Tom Barrack’s Middle East Realignment Faces Its Real Test | Opinion

Résumé détaillé

"The pact produced assistance. It has yet to demonstrate a coordinated defense at the scale Saudi Arabia needs." ...

The Middle East’s experiment with life after the American security guarantee has begun.

Turkey's ratification of its defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has put into place the kind of regional security architecture that Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy, says Washington wants to encourage. Last month, he described America's retreat from its eight-decade role as regional guarantor as a "realignment," not an abandonment. Now comes the harder question: What happens when the new system is tested again?

October's renewed fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen exposed a vulnerability that ratification alone cannot fix. Washington does not want to own that war. Turkey and Pakistan have shown limits to what they will own. And Iran's proxy strategy is particularly well suited to exploiting the space between the two.

This past week, the Houthis have launched a fresh wave of aerial and missile attacks targeting Saudi Arabia’s capital and energy infrastructure, including a strike on the Saudi Aramco Tower in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District and a separate attack on the East-West oil pipeline in the Medina region.

On October 20 at the Global Security Forum in Doha, Barrack said the kingdom was “in a very difficult position” against the Houthis and that American involvement in a ground battle “seems fruitless.” Washington has thus placed the Houthi problem outside its own role. The partners it points to have done the same.

The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed in August, commits Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan to treat an armed attack on one as an attack on all, language modeled on NATO's Article 5. After repeated Houthi missile and drone attacks on the kingdom, the three governments activated collective deterrence measures under the pact and pledged rapid deployments.

Yet while much of Turkey’s initial support was bilateral, its November 5 ratification of the pact has not produced a visible Turkish…

The…

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