Suddenly, Saudi diplomacy has gone into over-drive. In the space of a few weeks, the kingdom has held a string of meetings with its regional arch-rival Iran, culminating in a summit between the Saudi king and the Iranian president. It has brokered the Mecca agreement between the warring Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah. And it has revived the Arab-Israeli peace initiative of 2002, which had long gathered dust, ahead of the Arab summit which it is hosting on 28 March.
What’s going on? Why have the ruling Saudi princes abandoned their traditionally cautious, low-profile diplomacy for a much bolder, high-stakes game? The short answer is that the Middle East, accustomed though it is to crises of every kind, is an unprecedented state of disarray. The region now confronts three actual or potential civil wars -- in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine – and in each of them the Saudis detect an unwelcome Iranian hand. Adding an ugly coloration to regional disputes and rivalries, a new sectarianism – pitting Sunni Arabs against the Shi’ite Persians -- has entered Middle East political action and discourse.
The Saudis sense, correctly, an Arab leadership deficit. Egypt is no longer the dominant Arab player it once was. The Syria of Bashar al-Assad – weakened and ostracised in the Arab world, clinging to its odd but enduring alliance with non-Arab Iran – is a pale shadow of the Syria of his father Hafiz. So who but the Saudis can enter the vacuum? Eager to do so is the kingdom’s veteran trouble-shooter Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador in Washington and now the national security adviser in Riyadh. Bandar is now seeking to play the role of an Arab Kissinger, shuttling endlessly between world capitals – and keeping his cards close to his chest. He has been active in trying to reconcile the Palestinian factions; in efforts, so far unsuccessful, to end the political standoff in Lebanon; and in discreet contacts with the Israelis.
But Bandar’s individualistic style of operating poses its own problems. It has added a new twist to the familiar question of who, among the Saudi policy-makers, really decides. Bandar and the foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, are both close advisers to King Abdullah; at any given moment, both must compete for his ear. Bandar’s direct dealings with the Bush administration in Washington were a factor in the abrupt resignation of Saud’s brother, Prince Turki al-Faisal, as ambassador in Washington.
Over and above issues of personality, Saudi diplomacy suffers from a number of handicaps. The Arabian kingdom is oil-rich but militarily weak; its traditional reliance on cheque-book diplomacy is of limited value in the region’s current parlous state. Second, its position as a conservative Sunni power is a liability as well as an asset. While it gives the country a certain authority (which proved helpful in mediating between the Palestinian factions), it tends to lock the kingdom into an inevitable sectarian rivalry with Shi’ite Iran – despite Saudi fears that Sunni-Shi’ite friction is an acute danger for the region.
Third, the kingdom depends on the United States as its guardian-of-last-resort, yet that very dependence opens it up to the charge of being a lackey of the American superpower. This, in the end, is the nub of the Saudi dilemma. It can to a certain extent, as the nimble Bandar has demonstrated, create a certain freedom of manoeuvre for itself in its regional foreign policy. (A good example is the Mecca agreement, where the commitments made by Hamas fell far short of Washington’s demands.) But at the same time the Saudi princes are deeply fearful that they may end up paying a high price for American policies – if, as seems possible, the Bush administration fails to break the Arab-Israeli deadlock, adopts a confrontational stance towards Iran and, most crucial of all, proves unable to prevent Iraq becoming a failed state.
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