Riyadh's Bad Influence on Washington

“I express today our condolences to our brothers in Egypt, as a leadership and people, for what happened in the past days,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said at a meeting in Riyadh Sunday in response to the brutal attack on a Sufi mosque in the Sinai Peninsula that killed more than 300 people. “Today we are sending a strong message that we are working together to fight terrorism,” he continued. “Today we affirm that we will pursue terrorism until it is eradicated completely.”

This is not the only grave risk inherent in U.S. entanglement with Saudi Arabia. As the name suggests, the IMCTC alliance is in theory devoted to opposing terror, an example of the sort of regional self-responsibility that offers a better shot at stability in the Middle East—not ideal as political goals go, but certainly preferable to the chaos of the Islamic State and its fellows—than another decade and a half of U.S. military meddling can muster. In practice, however, the IMCTC functions as one side of the larger Sunni-Shiite conflict, leading critics to suggest the group is more interested in fighting Iran and its Shiite friends than terrorist groups like ISIS.

That is certainly a portion of the dynamic in Yemen, which is at least in part a proxy war between Riyadh and Tehran that has rained disaster on Yemeni civilians and, in a grim irony, actually strengthened Al Qaeda. And it is, recall, a proxy war the United States makes possible with intelligence sharing, advice, naval blockade, fuel for air raids, and weapons sales. The advantage for Saudi Arabia here is evident; the benefit for the United States is not. On the contrary, this is the sort of partnership students of World War I and its domino alliances will find all too familiar, as it poses a real—though, thankfully, at present distant—possibility of great power conflict between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and their respective allies, on the one hand, and Russia, Iran, Syria, and their allies on the other.

This regional Sunni-Shiite conflict is not the United States’ war to wage. It has cultural roots Washington self-evidently does not understand, and it is far from obvious that Saudi Arabia—which has been credibly accused of war crimes in Yemen—is deserving of American support. Insofar as it supports the Saudi-led proxy war in Yemen, Washington is serving Riyadh, not the public it is supposed to represent.

More broadly, as military historian Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich has argued, for the United States to continue our fight for control of the Middle East is neither necessary nor wise. “The tendency to see the region and Islamic world primarily as a problem that will yield to an American military solution” is central to the failings of the United States’ post-Cold War approach to foreign affairs, Bacevich writes. “To an unseemly and ultimately self-destructive degree, we have endorsed the misguided militarization of U.S. foreign policy,” he adds, and as “a consequence, we have allowed our country to be pulled into the impossible task of trying to ‘shape’ the region through martial means.” That is a delusional project, and insofar as our Saudi alliance encourages it, the partnership is detriment to our defense.

Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities. She is a weekend editor at The Week and a columnist at Rare, and her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, Politico, Relevant Magazine, The Hill, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.