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Saudi king's visit to Russia heralds shift in global power structures
Saudi king's visit to Russia heralds shift in global power structures
(about 13 hours later)
Russia will host its first visit by a Saudi monarch on Thursday, in an attempt to seal an alliance that would confirm Moscow as a major independent force in the Middle East capable of shaping worldwide oil prices and the outcome of regional conflicts such as those in Syria and Libya.
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman opened his historic four-day visit to Moscow by signalling a new era of cooperation with Russia, but demanding that Iran, an ally of the Kremlin, end its “interference” in Middle East politics.
With diplomatic alliances shifting across the Middle East, Moscow hopes that King Salman’s historic four-day visit will show that Moscow can forge close alliances with all the key Middle East players, including Turkey, Iran and now Saudi.
King Salman called for any peace settlement in Syria to ensure that the country remained integrated, but he did not repeat the longstanding, and now shelved, Saudi call for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to stand aside.
Only two years ago, the idea of a Saudi monarch visiting Moscow would have seem far-fetched, as Moscow and Riyadh have opposed each other for decades on every major regional conflict, from Afghanistan to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The visit to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Thursday is the first by a ruling Saudi monarch to Moscow and is widely seen as a potential turning point in Middle East politics, and even the conduct of world oil markets.
But the two sides have decided to end their animus, and in a round of meetings will sign commercial deals, coordinate on oil prices, and discuss a potential peace settlement in Syria, including the future role of Iran, now that it seems clear that President Bashar-al Assad is not going to be deposed.
More than 15 cooperation agreements worth billions of pounds were signed, ranging from oil, military and space exploration, leading the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, to claim the visit marked the moment when Saudi-Russian relations “reached a new qualitative level”. In one of the most remarkable deals, the Saudis said they would purchase the Russian S-400 defence system.
As many as 100 Saudi businessmen are accompanying the King to Moscow and a £1bn joint oil investment fund is due to be agreed.
Many of the agreements covering Saudi investment in the Russia energy markets are hardly likely to strengthen the impact of EU and American sanctions over Russia’s interference in Ukraine. But Saudi Arabia is keen that the visit also secures a more permanent Russian cooperation over oil prices after a January agreement between the world’s two largest oil producers managed to stabilise oil prices.
The Saudis, normally heavily dependent on US goodwill and oil consumption , have tended to shy away from an ambitious foreign policy, focussing narrowly on the country’s opposition to Shia Iran. But over the past few years, increasingly wary of American reliability, the Saudis have started to diversify their diplomatic alliances, including building contacts with forces with which it had previously refused to have dealings, such as Shia figures in Iraq. In recent months, Saudi, the region’s Sunni powerhouse, has hosted Muqtada al-Sadr, the influential Shia cleric. Riyadh and Baghdad have also said they will open the Arar border crossing for the first time in 27 years.
Saudi Arabia wants to prolong the oil agreement, which curbed production and raised prices. Speaking in Moscow, the Saudi energy minister, Khalid Al-Falih, said the January agreement “had breathed life back into Opec” and made his country more optimistic about the future of oil. “The success of this collaboration is clear,” he said. Russia is not a member of Opec, but badly needs oil prices to rise to rescue its ailing economy.
Much of the new activism is being driven by the king’s modernising and ambitious son, Crown Prince Mohammed Ibn Salman, the de facto orchestrator of Saudi’s high-risk foreign policy, including the military intervention in Yemen, and the trade boycott of Qatar, its onetime partner in the Gulf Co-operation Council.
The Saudis have traditionally seen the US as its chief – if not exclusive – foreign policy partner, but changes inside the Saudi regime, as well as Saudi fears about US reliability, have left the kingdom looking to diversify into wider set of alliances.
The change has partly been forced upon Saudi due to the successful Russian-orchestrated advance by the Assad government in Syria, and the consequent military reverses for the Saudi-backed opposition.
The visit has been in the works for months, if not years, but the Trump administration’s failure to give the Saudis unambivalent support in its dispute with Qatar earlier this year disappointed the Saudis.
There has been recrimination across the Gulf for the failure of the Syrian opposition and Russia’s success, with some blaming Saudi’s refusal to arm groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many Saudi commentators have expressed frustration at Donald Trump’s lack of a policy on Syria beyond the defeat of Islamic State.
Russia and Saudi were at loggerheads through most of the cold war and the Saudis have been stymied by the Russian decision to prop up Assad at a time when it was supporting the Syrian opposition with cash and arms.
But Russia’s success means the diplomatic energy in Syria has shifted towards the joint Russian-Turkish-Iranian formation of four de-escalation zones in Syria, a process that Saudi now pragmatically has been forced to support. Saudis are due to stage another meeting of the Syrian opposition in Riyadh in the middle of the month in a bid to unify the Syrian opposition and restructure its political demands.
Faced with Assad’s Russian-backed military advance in the south and west of Syria, the Saudis have been forced to scale back their political demands that Assad leave. They remain virulently opposed to an Iranian presence in Syria and will be seeking assurances from Putin that the Iranian militias fighting alongside the regime will be forced to leave Syria as part of any peace settlement. The Saudis also want the Iranians to stop backing the Houthi opposition in Yemen.
At the same time, Riyadh, in common with Israel, will raise with Moscow its concern that these zones may guarantee a long-term presence for Iranian and Hezbollah troops inside Syria.
In his opening remarks at the Kremlin, King Salman stressed his opposition to Iran, saying: “We emphasise that the security and stability of the Gulf region and the Middle East is an urgent necessity for achieving stability and security in Yemen. This would demand that Iran give up interference with the internal affairs of the region, to give up actions destabilising the situation in this region.”
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia fear that with Russian acquiescence, Iran is building a corridor of territorial control through Iraq and Syria to its powerful proxy Hezbollah on Israel’s border in South Lebanon.
Russia has pulled out all the diplomatic stops to welcome the Saudi king, although there was glitch when the golden escalator due to take the ageing king down the steps at Moscow airport failed to function.
Russia is also hoping that today’s round of meetings will confirm closer cooperation between the two giant oil-producing nations, leading to a longer-term agreement to constrain production and prevent a further fall in oil price. Russia is not a member of the Opec oil producers cartel.
But in late 2016, 24 oil-producing countries, including Saudi and Russia, agreed to reduce overall output to around 1.8m barrels per day. The deal has been extended to March 1 2018 and is aimed at reducing the global oil surplus that had led to crude oil falling to a 13-year low of under $30 a barrel last year.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, speaking in Moscow ahead of King Salman’s visit, said: “What we’ve done serves the entire global economy well” – remarks that suggest Russia would like the deal to be extended. He added: “We will look at the situation in late March. I think it is possible.” He implied that any renewal would take the deal to the end of 2018.
