Inflection Point (2014)

Four factors led to a fundamental change in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar’s strategic approach to proxy warfare and regional competition by mid-to-late 2014. By then, the failure to achieve victory and the quagmires in Libya and Syria had already cast serious doubt on the possibility of installing friendly governments in either country. The Obama administration’s unexpected decision to not conduct airstrikes against the Assad regime in August 2013 was a turning point in how many viewed U.S. engagement in the region’s proxy wars—a clear signal that the monarchies could not expect intervention by the United States, one of the only actors whose intervention could decisively reshape the balance on the ground. Diplomatic divisions between Qatar and its neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula had clearly reached a breaking point, most notably when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March 2014. Likewise, while these monarchies were not concerned by increasingly extreme ideologies of the groups that they and their citizens supported further away in the Levant, the rapid expansion of ISIS through much of Iraq in the summer of 2014 made it clear that there was a significant risk of blowback in the form of extremist attacks in the Arabian Peninsula.

The failure of the original strategy in Libya and Syria laid the groundwork for a shift in the Gulf monarchies’ strategy. In both countries, hopes for rapid victory gave way to ongoing quagmires with little hope for success, paving the way for the Gulf Arab governments to revisit their initial calculations of the utility of proxy intervention.

Although the Gulf states had scored a quick victory in Libya, the fragmented militia groups on the ground failed to coalesce into a coherent state. The killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate in September 2012, in an attack carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, highlighted Libya’s discord. In the run-up to elections in the summer of 2012—Libya’s first in more than 40 years—Libyans and Western observers argued about whether elections should even go forward before militias had been demobilized and reintegrated.¹ According to New York Times reporting about the election, “regional rivalries spilled out in armed assaults on polling places….Libya went to the polls with its cities still under the control of fractious militias, reeling from bloody trial feuds, and with armed protesters across the east determined to thwart the election for fear of domination by the country’s western region.”²

Likewise, while Syria’s insurgency had scored a number of tactical victories, the fragmented nature of the opposition had complicated the conflict exponentially. Approximately 6,000 different armed groups and military councils formed a continuously evolving network of more than 1,000 unique groupings on the ground.³ Fragmentation and fighting among rebel groups hindered their efforts to fight effectively and take and hold territory.

The armed opposition’s internal challenges were compounded by Iran’s intervention to shore up the regime. From 2011, Iran had provided assistance and advice to Assad’s government. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) led efforts within Syria to organize local militias. In 2013, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon Hezbollah intervened in Syria. Hezbollah assisted in the battle of al-Qusayr near the border with Lebanon, leading to the Syrian regime’s first major victory of the conflict, and then advanced deeper into Syria, helping to secure territory from northern Lebanon through Zabadani in the south.⁴ Explaining Hezbollah’s intervention in a later speech, Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah, explained that it was important to protect “a front [the Axis of Resistance] that the world wants to destroy…targeted by an American, Israeli, takfiri project.”⁵ Iran also deployed several thousand of its own regular and IRGC forces to Syria, and organized weapons and training for about 25,000 Shia fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.⁶

In a tacit acknowledgement of the increasing consensus that the Assad regime would survive the war in some form, if not with control over all Syrian territory, the Gulf states began to explore diplomatic options to normalize relations with the Assad regime in late 2018, when the UAE reopened its embassy in central Damascus. A statement from the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that “the move underscores the UAE government’s keenness to restore relations between the two brotherly countries to their normal course.”⁷

Any hopes that the United States might intervene in Syria as a counterweight to Iranian support had been dashed by 2014. The Obama administration’s refusal to carry out air strikes in 2013 convinced Gulf governments that the United States intended to draw down its presence in the region, and would not provide backing for further revisionist actions in the Middle East.

U.S. military backing had encouraged the three Gulf monarchies, whose stability and security had been an explicit U.S. geostrategic interest since the Carter Doctrine of 1980, to behave more adventurously, secure in the knowledge that the United States would step in to support them if they ran into trouble. In the late 1980s, for example, the United States had stepped in to provide protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, and deployed forces to Saudi Arabia in 1990 in the lead-up to the first Gulf War at the request of King Fahd to head off a potential Iraqi invasion.

The Obama administration’s initial reaction to the Arab Spring had already raised Gulf states’ concerns that the United States would not guarantee their security. President Obama’s public calls for Egyptian President Mubarak to step down in February 2011 signaled to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that something in the relationship was amiss. Saudi and Emirati leaders hoped that the Obama administration would take a more conservative line towards a regime they considered a key regional ally. Mubarak’s fall was “a wake-up call for the Gulf monarchies that traditional Western support could no longer be taken for granted” and that they would need to be more proactive in managing regional security.⁸

In mid-2013, the Syrian opposition, as well as Gulf governments, believed that the United States might yet step in to break the stalemate on the ground—while the Syrian opposition had made tactical gains in noncontiguous territories, it had failed to make significant territorial advances. “Some combination of a Western enforced no-fly zone or direct Western attacks against regime targets became the central goal of” the Syrian opposition, who increasingly considered western intervention to be “the only way to break the stalemate” according to Syria scholar Samer Abboud.⁹ President Obama’s now-infamous August 2012 “red line” statement led Syrian opposition groups and Arab gulf countries alike to believe that the United States would intervene directly in Syria. Indeed, these countries reportedly assured their Syrian proxies that the November 2012 elections prevented the United States from intervening immediately, but they could expect a U.S. intervention soon afterwards.¹⁰ It is also likely that NATO’s intervention in Libya shaped this expectation. As a Syrian rebel told a reporter in the summer of 2011, “It’s similar to Benghazi. We need a no-fly zone.”¹¹

The Obama administration’s decision not to go forward with airstrikes in Syria in August 2013 was therefore both unexpected and deeply frustrating to regional governments. After the Obama administration’s decision, Arab Gulf sponsors became increasingly willing to openly back more radical groups, even when they met with disapproval from Washington. Rebel fragmentation and radicalization became a vicious cycle, as militias sought to outbid each other for external support and to keep fighters from defecting to better-funded, more highly visible groups. The search for external sources of support led to increased radicalization (whether real or performative), as their leadership saw that “the more sensational their acts, the more support they would gain irrespective of their strategic importance.”¹² External actors including Qatar and Turkey were willing to back more radical insurgent groups even early on. For Saudi Arabia, which may have preferred to back more status-quo oriented militias, the need to compete led them to back more radical groups. In the fall of 2013, for example, Saudi intelligence brokered a merger between Liwa al-Islam and 42 other Islamist militias to form the Salafist Jaysh al-Islam, a major policy departure from Saudi Arabia’s prior support for the more moderate Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC).¹³ This shift suggests that the decision had at least some effect on the Gulf monarchies’ strategies in Syria.

Furthermore, U.S. policymakers’ secret engagement with Iran leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiations caused a breach in the Arab Gulf monarchies’ relationship with the United States and made them fear that the United States would no longer be decisively on their side in their regional rivalry with Iran. When details of the interim nuclear framework that the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran without GCC input first leaked in November 2013, the information triggered a hostile reaction amongst Gulf Arab leadership, especially from Riyadh, which feared that an agreement that ended international sanctions would embolden Iran’s activities in the region by providing Tehran with more resources that it could devote to supporting its regional proxies.¹⁴ When the final deal was announced, a Saudi diplomat described it as “extremely dangerous,” arguing that “if sanctions are lifted, Iran will try even harder to redesign the region.”¹⁵

The Saudis also worried that the deal could signal the beginning of a détente between the United States—their key security partner—and Iran, or even that it could signal that the United States was willing to quietly accept the existence of an Iranian sphere of influence in the region.¹⁶ As General James Mattis, former U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander, commented to a reporter, in Syria “[The Emiratis] are trying to keep us tight. Their biggest concern isn’t Iran. It’s American disengagement.”¹⁷

The apparent U.S. drawdown led the Arab monarchies to feel that they were on their own in terms of providing their own security—they would not necessarily receive assistance if their adventurism abroad went awry. This encouraged the monarchies’ leadership to focus on threats that were felt more directly via crisis management, rather than revisionist intervention. Taken together, the Obama administration’s calls for Mubarak to step down and the negotiation of the JCPOA, as well as the administration’s apparent efforts to keep the United States from becoming more engaged in the region, including rhetoric around the “pivot to Asia,” led Saudi and Emirati leaders to feel that the United States was disengaging from the region, leaving them to push back against Iran on their own.

In a 2018 interview, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed the Saudi leadership’s view of Iran as a central security threat: “I can tell you that the Iranians, they’re the cause of problems in the Middle East.”¹⁸ Additionally, instead of attending the May 2015 GCC Summit at Camp David in person, King Salman sent delegates in his place, a snub towards the Obama administration in retaliation for the agreement and what Saudi leaders perceived as a lack of adequate consultation prior.¹⁹ This was seen as one more in a growing number of indications that the United States was reconsidering its role in the region and possibly disengaging.

Growing division among the Gulf states was another driver of the shift in approach. The GCC countries were not on the same page in terms of their strategic aims, a fact that became abundantly clear once arguments typically kept behind closed doors erupted into an open diplomatic dispute in 2014.²⁰ In both Libya and Syria, a shared general aim of overturning the regime gave way to competition between the Saudi-UAE and Qatar-Turkey axes, as described in the previous section.

The intra-GCC tension manifested soon after the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak, an ally of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was replaced by Muslim Brotherhood-supported President Mohammed Morsi in 2012. Morsi’s election victory “tilted the regional balance of power towards Qatar’s Islamic and activist networks,” as Marc Lynch, who directs George Washington University’s Middle East Studies program, put it.²¹ Qatar invested substantially in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, providing an estimated $8 billion in aid.²²

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were troubled by the fall of Egyptian president Mubarak and by the rising political fortunes of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose calls for elections and accountability to domestic populations were anathema to these leaders. With the largest population in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also viewed Egypt as critical to an effective Sunni coalition to counter Iran.²³

In July 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup that removed Morsi’s government, and within 24 hours Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait pledged about $12 billion in financial assistance and energy supplies to Sisi’s new government.²⁴ Between June 2013 and 2015, these three countries provided Egypt with more than $29 billion in cash deposits to the central bank as well as oil shipments and investments.²⁵

The visible competition in Egypt was matched by submerged fault lines within the GCC over Libya, Syria, and the future of political Islam in the region writ large, and by 2014, these tensions had reached a breaking point. As a demonstration of their deep-seated resentment towards Qatar’s regional policies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March 2014, initiating an intra-GCC crisis.²⁶ The diplomatic break was quickly followed by several demands, including that Qatar stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and curtail Al Jazeera’s oppositional coverage of the Sisi regime.²⁷ After nine months of negotiations, Qatar made some concessions; most notably, several Muslim Brotherhood members who were living in exile were expelled from Qatar. The GCC ambassadors returned in November 2014, but the underlying divisions in the three states’ regional policies were far from resolved.²⁸

Finally, a renewed threat from Iran and ISIS encouraged Gulf governments to focus on preserving the status quo across the region rather than doubling down on their revisionist wagers, particularly in Syria.

At first, this growth occurred within the context of the quagmires that had developed in Syria and Libya. The increasingly fragmented nature of these conflicts had given Gulf monarchies’ opponents—Iran and ISIS—the opportunity to make significant gains since 2011. In the summer of 2014, ISIS’ dramatic military gains across Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, as well as government advances in Aleppo, put the Syrian opposition in an increasingly dire position. In September 2014, a Carter Center analysis noted that “Though the opposition has shown itself capable of making consistent gains in southern Syria and in the central Idlib and Hama governorates, these limited advances, particularly in the north, will be difficult to maintain if the Islamic State succeeds in cutting vital supply routes from Turkey, and the government maintains control of the skies.”²⁹

Already in early 2014, ISIS was extending its influence from Syria back into Libya, where many of its foreign fighters had come from.³⁰ In Libya, the local ISIS affiliate captured the city of Sirte in early 2015;³¹ since then, a U.S. campaign of airstrikes and special-operations personnel based in Misrata fought the remaining ISIS cells that had fled Sirte and reconstituted.³²

The threat of ISIS’ growing strength was not limited to the battlegrounds of Syria and Libya. The Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, saw ISIS as a direct security threat,³³ because of its potential to develop cells on the peninsula. In May 2014, the Saudi government uncovered several organized cells that allegedly had links to ISIS, and ISIS affiliate Wilayat Najd conducted suicide bombings in May 2015 in Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, heightening these fears.³⁴ Writing in state-affiliated media site Al Arabiya, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, an editor with a close relationship to the Saudi regime, wrote in a column titled “ISIS Has Reached the Border of Saudi Arabia,” that in Syria, Saudi Arabia had “two rivals which we cannot take sides with: Assad and Maliki’s sectarian governments on one side, and ISIS and its terrorist affiliates on the other.”³⁵ Likewise, the UAE saw ISIS as a threat: prominent Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla argued in 2014 “We have some of our best men and women [flying sorties for the coalition], and I think rightly so….We should be at the forefront of fighting ISIS. Our values are at stake.”³⁶

At the same time, Iran began to pose a growing threat beyond the borders of its longtime partner Syria. On Saudi Arabia’s southern border, the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in September 2014, sparking another round of regional proxy conflict. Saudi Arabia had a recent history of enmity with the Houthis, having fought them briefly across the border in 2009 through 2010.³⁷ But from the Saudi and Emirati perspective, the Houthi advance was also Iran’s success. Tony Blinken, then Deputy Secretary of State, stated that when he traveled to Riyadh to meet with Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) at the beginning of the coalition intervention, MbS explained that “his goal was to eradicate all Iranian influence in Yemen.”³⁸

Iran was not shy about embracing this frame. After the Houthi coup in Sanaa in September 2014, Iranian member of Parliament Ali Reza Zakani said that Sanaa was the fourth Arab capital to fall under Iranian influence, in addition to “the three Arab capitals who are already a subsidiary of the Iranian Islamic revolution,” referencing Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus.³⁹ Saudi and Emirati officials saw this kind of statement as an expression of Iran’s intention to use its proxy relationship with the Houthis to expand their influence in the Gulf. Now, instead of the Arab Spring creating opportunities far from the peninsula, its fallout was opening new Iranian fronts on the peninsula itself that required management.