The old Bush-style diplomacy seemed to reassert itself over the weekend when it emerged the United States is planning a major expansion of military aid to Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf allies including the deployment of anti-missile defences on ships in the Gulf and on land in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. It also involves speeding up arms sales and rapidly upgrading defences for oil terminals and key infrastructure to thwart attacks by Iran or al Qaeda.
The initiatives, including a US-backed plan to triple the size of a 10,000-man protection force in Saudi Arabia, are part of a broader push that includes unprecedented co-ordination of air defences and expanded joint exercises between the US and Arab militaries. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are leading a region-wide military build-up that has resulted in more than $25 billion in US arms purchases in the past two years alone.
The move, taking up where President Bush left off, is a response to Iran’s rebuff of President Obama’s six months of diplomatic overtures over its nuclear arms programme. Iranian stalling has compounded concerns arising from the recent identification of a secret nuclear plant underground near Qom and suspicions that there are other clandestine facilities.
The US is struggling, and may not succeed because of the Chinese, to get an agreement at the UN Security Council on further sanctions, but there are regional fears among US allies and Israel that these would do little to deter Tehran anyway.
The timing is unfortunate – Mr Obama’s decision will be a welcome propaganda coup for the Iranian leadership of President Ali Khamenei and prime minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which has justified its brutal crackdown as a response to an “international conspiracy” against Iran. Evidence of the latter is scarcely what the opposition needs ahead of a major rally on February 11th to mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution.
But the US administration also has to play a delicate balancing game in which restraining Israel and reassuring Arab allies may be as important as the dangers of inflaming the internal Iranian dynamic.
It would also be wrong to characterise the Obama initiative as simply a continuation of Bush’s significantly more aggressive strategy. Mr Obama’s intention in building up the region’s defences is clearly to send a strong signal to Tel Aviv that a direct strike against Iran, either by the US or Israel itself, is both unnecessary and would be deeply politically counterproductive. It would prove so not only in Iran itself and its allies in Lebanon and Iraq, but also in the region more widely, in potentially destroying the goodwill of sympathetic Arab states whose public would be outraged by an attack on Iran.
Part of the rationale is also to strengthen anti-proliferation arguments within Arab states tempted to say that they too need their own nuclear programme to respond to either Iran or Israel.