Saudi Arabia was quick to endorse the American cruise missile attack on the Syrian air base responsible for the horrendous chemical massacre in Idlib. Saudi expectations of future American steps to unseat Bashar al-Assad are likely to be extravagant.
The Saudis have wanted Washington to get rid of Assad for years. Riyadh believes the Assad dynasty is the key to Iranian influence in the Levant. In the 1980s the Saudis tried to get then-President Ronald Reagan to oust Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, and in the 1990s they hoped Washington would entice Damascus away from Tehran by a peace agreement with Israel on the Golan Heights. Neither strategy worked, but both relied on American heavy lifting to do the job. Both expected Washington to be capable of delivering more than it could. That is a common feature of Saudi foreign policy: to expect the United States to be all powerful.
When the Arab Spring came to Syria, the Saudis hoped an Afghan-style mujaheddin war with covert Saudi and American support would do in the Assads and the Iranians. Riyadh spent billions on the rebels, but Assad is stronger today than at the onset of the rebellion. The Saudis were deeply disappointed by President Barack Obama's vacillation on his approach toward Syria.
The Saudi kingdom now is encouraged that President Donald Trump's administration shares their enmity with Iran. Trump's decision to sell F16s to Bahrain — the kingdom's closest client state — despite human rights concerns was welcomed in Riyadh as a sign Washington finally understands that Iran is the source of instability on the island. The Saudis are looking for a free hand in Yemen and American support for an attack on Yemen's port of Hodeidah. They expect human rights and gender equality issues to be off the table, but more sanctions on Iran are welcomed.
King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud spent considerable energy at the Arab summit in Amman seeking to secure pan-Arab opposition to Assad and Iran, even trying to coax Iraq away from its Shiite partner. Earlier this year he traveled to Indonesia, China and Japan to press an anti-Iran agenda.
Saudi commentators were alarmed when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said Trump was abandoning the Obama administration's public demand that Assad must go. An important editorial noted that the Trump administration's big defeats on health care and immigration issues suggested his team might be simply incompetent and thus unlikely to fulfill Gulf Arabs' high hopes for defeating Iran. The editorial even warned that impeachment over whether the president colluded with Russia to subvert the American democratic process is unlikely but not impossible, so the Arabs should avoid putting all their hopes on Trump.
