economic development program at
home and aggressive interventions abroad,
including a brutal campaign to suppress
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Newly exposed to Middle Eastern
diplomacy on taking oce, Trump
jumped at the short-term beneÄts Saudi
Arabia promised to deliver in both
security and economics (a $350 billion
arms deal that never materialized and the
promise o huge investments in the
United States). The young Saudi scion
soon developed a bromance with his
American counterpart, Kushner, which
led to Trump’s Ärst trip abroad, to an
Arab and Islamic summit in Riyadh in- This gathering was supposed to
facilitate greater cooperation on counter-
ing violent extremism across the region;
its sole tangible result was Trump’s
greenlighting o an Emirati-Saudi deci-
sion to blockade neighboring Qatar, a
crucial U.S. partner in the Gul because
it hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest
U.S. military facility in the Middle East.
Instead o focusing on Iran, the Saudis
had duped Trump into taking sides in a
local ideological contest, against another
American friend to boot. The result was
to split the Gul Cooperation Council,
March o this year, he issued a presiden-
tial proclamation declaring that the
Golan Heights was part o Israel. Trump
boasted that he had done something no
other president was willing to do. He was
clearly unaware that no previous Israeli
government had been willing to do it
either, knowing that it would violate a core
principle o £ Security Council Reso-
lution 242 and not wanting to reap the
whirlwind.
The cheap political gambit wasn’t even
successful. Netanyahu couldn’t secure a
majority in national elections two weeks
later and was forced to take part in
another campaign in the fall, in which he
came up short again. But Trump’s snap
decision will have lasting implications,
undermining the disengagement agree-
ment, giving Putin justiÄcation for his
illegal annexation o Crimea, and reinforc-
ing U.S. and Israeli diplomatic isolation.
The result is a Tehran now free to
establish its militias’ presence on the
Syrian side o the border—with the
blessing o Damascus, unconstrained by
the antiterrorism commitment that Hafez
al-Assad made to Kissinger all those
decades ago. Sure enough, by July o this
year, Israel was Änding it necessary to
bomb Hezbollah positions in the Golan
Heights, left with violence as its only
tool to prevent Iran from making mis-
chie there.
SAUDI STYLE
Saudi Arabia has proved to be an even
weaker reed for the United States to
lean on. Riyadh has never before sought
to lead the Arab world in war and peace.
Recognizing their country’s limitations
as a rich yet vulnerable state with a
fragile domestic consensus, Saudi rulers
have preferred to play a quiet, support-