
The Camp David Summit: Major or modest moves in U.S.-Gulf ties?
The Gulf states have received a broad array of new U.S. commitments to reinvest in bilateral and multilateral security cooperation
In the run up to Thursday's summit at Camp David, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had #Syria policy.” Elaborating further on the summit’s Syria language, he added that “this reads like a [Mideast] Quartet statement to me. Where are the specifics on Syria? [Chemical weapons], Safe Zones?”
Perhaps the most significant new language on Syria actually came from the Gulf states. Another innovative announcement on regional affairs in the annex was a call for the states to “press all parties” in Libya to “urgently establish a national unity government before Ramadan.”
The Gulf states have received a broad array of new U.S. commitments to reinvest in bilateral and multilateral security cooperation, but most of those commitments were relatively shallow. As the Saudi and Bahraini kings’ absences foreshadowed - and Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies explicitly predicted - this summit probably left “everybody feeling a little bit unsatisfied.”
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Patrick Megahan is a research associate for military affairs at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David Andrew Weinberg is a senior fellow.
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