Reaction from officials and analysts after last week’s U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting indicate that President Obama’s outreach to leaders helped to shore up the U.S.-GCC alliance.
“The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) may not have gotten what they wanted from the Obama administration this week, but they appear to have gotten some of what they need,” journalist Barbara Slavin writes in Al Monitor. Slavin quotes GCC Assistant Secretary-General Abdel Aziz Abu Hamad Aluwaisheg as saying the summit “exceeded the expectations of most of us” by reassuring GCC states of an “‘unequivocal’ commitment to their security. President Barack Obama also stressed, Aluwaisheg said, that an impending nuclear deal with Iran does not represent a ‘pivot’ toward Tehran,” Slavin writes.
Deputy Crown Prince and defense minister Mohammed bin Salman meets with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon in Washington. Photo via SPA.gov.
In addition to reassurances, some hard actions were agreed upon, including a collective U.S.-GCC ballistic defense shield, as outlined in a White House annex following the meeting.
“There is one truly important theme. The ritualistic statements do include a clear and continuing U.S. commitment to a strategic partnership with the GCC and Arab Gulf, and U.S. efforts to make it clear America will not somehow turn away from its Arab partners and ‘normalize’ relations with Iran in ways that ignore the many other threats Tehran poses to the region,” writes Gulf expert Anthony Cordesman from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“The U.S. came very close to saying it will treat the GCC states in much the same way as Article treats NATO – a statement reinforced later and equally directly by President Obama in a press conference….At the same time, The U.S. was careful to ensure that the Joint Statement referred to the “territorial integrity” of the GCC states, and did offer or imply the kind of open-ended guarantee to respond to Iranian and other third party actions outside their territory that that some GCC states may want to describe as aggression,” Cordesman writes.
