Every so often, I get annoyed with people I generally respect. Today Matt Yglesias annoyed me, although, to be fair, it was part of a sullen-but-sensible post about Libya. He began, “So I guess I agree with Jon Chait that the fact that the U.S. isn’t using its influence over the Saudi or Bahraini governments to halt the killing of non-violent protestors there isn’t a reason to decline to intervene in Libya.”
Hmm. More and more observers are noting that Saudi Arabia has openly split with the United States and no longers considers itself a client state. We also know that President Obama effectively ordered the Bahrainis to stop shooting protestors the first time out, and that Secretary Gates told them that they would have to give parliament real power. Bahrain seemed to be following our lead until recently, when with Saudi support they reversed direction and cracked down.
Yesterday, the U.S. openly told both the Bahraini and Saudi governments that they are “on the wrong track. There is no security answer to this.” Presumably right now, a few days into the crackdown, the U.S. is considering out a menu of carrots and sticks to lay before the government in Manama. And normally we would have a lot of leverage. The problem is, with the Saudis against us, it hard to see what levers would be effective ... and it is easy to see some that would be downright counterproductive.
Obviously, he must think that there is something else besides diplomatic pressure that we can do right now that would be neither ineffective nor counterproductive. But what could that be? Honest question: from where I sit, it looks like our imperial contr ... er, influence has ebbed considerably. If that’s correct, then our best hope is to (correctly!) persuade the Bahraini monarchy that the crackdown is against their own best interest.
This sort of sullen refusal to admit the limits of American power bugs me. Matt Yglesias generally does a great job of puncturing American myths about our good-will and omnipotence. Here, though, he seems to be buying into them, but that may just be because I am missing the lever that Washington should be pulling.
Any ideas?
Well, I'm not sure about Bahrain, but a lot of the KSA's military kit is American. Granted, it's a nuclear option, but the U.S. can always gently remind the Saudis how long all of those nifty M1A1s, F-15s, etc. would last without the necessary maintenance parts. Heck, it worked with Egypt.
Posted by: Andrew R. | March 19, 2011 at 09:03 PM
It worked in Egypt but the parallel doesn't hold. First, the Egyptian military was a separate force from the government. The Saudis have done a lot to insure that isn't the case in that country. Second, the Egyptian military didn't feel that the protestors posed an existential threat; the Saudi leadership feels differently about the situation in Bahrain.
So I'm not sure that it would work against the Saudis. The Bahrainis on their own, possibly --- as long as you could convince the monarchy that constutionalism did not mean death --- but not Riyadh.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | March 19, 2011 at 10:14 PM
One of the things I've noticed about Yglesias and Klein is that as they've gotten older they've become less prone to heterodoxy on certain points as they move toward being fixtures of The Village.
I doubt we could really coerce the Saudis back out, even over material for their nifty US kit. The Egyptian military is much larger than the Saudi military, and politically close to, but independent from, the state. The Saudi military is designed with an eye towards the military coups of the 1950's. Further, the Saudis can threaten the price of oil, which the Egyptians could not.
Beyond economic and material leverage, it's pretty clear that the Saudis view situations in which Arab Shi'a gain political agency to be an existential threat (which is why Saudi money backs Sunnin insurgents in Iraq and why they bombed North Yemen at various points). So getting the Saudis to get out would be really hard. If the Bahraini PM could be isolated with his clique, I'm sure the US swing reform, but as long as he's free and in power, he's a serious problem
Posted by: Luke the S | March 20, 2011 at 07:17 PM