Libya has bared an uncomfortable truth to Saudi King
Abdullah (pictured right above), Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, Kuwaiti Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad
Al-Jaber Al-Sabah (left), and the rest of the petro-autocrats of the world:
When politically expedient, Washington will help to push
you out of power.
This sounds obvious, but it's not how it was supposed to
be. The United States has been allies with many such leaders as part of Pax
Americana. For the most part, this hasn't seemed cynical, but realistic --
factually speaking, the United States and the rest of the West and the world require
oil; there are diplomatic missions that only an Arab king or sheikh can fulfill;
and the balance of power includes the support of autocratic leaders. Even the
peace with Col. Moammar Qaddafi was well-intentioned -- he has considerable blood
on his hands, but back in 2003 there was
hope he had opted to reform; the most prevalently voiced opinion was that he
was a potential template of the new possibilities of the age.
Much of this portrait is different now because of the
Arab Spring, under replacement by an as-yet unestablished new set of rules. In
the United States, there is an understanding that petro-realpolitik must change
because one can no longer be sure that the Emir sitting confidently before you
will be there next year, or even next week. In the petro-states, there is an
understanding that the long-standing alliance-of-interests underpinning one's
relationship with the United States can be much shorter-lived than one originally thought.
Hence, no one should be surprised when hearing of an unprecedented
breach between the United States and Saudi Arabia -- as we've
discussed, the Saudis have played a highly constructive role on behalf of
U.S. economic and political interests around the world, but the truth is that there
simply is not much support in the United States for families that treat their
nation's wealth as a personal treasure trove. From the Saudi side, why should one
go out of one's way for a superpower that so rapidly discards its friends?
But another reason for the transformation is local
politics. Real-life diplomacy attempts to put nuance in relationships.
Diplomats try to advance their nation's strategic interests -- such as the need
for oil -- and leave their personal opinions about other leaders' political predilections
unstated. But for American diplomats, this practice has been made untenable by partisan
politics, in which a wing of elected leaders is eschewing the wink-nod-and-arm
approach to siding with rebel causes -- not to mention ignoring the unique localized
nature of the Arab Spring -- and demanding that the United States itself forcibly
remove Qaddafi. The Arab themselves do
not like Qaddafi, and voted publicly in favor of a no-fly zone. But that is
different from the actual materiel support for Libyan rebels being discussed in western capitals. The blunt public language being used by American politicians has lifted the
veil on the fiction that the U.S. actually prefers rapacious, power-hungry,
megalomaniacal and delusional leaders. It has made it harder to calibrate U.S.
interests among the various petro-leaders according to their very differing set
of circumstances. This simply is not a nuanced age.
What does this mean? One thing is that the United States
is now viewed with quite a bit of suspicion among the world's petro-autocrats. It
will be more difficult to establish quids-pro-quo of security for oil, which
could strengthen China's hand. This will be the case for quite some time, as
the whole stretch of leaders is not going to fall at once.
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