After Saudi Arabia expanded the GCC by wooing to it regional American clients, including Jordan, Iran retaliated by sending its top diplomatic personnel to Qatar and Kuwait. The tiny emirates are now being squeezed between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
The Saudi political expansion is likely to be short-lived. No amount of funding of smart proxy wars, as in Syria and Yemen, can compensate for the lack of will to fight, which the Iranians have and the Saudis don’t.
After the US helped Islamist mobs oust its allies in Egypt and Yemen, the Gulf royals would rather depend on Iran or the Saudis for survival. And they will soon realize that the Saudis cannot protect them for long. The test case is now Yemen. The Saudis can defend a minor island like Bahrain, but we believe they lack the resources to prop up the Yemeni president against the Iranian-supported insurgency.
Moreover, the Saudi royal family is in serious trouble financially: most of its investments, upward of a trillion dollars, are in the United States. In the event of unrest in Saudi Arabia requiring security forces to shoot Shiite protesters, the White House can easily slap sanctions on the Saudi rulers, especially now that the Saudi king has proclaimed that he will pursue a policy independent of the United States. Obama has already condemned the Saudis’ “repressive military action” in Bahrain, which incidentally saved the island, a large base for the US Navy, from falling to Iran.
