Pulling out of the nuclear deal has emboldened Tehran and exposed Saudi Arabia DAVID GARDNER Add to myFT Donald Trump with Mohammed bin Salman. The Abqaiq oil attacks put another dent in the credibility of the Saudi crown prince © Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save David Gardner YESTERDAYPrint this page8 Saudi Arabia’s parading of its purported military might this week to mark its independence day had an air of histrionic muscularity that, if anything, spotlighted the kingdom’s vulnerability after the spectacular September 14 missile and drone attack on the state oil company, Saudi Aramco.
The US blames the attack, almost certainly correctly, on Iran. It targeted the Abqaiq crude processing plant and a nearby oilfield and took out about half of Saudi oil production, equivalent to 5 per cent of world output. It was a devastating assault on the kingdom’s crown jewels, also one of the world’s most neuralgic oil hubs. Its audacity has left the Middle East holding its breath. Yet it looks as though, for all his bluster and bombast, US president Donald Trump may not respond militarily. It was Saudi Arabia, not the US, which was attacked. The shale oil revolution has radically reduced US dependence on oil from the Middle East. The US president seems averse to risking a conflagration going into his re-election year. And, not least, Mr Trump’s primary interest in Saudi Arabia would appear to be that it is the biggest importer of weapons in the world — and the bulk of them are American-made.
At his meetings with Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince who is the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the president is wont to hold up charts illustrating the volume and value of US arms the kingdom has contracted to buy. For now, therefore, and despite US secretary of state Mike Pompeo describing this month’s attack as “an act of war”, Mr Trump wants to tighten already-draconian US sanctions on Iran’s economy and send a small number of American troops to help with Saudi air defences. It also looks as though Mr Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran — cheered on by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as Israel — has backfired badly. The present stand-off in the Gulf stems in great part from Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw the US unilaterally from the landmark nuclear deal Iran reached in 2015 with six world powers, to mothball most of its nuclear programme and submit to outside monitoring. He reimposed sanctions with the express aim of strangling Iran’s economy by throttling its oil and gas exports. Parallel to this blockade, which the Iranian regime considers an “economic war”, Israel has taken the lead in a “shadow war” against Iranian assets and proxies across the region. Over four years, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its militia allies fighting alongside Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria’s civil war. In recent weeks, it has widened its sights to strike at Hizbollah, the Lebanese paramilitaries, in Beirut, and the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), in Iraq, a coalition of Iran-backed Shia militias.
Although it waited a year after the US withdrawal from the nuclear accord to respond (by, for example, increasing uranium enrichment above the deal’s agreed levels of volume and purity) Tehran has always stated that if it is prevented from selling its oil so will others be. Pulling out of the nuclear deal, in Trumpian fantasies, was supposed to bring Iran to heel and force it back into negotiations. These would, or such was the hope, lead to the axing of Iran’s ballistic missile programme and wrapping up of the militia networks through which it has built a Shia axis of power from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and down into the Gulf. Instead, it is hard to think of any policies that could have made the Iranian security challenge sharper.
The Islamic Republic, 40 years old, has never been more “forward leaning”, as American military strategists would say. In May 2017, at a lavish summit of Arab leaders in Riyadh, Mr Trump exhorted his Saudi hosts to lead a Sunni Arab jihad against Shia (and Persian) Iran (and claimed to have secured $110bn in arms sales to the kingdom). The idea was fanciful then and demonstrably ludicrous now. Although it emboldened Prince Mohammed to threaten to carry the fight into Iranian territory — “We will work so that the battle is for them in Iran and not in Saudi Arabia,” he bragged — US allies in the region have come up with no answer to Iran’s winning formula of militias with missiles.
Prince Mohammed, seconded by his sometime mentor, Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, cheered when their friend Mr Trump ripped up the nuclear deal — for which they had vilified his predecessor, Barack Obama. They then watched in horror as his erratic Iran policy veered towards drawing Tehran into talks. But while the Emiratis seem to have realised their vulnerability — dialling down their bellicosity towards Iran and withdrawing from the war against Tehran-backed forces in Yemen — it has taken the Abqaiq attack for the headstrong Saudi crown prince to register how exposed his kingdom is. By calling the bluff of Mr Trump and his Gulf Arab allies, Iran has taken a big gamble. We still do not know the details of how, from where and by exactly whom this attack was carried out. But it has put another dent in the credibility of Prince Mohammed, already undermined by bad luck, bad judgment and bad ideas — from the Yemen war he launched in 2015 to last year’s grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and estranged ally, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Whatever happens now, Iran has helped demonstrate that the young prince is out of his depth.