Statement from Dr. John Duke Anthony, Founding President and CEO, National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations; Member, Secretary of State Kerry’s Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy and its Subcommittee on Sanctions; and Adjunct Professor, Defense Institute of Security Assistance Management; on occasion of the C3 Summit 2013 in New York.

Wael Fakharany, Ransel Potter, and other distinguished speakers and guests, I am honored to have been asked once again to address you at this second annual C3 Summit in New York. I am also pleased to be asked to identify an opportunity largely overlooked by the rest of the world and especially by many in the United States that will continue to have an extraordinary impact on global affairs. Such an opportunity is the little known but growing and increasingly formalized American relationship with the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member-countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The GCC and its members arguably represented such an opportunity from the beginning of its establishment in May 1981. Certainly, the region they inhabit then as now is the one area more than any other on the planet to which the United States has mobilized, deployed, and led an internationally concerted coalition of the world’s armed forces three times in the last quarter century.

Even so, and despite the GCC countries wishing it were otherwise from the outset, and despite also the European Union (EU) and its member countries taking advantage of the opportunity practically from the beginning, often at America’s expense despite the latter’s economic and strategic comparative advantage, the United States mainly failed to do so.

Instead, for reasons arguably anchored in the deep-rooted and pervasive American negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, and an undeclared suspicion of the potentially controversial use to which the extraordinary resources of such a collectivity might one day be put, one set of American Executive and Legislative Branch leaders after another paid little heed to the Riyadh-based GCC General Secretariat. Neither did Washington officialdom take seriously or respond credibly and respectfully to the members’ various overtures to try and place their relationship with world’s strongest power, and vice versa, on the firmest foundation possible.

Now, however, this has largely changed. At least on the economic and strategic fronts as they relate to America’s and the GCC’s respective quests for greater regional and global security and stability, and the respective potential for increased prosperity at both ends of the relationship, there is the end of an error and the beginning of an era quite unlike any before.

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Yesterday marked another significant event in the evolution of the U.S. relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. GCC Foreign Ministers, GCC Secretary General Dr. Abdul Latif Bin Rashid Al Zayani, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met in New York for the Third Ministerial Meeting of the U.S.-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum. The forum was established in March 2012 “to deepen strategic cooperation and coordination of policies to advance shared political, military, security, and economic interests in the Gulf region, foster enhanced stability and security throughout the Middle East, and strengthen the close ties between the GCC and the United States.”

National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President and CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony, the only American to have been invited to each of the GCC’s Ministerial and Heads of State Summits since the GCC’s inception in 1981, remarked that: “This meeting represents another significant step toward placing the relationship between the U.S. and the GCC on a more solid and enduring foundation. The growing U.S. awareness of the GCC is vital. It is hard to imagine an organization, geographically significantly larger than all of Western Europe combined, that has a larger global reach — in terms of its internationally-oriented policies and positions, in terms of its actions and attitudes — regarding its members and billions of other people’s issues, regarding its members and billions of other people’s legitimate needs and concerns, and regarding its members and billions of other people’s legitimate interests and national development processes as well as foreign policy objectives.”

Dr. Anthony added that, “[l]est one regard the GCC as a still evolving and relatively insignificant entity when it comes to major matters of importance and interest to the world, one need only ponder the following. For example, the GCC, in cooperation with the League of Arab States, the United States, and NATO, played a formidable transitional role in the situation in Libya in 2011; the GCC countries were the first to pledge billions in economic stabilization support, humanitarian aid, and developmental assistance to Egypt’s massively impoverished people; the GCC’s central role — personally and especially that of GCC Secretary General Dr. Al Zayani — in brokering the peaceful transition in Yemen’s presidential power in 2011; and the GCC’s extraordinary example of monetary, fiscal, and overall financial and economic stability from 2008 onwards despite the economic upheavals in practically every place else in the world.”

Posted below are links to remarks by Dr. Abdel Aziz Abu Hamad Aluwaisheg, GCC Assistant Secretary General for Negotiations and Strategic Dialogue, made at the National Council’s 21st Annual Policymakers Conference on Arab-U.S. relations on October 26, 2012, along with the full text of a Joint Communique issued following the Third Ministerial Meeting for the U.S.-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum September 26, 2012 in New York.

Remarks from Dr. Abdel Aziz Abu Hamad Aluwaisheg at the 21st Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference:

• Watch via the C-Span Video Library
• Read the transcript (.pdf)
• Listen to the podcast (.mp3)

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