Saudi embrace of Assad sends strong signal to US

Once labeled a pariah, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took center stage as master of ceremonies last week when Arab states readmitted Syria to the Arab League, signaling to Washington who calls the regional shots.

His effusive greeting of President Bashar al-Assad at the Arab summit with kissed cheeks and a warm embrace defied U.S. disapproval at Syria’s return to the fold and capped a turnabout in the prince’s fortunes spurred by geopolitical realities, Reuters reported.

The prince, known as MbS, seeks to reassert Saudi Arabia as a regional power by using his place atop an energy giant in an oil-dependent world consumed by the war in Ukraine.

Shunned by Western states after the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad, the prince has now emerged as a player whom Washington can neither disregard nor disavow, but must deal with on a transactional basis.

Skeptical of U.S. promises on Saudi security and tired of its scolding tone, MbS is instead building ties with other global powers and, regardless of Washington’s consternation, remaking his relations with their shared foes.

His blithe confidence on the world stage was not only visible in his reception of Assad. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy came to the Jeddah meeting and MbS offered to mediate between Kyiv and fellow oil producer Moscow.

Saudi Arabia still depends militarily on the United States, which saved it from possible invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990, and it monitors Iranian military activity in the Gulf and provides Riyadh with most of its weapons, Reuters reported.

Still, with Washington seemingly less engaged in the Middle East and less receptive to Riyadh’s anxieties, MbS is pursuing his own regional policy with less apparent deference to the views of his most powerful ally.

“This is a strong signal to America that ‘we’re reshaping and redrawing our relations without you’,” said Abdulaziz al-Sager, Chairman of the Gulf Research Center, of the summit.

“He is not getting what he wants from the other side,” Sager added.

The Saudi pivot away from reliance on the United States was meanwhile evident when China mediated this year a settlement between Riyadh and its arch regional foe Iran after years of hostility.

The deal was not made from a position of Saudi strength: Iran’s allies had come out stronger than those of the kingdom in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and held most of the populated territory in Yemen.

Still, it showed Riyadh was able to cut its losses and work with U.S. rivals and foes to shore up its regional interests such as cooling the Yemen war where Saudi forces have been bogged down since 2015.

Meanwhile the prince has improved ties with Turkey and ended a boycott of Qatar, a neighbor he considered invading in 2017 according to diplomats and Doha officials.