On November 19, 2014, National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President & CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony appeared on The Lemonade Stand radio show and podcast with host Linda Samuels. His interview is available below.
Dr. John Duke Anthony Interview with The Lemonade Stand (.mp3)
Leaders from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE meet for the Gulf Cooperation Council’s 35th Ministerial and Heads of State Summit in Doha, Qatar. Photo: Qatar News Agency.
In a significant development at the 35th Ministerial and Heads of State Summit in Doha, Qatar, all six Gulf Cooperation Council member-states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) agreed to the establishment of a unified armed forces command. This major breakthrough is not to be confused with the quite different Dir Al-Jazeerah (Peninsula Shield). That force, based at Hafr Al-Batin in northern Saudi Arabia and established in 1984 during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, is the one that dispatched several of the member-states’ defense units to Bahrain in 2011.
The new joint military command will, prudently, be based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The kingdom, beyond being the only GCC country with strategic geographic depth other than Oman, has the largest economy and armed forces as well as a populous citizenry numerically greater than all the citizens of the other five member-states combined. It is also the site of the GCC’s General Secretariat, the largest and oldest of the pan-GCC think tanks dedicated to precisely the kinds of greater cooperation that the member-states seek to achieve, sustain, and protect.
Dir Al-Jazeerah presently consists of 4,000 land-based forces. All six countries, including those of Oman and Qatar – which over extended periods earlier had reservations regarding the force’s capabilities, readiness, overall effectiveness, and utility – are represented in the force.
Critics have frequently pointed out that the force lacks credibility. That is, one ought not to expect it to be able to protect against an invading force that is battle-hardened and better equipped, or of any significantly larger size. To view it from that prism, though, is a recipe for misunderstanding. The force’s real position and role can be likened to a neighborhood fire brigade – a metaphor, so to speak, for the kind of assistance it rendered Bahrain. It is also much more than that. Symbolically, strategically, and geopolitically it serves as an important linkage for all six countries not only to one another, but also to their friends, allies, and strategic partners further afield.
By Dr. John Duke Anthony and Dr. Imad Kamel Harb
High level delegates from about twenty countries will meet in the Bahraini capital Manama on December 5-7. They will convene to debate regional realities of defense and security. Among the unwelcome developments since last year’s gathering have been Israel’s heightened provocation, oppression, dis-possession, and ongoing denial of the rights of Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims among its citizens and those under its continuing illegal occupation. The participants are also faced with the further rise and sweep of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the Houthi advances in Yemen to the capital in Sanaa and beyond to the Red Sea and Hudeidah, the country’s second largest port; and the problematic and yet-again-extended negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
F-16 Desert Falcons from the UAE Air Force lined up during joint training with the U.S. in 2011. Photo: U.S. Air Force.
Few intelligence analysts and political and security watchers predicted that an extremist Islamist faction in Syria’s civil war would sweep with such force through northern Iraq, threaten Baghdad, and inch its way through the country’s western Anbar Province to within range of Saudi Arabia’s borders. Indeed, the confused and confusing battlefield in Syria has again proven that it can spawn the kinds of circumstances, events, and players that at once threaten to destabilize the Levant and pose what, a year ago, were then unforeseen challenges to the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf regions. Just as dangerous in the rise and advance of ISIS has become the lure, to many recruits to its ranks, of its millennial ideology and its promise to establish an unsullied Islamic Caliphate that would redress Muslim grievances.
One of the most difficult issues confronting the Manama Dialogue participants is how to address the multifaceted causative underpinnings of the threat that ISIS poses to regional stability and peace. Having the necessary military means to protect against real and imagined threats is one thing. Being able to mobilize, deploy, and effectively implement such means is another. Of the two, the latter is vexing as it is pinned to the hope of containing and countering, if not delivering a mighty body blow, to regional radicalism and violent extremism that would discredit and severely weaken the appeal of such phenomena for far into the future. That a small militant faction like ISIS, which was originally armed with only the most rudimentary weapons it had collected on the Syrian battlefield, was able to roll over a well-armed Iraqi army proved two interrelated facts that contained important lessons.
National Council Founding President Dr. John Duke Anthony, presently in Doha, Qatar, escorting a delegation of outstanding Model Arab League student leaders and their faculty advisers, wrote the following today.
I was saddened and disappointed to read about the unfortunate circumstances related to American couple Mathew and Grace Huang from Los Angeles, California. After having been imprisoned in Qatar for a year, the couple was acquitted by Qatar’s Appellate Court Judge, Abdul Rahman Al-Sharafi. In a story that appeared in the International Edition of the New York Times on December 1, 2014, the authors, in their account of what happened next, wrote, “their attempt to leave Qatar was thwarted hours later when immigration officials refused to allow them to depart Doha’s airport. In a roller-coaster day of legal ups and downs, the couple had their passports confiscated in the airport departure area.” The authors seemed to imply that the reason the American couple were not allowed to leave the country was due to either malfeasance or incompetence, or possibly both, on the part of Qatari officials. In fact, neither was the case.
It was brought to my attention that in such circumstances a minimum of bureaucratically required paperwork, which often can be processed within a matter of a few hours , must not only be completed. It must also be properly submitted, scrutinized, and verified by the appropriately designated authorities. It appears that in this case the necessary and required forms only needed to be completed and processed. This morning I was informed by a Qatari government official, whom I respect, that the needed forms are not complex, but simple and straight forward.
These important facts were omitted from the International Edition of the New York Times on December 1 and served to harm the image of the Qatar-U.S. mutually beneficial relationship. This detracts from the need to elucidate for the reader what Qatar and the United States are and have long been doing to cooperate with one another across a broad range of common needs, concerns, interests, and key foreign policy and defense objectives.
Not least among what the two allies have been addressing in a cooperative manner for quite some time is that which drives the engine of the world’s material wellbeing, namely energy; their allied hour-by-hour efforts to counter violent extremism; their extensive joint endeavors in defending the aerial and maritime arteries in the world’s most economically vital area; and their and the five other Gulf Cooperation Council countries’ geopolitically and strategically aligned efforts to achieve a secure, stable, and peaceful Gulf and nearby areas, without which there can be no prospects for sustained prosperity either in the immediate region of Qatar, its fellow GCC countries, and its neighbors, or countries further afield.
Add the one-of-a-kind range of educational and cultural ties between Qatar and the United States, and include the numerous mutually beneficial facets derived from this kind of cooperation. In the developing countries and in numerous among the industrialized countries, the benefits of these dimensions of the relationship are increasingly well known and, understandably, the envy of many. They are also hard to come by in either quite the same nature or to anywhere near the same extent elsewhere.
I was pleased to learn today in a tweet from U.S. Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith that the travel requirements have now been met and the couple can now return to the U.S. tomorrow. I hope a future International Edition of the New York Times will better explain this to its readership.
Before the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations launched its first Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference in 1991, we asked numerous policymakers a single question: “What bedevils you the most in your tasks to recommend effective policies?” The answers differed only slightly from one person to the next. A common theme running through all the responses was, and I paraphrase, the following: The “W” questions are ones that policymakers deal with all the time. In and of themselves, they are difficult enough. They include:
“What” needs to be done;
“When” does it need to be done;
“Why” does it need to be done;
“Where” will we likely be if we do this or if we do not;
“Who” needs to do it; and, sometimes even,
“Whether” something needs to be done.
But the most difficult questions of all, the ones policymakers inform us they find most vexing, are “How” questions, for these, unlike most of the others, cannot be answered with a yes or no. Rather, the answer to each comes with a cost.
With this as background, context, and perspective, there follows a series of questions relating to contemporary Arab-U.S. relations. The questions are ones that policymakers on one side or another, and sometimes both sides, grapple with daily. They are provided in the spirit of a public service. To whom? To not only the policymakers entrusted to improve Arab-U.S. relations and not make them worse. They are also offered as food for thought. Again, to whom? To intellectuals, scholars, teachers, students, analysts, investment strategists, specialists in public policy research institutes, and many others eager to enhance their knowledge and understanding of the state of play in the relations between the United States and the Arab world, and who want to improve these relations.
Dr. John Duke Anthony
Founding President & CEO
National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations
GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL: ROLE IN REGIONAL DYNAMICS
GEO-POLITICAL DYNAMICS: EGYPT & N. AFRICA
GEO-POLITICAL DYNAMICS: SYRIA, LEBANON, IRAQ, & IRAN
ARAB-U.S. RELATIONS: VIEWS FROM THE REGION
ARAB-U.S. BUSINESS, FINANCE, AND HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT
Q: How might the U.S.-GCC relationship change, if at all, with the United States easing its reliance on Middle Eastern oil in tandem with increases in America’s domestic energy supplies?
Energy consumption in U.S., China, and India, 1990-2040. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration International Energy Outlook 2013.
John Duke Anthony: Despite the hyperbolic American rhetoric about decreasing reliance upon Middle Eastern energy sources, there appears to be no major credible United States effort underway to lessen in any significant way the privileged benefits that Americans, more than any of their counterparts among other industrialized economies, continue to derive from the relationship between the United States and GCC countries – despite the economies of the latter being heavily based on oil production and exports.
For these and a host of related reasons, not the least among them being that other countries would willingly and rapidly seek to trade places with the United States were Washington to grow tired of America’s special relationships with the GCC countries and provide them an opportunity to do so, the United States simply cannot afford to lessen its multifaceted strategic relationship agreements with this region’s six member-states.
In the coming decades, while the United States may be less dependent upon the GCC countries’ hydrocarbon fuels in terms of American needs, the same cannot be said for America’s allies and much of the rest of the world. Indeed, America’s lessened energy dependence upon the GCC and other energy-exporting regions is likely to have very little if any significant impact on the continuing needs for hydrocarbon fuels of the 27 European Union countries and those of India, China, and other South Asian and East Asian countries.
In these regions, their respective prospects for economic growth are practically guaranteed to remain dependent upon GCC and other foreign energy resources. Moreover, it is likely that the world’s dependence upon the GCC countries will increase if only because the GCC as a region has the planet’s single largest portion, one-third, of the world’s total proven supply of this resource. And it will likely increase for yet another reason: for the last 41 years and counting, the GCC countries have delivered every single barrel of oil promised. In addition, because internationally exported and traded oil is fungible, as are many other strategic commodities, America’s decreased dependence on the GCC countries for the energy needs of the United States will have no discernible impact on the rest of the world’s overall needs in terms of the levels of these countries’ energy production and exports. Nor, much more importantly, will anything the United States does or does not do with regard to oil and gas fracking likely have an effect one way or another on price. The later dynamic, more than any other variable, will arguably continue to affect the health and valuation not only of America’s stock markets and security exchanges but those of other countries as well.
For these reasons and the numerous strategic advantages and associated material gains the United States in effect has no choice but to maintain as robust and effective an engagement with the GCC countries as possible. A major factor in this regard is the long lead times that would be required for one or the other parties to switch to a different strategic partner.
The ability to procure the necessary economic, political, financial, marketing, logistical, operational, and maintenance arrangements presents yet another set of challenges. For example, negotiating such arrangements to the mutual satisfaction of the parties concerned in any attempt to switch effectively from one Great Power deterrence cum defense commitment to another would entail a lengthy and costly process with ultimately uncertain consequences. This factor alone makes it difficult to foresee the GCC countries’ leaders being able to obtain an alternate international protector in the short run. Certainly it would be difficult to obtain a protector as vital as the region’s present one is to their respective domestic stability, security, and potential to attract and sustain continuous flows of direct foreign investment, important as such investments are to these countries’ prospects for prosperity.
What one also needs to recognize is the formidable power of the vested interests that exist at both ends of the GCC-U.S. relationship spectrum. These are determined not only to maintain the status quo. Each party to a current vested interest understandably intends to strengthen and expand the relationship if only to further their respective objectives regardless of what Washington officialdom does or does not do to recalibrate various dimensions of the relationship.
Only partially illustrative of the reality and prevalence of these factors is the human resources dimension of the situation. For example, tens of thousands of Americans live and work in the region. Of additional significant importance is that Americans have entered into more joint commercial ventures with GCC country companies than the citizens of any other non-GCC country. Finally, the level of American investment in these countries’ economies is second to none.
Also indicative is the growing nexus of GCC-U.S. financial arrangements and undertakings between and among American and GCC investors and bankers. These are deemed by both sides as essential to the prospects for sustained economic growth regionally as well as globally.
Beyond these factors is, on one hand, the profusion of GCC students – more than 85,000 from Saudi Arabia alone enrolled in American universities. On the other hand are the implications of the establishment of entire four-year campuses in various GCC countries of high-profile American universities. The intricacies and dynamics of these little reported on realities practically ensure an ongoing continuously robust and expanding GCC-U.S. relationship.
National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President & CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony periodically responds to questions posed by friends of the National Council for the Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC Blog. Find Dr. Anthony’s full biography here and read more from Dr. Anthony here.
Q: What aspects of U.S.-GCC cooperation are looked upon favorably by citizens of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries (the GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates)?
President George W. Bush and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah meeting at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, April 25, 2005.
John Duke Anthony: GCC citizens, almost without exception, are aware of and deeply grateful for the effective United States external defense umbrella over the GCC’s member-countries. The 1979 Access to Facilities Agreement between the United States and Oman, the four separate Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) between the United States and Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and the much older and more multifaceted defense undertakings and understandings between the United States and Saudi Arabia have arguably proven effective.
Rather than accept such a statement at face value, one would be right to ask, “By what standard?” If asked, an accurate response would be “if measured against the fact that there has not been an attack on any of the GCC countries since the agreements, understandings, and undertakings were entered into following the restoration to Kuwait of its national sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity upon the reversal of Iraq’s aggression in February 1991.”
In concept and enactment, the DCAs were not entirely original. They built upon earlier British protected-state treaties dating from the first half of the 19th century that lasted until their abrogation in 1971. Viewed together – tellingly, despite the absence of such arrangements in the period spanning two decades from December 1, 1971 to Iraq’s August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which was the one exception – the two successive international arrangements have succeeded in deterring adversaries while simultaneously strengthening and expanding the defense capacities of the GCC countries against external intimidation and attack.
In addition, the older and lower profile educational, commercial, and other private sector dimensions of the GCC countries-U.S. relationship are not only intact. In spite of general impressions implying the opposite, they are at their most robust level ever. Youth and adults alike, and especially the hundreds of thousands of GCC country graduates from American colleges and universities, remain partial to U.S. science and technology, and eager to be ongoing beneficiaries of the fruits of North American education, research, and development.
Examples include the continued provision of advanced medicines, the administration of quality health care systems and facilities, the transfer of state-of-the-art technology in the realms of information and telecommunications structures, systems, and equipment, and the utilization of American-manufactured aircraft and automobiles as well as trade in a broad range of goods and services.
Also, many GCC citizens believe the American education system, together with its related training and human resources development components and programs, are likely destined to retain their preeminent status for some time yet to come. This is in spite of the American reaction to the trauma of September 11, 2001, of course, which dealt a severe but not fatal blow to this key component of the relationship. That the worst did not occur is thanks largely to the 2005 meeting between Saudi Arabia’s then-Crown Prince Abdallah and then-U.S. President Bush in Crawford, Texas, which led to the easing of U.S. visa issuance process for students from GCC countries seeking admission to American institutions of higher education.
National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President & CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony periodically responds to questions posed by friends of the National Council for the Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC Blog. Find Dr. Anthony’s full biography here and read more from Dr. Anthony here.
Q: How is it that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries retain good relations with the United States despite regional anti-American sentiment?
U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel with fellow Gulf Cooperation Council Defense Ministers at a Defense Ministerial Meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, May 14, 2014. Hagel spoke about regional threats and challenges including Iran and Syria, and the importance of maintaining close cooperation on these and other issues in the region.
John Duke Anthony: Respectable poll after poll has revealed the extraordinary and overwhelming unpopularity of numerous American foreign policies throughout the Arab world, including the GCC region. (The GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). In the GCC countries, however, neither the nature nor extent of this unpopularity thus far has reached such a magnitude as to be crippling to either side.
A major reason has been the effective accommodation by the member-states’ leaders to the international and global geopolitical realities in play. Compelling the accommodation has been, on one hand, the ongoing joint dependency of the GCC country leaders and the vast numbers of allies and followers they maintain within their extensive and multifaceted support networks. On the other hand, the same dynamic has been in play simultaneously and to a similar degree among their American counterparts. In effect, both sides remain reliant upon the governmental and private sector goodwill of their respective citizenries regarding various strategic, economic, political, commercial, and defense issues. This fundamental and pervasive interdependency dimension of GCC-U.S. relations is what really continues to hold the two together and yet is seldom noted in published reports within the mainstream media.
Three among many interdependency examples – of the GCC countries’ reliance on and benefit from their relations with the United States, and examples simultaneously of America’s reliance on and benefit from its relations with the GCC countries – are:
The longstanding and continuing denomination of the GCC countries’ exports not in their own currencies, which would be their right, but the American dollar. This self-determined policy by all six of the GCC countries’ governments is in and of itself an incentive for these governments not to enact, administer, or otherwise engage in actions that could harm the American economy, injure its worldwide financial and banking systems (together with theirs, too), and vitiate the value of their investments in and commercial relations with the United States.
The GCC countries’ acknowledgement and admiration of America’s huge lead over all other countries in terms of investment in science, technology, research, and development, accounting for nearly a third of such spending globally.
A twofold defense linkage between the GCC countries and the United States. One linkage is reflected in the GCC countries’ dependence upon the unrivaled superiority of American-manufactured defense structures, systems, technology, and equipment. The other linkage is illustrated by their reliance upon America’s commitment not only to their deterrence against possible threats, attacks, and intimidation by their real and potential adversaries but also to their defense should deterrence fail. Viewed from either end of the GCC-U.S. relationship interdependency, such multifold and multifaceted benefits are mutual.
In spirit and in letter, many of these and related benefits to the GCC countries are enshrined in the numerous official and de facto bilateral defense cooperation agreements between them and the United States. They are embedded also in:
National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President & CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony periodically responds to questions posed by friends of the National Council for the Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC Blog. Find Dr. Anthony’s full biography here and read more from Dr. Anthony here.
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