EDITORIAL: A geopolitical shift of erstwhile long-term strategic partners will come under further severe strain after the Democrat lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced legislation requiring the removal of critical US military assets stationed in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a counter measure to the OPEC+ decision to cut production by 2 million barrels per day starting next month in November.

The proposed legislation states in no uncertain terms: “If Saudi Arabia and the UAE hope to maintain a relationship with the United States that has been overwhelmingly beneficial to them, they must show a greater willingness to work with us — not against us — in advancing what is now our most urgent national security objective: the defeat of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.” The Saudis have suggested that the US ups its own domestic supply which at present remains untapped as the cost of its extraction is higher than the cost of importing it from OPEC.

The sum of the military assets currently stationed in the kingdom and the emirates include 5,000 troops, and air defence systems such as Patriot missile batteries and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. The legislation by the three US lawmakers is no doubt in response to the anticipated rise in the price of oil in the US market come November which, in turn, is expected to negatively impact on the Democrats’ hopes of maintaining a majority in both houses of parliament in the scheduled mid-term polls the same month.

Needless to add, the Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, most recently in January this year, were intercepted with the United States Central Command (Centcom) acknowledging that the US military “engaged” two missiles aimed at Al Dhafra airbase which hosts around 2,000 US servicemen with “multiple Patriot interceptors.

” In addition, there is the possibility of regional powers taking advantage of US withdrawal to launch their bid to change the regional status quo. The key question for the Saudis in the event that this legislation is passed is whether an alternate source of providing the same level of security can be procured? While the US does have state of the art defence systems yet one would assume that these can be replaced by procuring similar systems from other countries as well as increasing the number of troops.

The US-led alliance, particularly the European Union, is at present facing massive economic pressure due to not only disruption of fuel supply from their traditional supplier, Russia, in the aftermath of sanctions after the Russia-Ukraine war, but also from their own public increasingly disgruntled at the reverberations of those very sanctions on their quality of life – sanctions that China’s President Xi criticised saying that they “would only make people suffer.

” In May this year Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, called China the “most serious long-term challenge to the international order” and compared China’s authoritarianism to US commitments to advancing democracy and human rights, a claim denounced by the Chinese Foreign Ministry as “disinformation.” About three months later in August the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan angered China, raising the temperature in that region.

There is thus overwhelming evidence of a challenge to the new international order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the emergence of China’s economic might – a period where the US was the sole superpower. However, today the over-use of sanctions that bite not only the sanctioned but also those that impose the sanctions together with a selective use of taking the moral high ground (Ukraine must be fully supported while the sustained practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa against Palestinians and the people of Kashmir for example continue to be ignored) is being challenged by other nations of the world. It is about time the West became aware of these winds of change before they take on the gale force rather than continuing to look at the world through the prism of the past.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022