As the Wall Street Journal has noted, the de facto rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, appear to be pressuring the Biden administration over the oil issue to get more support for their devastating war in Yemen. Both men have declined to speak by phone with President Biden in an attempt to draw U.S. attention to the quid pro quo they are seeking — more oil output for more arms and assistance in fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen.
Closer U.S. military relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE pose serious human rights issues, which should be reason enough to cut off U.S. military support. But cozying up to these regimes also undermines U.S. security interests in the Middle East and beyond. The war in Yemen has stoked anti-U.S. sentiment there and destabilized that country in ways that may create an opening for a resurgence of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The UAE has supplied weapons to the forces of Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, and has launched drone strikes there that have killed scores of civilians. This reckless behavior by U.S.-armed allies not only diminishes the United States’s reputation and influence in the greater Middle East, but it also threatens to pull us into more conflicts there at a time when we should be reassessing our military footprint in the region.
Venezuela , long time enemy of USA, is suddenly kosher though
ReplyDeleteThe Hill misses the most important but inconvenient points - the Arabs are pissed off that Biden wants to turn Iran into the regional power and give it billions of dollars and a free pass to building nukes.
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