Beyond Money and Diplomacy: Regional Policies of Saudi Arabia and UAE after the Arab Spring (original) (raw)
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The new dynamics that emerged after the Arab Spring have shaped the policies of countries in the region. Their traditional foreign policies changed to better respond to national interests in the region. In particular, Saudi Arabia, as an effective actor, modified its traditional positions as a result of fear of an epidemic effect on the region. In this context, this study examines the reaction of Saudi Arabia, focusing on Syria. It will also try to respond to two questions: Why did Saudi Arabia give up its traditional foreign policy, and why did it change its position from the status quo to a revisionist policy regarding the Assad regime? To seek the answers in the first step of this work, Saudi Arabia's traditional foreign policy and regional alliances will be analyzed. The second step will include the "double bind" dilemma of Saudi Arabia in its reaction towards the Arab uprising, in particular its change in posture towards Syria from remaining silent or procrastinating to supporting intervention against the Assad regime.
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After the Arab upheavals that began in 2011, Saudi Arabia became the most dominant power in the Arab world. While most of its Arab rivals experienced political and economic crises and disintegration, the Gulf monarchy began an unprecedented active and even interventionist foreign policy and increased its regional influence tremendously. Remarkably, most of this activism was not exercised unilaterally but within regional institutional frameworks, mainly of the League of Arab States (LAS) and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This article investigates how Saudi Arabia gained institutional power within the LAS. The analysis is based on the LAS decisions at the Summit level before and after the Arab uprisings with regard to Saudi Arabia’s main foreign policy interests. The purpose of the article is to examine the essence of Saudi Arabia’s regional power. It also looks at the unforeseen revitalization of the LAS and allows predictions of the future of Arab regionalism in a changing Arab world.
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In the wake of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia was considered to be amongst the countries that were untouched by popular dissent and the wave causing regime change sweeping the Arab world. Despite that, Riyadh wasn’t as bulletproof as it seemed at first and had to respond to domestic challenges and adjust to new conditions in the Gulf regional sub-system. After tackling short-term effects that could destabilize domestic politics and its immediate neighborhood, Riyadh was presented with a new geopolitical status quo that posed an opportunity in reversing Iranian influence. Ten years after the popular uprisings, Riyadh and its new Crown Prince have moved to consolidation of power, an aggressive foreign policy and renewed aspirations for regional hegemony.
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The Arab uprisings have rightfully provoked an incredible burgeoning of research projects and fuelled existing ones with new energy. Among the numerous issues the “Arab Spring” has arisen is the question of its impact on the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This paper focuses on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and aims at analyzing its response to the ambient disorder in terms of security strategies. Considering how closely interlinked Saudi foreign and security policies have always been, it is important to examine the impact of the recent regional events on Saudi security issues and interests. Together with the political realities on ground, they indeed represent the main determinants of the dynamics of the Saudi response that this paper analyzes. The idea explored in this paper is that the evolving strategic environment faced by KSA (at both regional and global levels) represents new security challenges as well as a window of opportunity to adopt more assertive foreign and security policies. This paper studies how the Arab uprisings deeply modify global security issues and related risks in the whole Middle-East and North Africa region, which represents specific pressures and security issues as well as a window of opportunity onto a new regional lead for KSA. The more assertive Saudi foreign and security policies this has led to are assessed through the “hegemonic vs. defensive” analysis and a third view is offered: the current Saudi security strategies could be read as an attempted leadership on a revived “hegemonic cooperation”. In order to test this hypothesis, the paper explores another issue: the role of geo-economic trends, associated with a perceived shift in traditional alliances and interests, in the new Saudi strategic stance. Examining the change in traditional security paradigms in the region – particularly linked to uncertainty about the future US position towards the Gulf –, the author goes through the scope of possible strategies it opens for KSA and its partners: a continued reliance on the West as ultimate security guarantee, a diversification of partnerships looking East and the development of an integrated regional security system. With regards to the latter option, possibly combined with the other two, the paper then examines how this GCC “hegemonic security cooperation” could work within what has been labelled as the “Arab Gulf Moment”. This analysis involves a development on regional antagonisms and rivalries which are likely to jeopardize this option. Finally, the author offers an outlook on the regional and global repercussions that these renewed Saudi strategies towards its security challenges could have.
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If Saudi Arabia's regional strategy involves the containment of Iran's proxies, why, under King Salman, did Saudi Arabia attack the Houthis in Yemen, but give up its attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria? I argue here that both decisions reflect Mohammed bin Salman's willingness to seek 'heterodox' solutions in foreign policy, a feature that guided Saudi foreign policy in the face of a changing decision-making unit in the Saudi regime. While MBS's influence in the case of Yemen is more easily identified, in the case of Syria this is not so straightforward. The crown prince only acquired the ability to manoeuvre Saudi policy towards Syria after consolidating his power within the regime, in 2017, and, from there, he put in place measures that, in practice, facilitated a coexistence arrangement between Saudi Arabia and Russia. In both cases, the objective was to contain the perceived Iranian advances in a scenario of reduced appetite by the United States to provide security for Saudi Arabia. This conclusion is reached through the use of a Foreign Policy Analysis approach, more specifically, the analysis of the decision-making units, to broaden and deepen the observations made from a regime security perspective.