Saudi Arabia Says King Won’t Attend Meetings in U.S.
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that its new monarch, King Salman, would not be attending meetings at the White House with President Obama or a summit gathering at Camp David this week, in an apparent signal of its continued displeasure with the administration over United States relations with Iran, its rising regional adversary.

As recently as Friday, the White House said that King Salman would be coming to “resume consultations on a wide range of regional and bilateral issues,” according to Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman.

But on Sunday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said that the king would instead send Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the defense minister. The agency said the summit meeting would overlap with a five-day cease-fire in Yemen that is scheduled to start on Tuesday to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Arab officials said they viewed the king’s failure to attend the meeting as a sign of disappointment with what the White House was willing to offer at the summit meeting as reassurance that the United States would back its Arab allies against a rising Iran.

King Salman is expected to call Mr. Obama on Monday to talk about his last-minute decision not to attend the summit meeting, a senior administration official said on Sunday.

The official said that when the king met Secretary of State John Kerry in Riyadh last week, he indicated that he was looking forward to coming to the meeting. But on Friday night, after the White House put out a statement saying Mr. Obama would be meeting with King Salman in Washington, administration officials received a call from the Saudi foreign minister that the king would not be coming after all.

There was “no expression of disappointment” from the Saudis, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “If one wants to snub you, they let you know it in different ways,” the official said.

Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said King Salman’s absence was both a blessing and a snub. “It holds within it a hidden opportunity,” he said, “because senior U.S. officials will have an unusual opportunity to take the measure of Mohammed bin Salman, the very young Saudi defense minister and deputy crown prince, with whom few have any experience.”

But, Mr. Alterman added: “For the White House though, it sends an unmistakable signal when a close partner essentially says he has better things to do than go to Camp David with the president, just a few days after the White House announced he’d have a private meeting before everything got underway.”

Mr. Kerry met on Friday in Paris with his counterparts from the Arab nations that were invited to the summit meeting — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — to discuss what they were expecting from the summit meeting, and to signal what the United States was prepared to offer at Camp David.

But administration officials said that the Arab officials had pressed for a defense treaty with the United States pledging to defend them if they came under external attack. But that was always going to be difficult, as such treaties — similar to what the United States has with Japan — must be ratified by Congress.

Instead Mr. Obama is prepared to offer a presidential statement, one administration official said, which is not as binding and which future presidents may not have to honor.

The Arab nations are also angry, officials and experts said, about comments Mr. Obama recently made in an interview with The New York Times, in which he said allies like Saudi Arabia should be worried about internal threats — “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances.”

At a time when American officials were supposed to be reassuring those same countries that the United States would support them, the comments were viewed by officials in the gulf as poorly timed, foreign policy experts said.

The Arab countries would also like to buy more weapons from the United States, but that also faces a big obstacle — maintaining Israel’s military edge. The United States has long put restrictions on the types of weapons that American defense firms can sell to Arab nations, in an effort to ensure that Israel keeps a military advantage against its traditional adversaries in the region.

That is why, for instance, the administration has not allowed Lockheed Martin to sell the F-35 fighter jet, considered to be the jewel of America’s future arsenal, to Arab countries. The plane, the world’s most expensive weapons project, has stealth capabilities and has been approved for sale to Israel.

In Paris on Friday, Mr. Kerry said that the United States and its Arab allies, which constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council, were “fleshing out a series of new commitments that will create between the U.S. and G.C.C. a new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives that will take us beyond anything that we have had before.”

The king is the latest top Arab official who will not be attending the summit meeting for delegations from members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The United Arab Emirates is also sending its crown prince to the meetings, the officials said. The Emirati president, Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, was never expected to attend because of health reasons, American and Arab officials said. Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman also will not be attending because of health reasons, officials said.

Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, declined to say exactly what his government was pushing for from the United States when he spoke at a conference in Washington on Thursday.

“The last thing I want to say is ‘here’s what we need,’ ” he said at a panel discussion sponsored by the Atlantic Council in Washington. “That’s not the right approach. The approach is, let’s come here, let’s figure out what the problems are, how we can work together to address our needs.”

King Salman’s decision to skip the summit meeting does not mean that the Saudis are giving up on the United States — they do not have many other options, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “As upset as the Saudis are, they don’t really have a viable alternative strategic partnership in Moscow or Beijing,” Mr. Sadjadpour said.

But, he added, “there’s a growing perception at the White House that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are friends but not allies, while the U.S. and Iran are allies but not friends.”

美親近伊朗 沙國王拒波灣峰會

沙烏地阿拉伯政府十日透過國營通訊社宣布，國王沙曼不會赴美參加十三、十四日美國與波斯灣周邊六國「海灣合作理事會」領袖的峰會。紐約時報指，沙國顯然不滿美國與沙國宿敵伊朗改善關係。

峰會由美國總統歐巴馬主持，十三日起舉行，歐巴馬邀請「海灣合作理事會」領袖與會，希望在美國與這六國的敵國伊朗談核子協議時，鞏固六國對美國的信任。

不過，六國之中只有科威特和卡達領袖親自出席。沙國通訊社說，沙曼將指派王儲內政部長納耶夫和自己的兒子、也是第二王儲的國防部長沙曼與會，國王缺席「是因為峰會期間和預定十二日起生效的葉門五天停火期、沙曼國王人道救援中心開幕日重疊」。阿曼、阿拉伯聯合大公國領袖因健康不佳，不克出席，巴林國王指派王儲與會。

阿拉伯國家官員認為，美國給阿拉伯盟國的安全保證太少，沙曼以缺席表達失望。聯合國安理會五個常任理事國、德國與伊朗預計六月談成核子協議，限制伊朗發展核武，並解除對伊朗的制裁，提供一千億美元資金。

波灣國家擔心，伊斯蘭教什葉派大國伊朗會用這筆錢發展軍備，因而要求美國出售F-35戰機等先進武器，並與它們簽訂有強制力的防禦條約，一旦這些國家被攻擊，美國就要依約保護它們，然而美國官員透露，歐巴馬只打算在峰會上發布一份聲明，聲明既沒有強制力，還可能被繼任總統束之高閣。

一些官員指出，另一個讓波灣國家憤怒原因是，歐巴馬最近受訪時說，像沙國這類美國盟國，應擔心人民與世界脫節、年輕人沒工作、意識形態有破壞性等內部問題，波灣國家認為，在它們面臨伊朗威脅、亟需美安全保證時，歐巴馬這樣說實在不恰當。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-king-wont-attend-camp-david-meeting.html

2015-05-12．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯李京倫