Gulf Alliances: Regional States Hedge Their Bets

Middle East North Africa Financial Network (MENAFN)

06 April 2015

James M. Dorsey

(MENAFN – Daily News Egypt) The current Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, designed to prevent Iranian-backed forces from gaining power, symbolises the Gulf’s new assertiveness.

This is unfolding as the various Gulf states seek to hedge their bets with different strategies that complement rather than replace the regional US security umbrella.

Qatar, this month, signed a military agreement with Turkey, which gives the two parties the right to deploy soldiers in each other’s territory.

Qatar is the latest Gulf state to seek alliances as a way to enhance security in a world in which a post-nuclear agreement Iran would join Turkey and Israel as the region’s foremost military powers.

The agreement is rooted in shared attitudes towards tumultuous developments in the Middle East that potentially threaten long-ruling autocrats and spawned civil wars and spiralling political violence and could rewrite the region’s nation state cartography.

… James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, a syndicated columnist, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog.

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