... international politics today is a rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Gulf area, — a region which remains a critically important part of the global economy, finance and transportation. The foreign military involvement in the civil war in Yemen and the approaching humanitarian disaster in this country, the recent unprecedented pressure on Qatar by a number of neighboring Arab states are just the most graphic illustrations of this dangerous development. The Gulf Cooperation Council is in ...
... closed seminar organized by Russian International Affairs Council and King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (Saudi Arabia). The event focused on security challenges in the Gulf and the prospects for political resolution of the situation in Yemen. The opening remarks were made by Ivan Timofeev, RIAC Director of Programs, and Saud Al-Sarhan, Secretary General of the Center.
Timur Makhmutov, RIAC Deputy Director of Programs, moderated the seminar.
The seminar started with the presentation ...
Disappearing Legitimacy
For over five years, Yemen has remained one of the most unstable states on the political map of the Middle East. The Arab Spring exposed the true crisis potential of the country, revealing colossal problems its leadership that had previously been ignored or put on the backburner....
The Yemeni Civil War is probably not the most talked about conflict in western media, with all the attention attracted by the unfortunately well-known atrocities committed by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Nevertheless, the bloodshed has reached sizable ...
... momentous for themselves and the region.
The Syrian settlement is dangerously moving off the rails of the Vienna process, as Iran and Saudi Arabia, its key regional members, are losing the incentives to fulfill their obligations.
To this end, Syria and Yemen appear most vulnerable. The Syrian settlement is dangerously moving off the rails of the Vienna process, as Iran and Saudi Arabia, its key regional members, are losing the incentives to fulfill their obligations. On the contrary, they tend to support ...
... Obama’s Camp David
This strategy has delivered some results, i.e. the U.S. promise of a military shield against Iranian missiles, Congress adopting sanctions against Iranian proxies, and American support for Saudi armed action against the Houthi in Yemen. In this context, the Senate’s recent
decision
to cut off funding for Hezbollah by putting sanctions on all financial institutions that deliberately do business with them indicates that these promises are being transformed into concrete obligations....
... the Middle East. A number of Middle Eastern leaders visited Moscow; Russian diplomats held the second consultative meeting between representatives of the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition; Russian planes evacuated all Russian citizens from Yemen, as well as citizens other countries, including the United States and Europe; Russia took an active part in reaching an interim solution in the Iranian nuclear talks; and Russian diplomats have been working on draft resolutions at the UN Security ...
... factors, including the slowing of rig count declines in the US, a possible decline in production as well as Saudi Arabia raising the oil price for Asian customers for a second consecutive month. Questions arise, however, as to where the ongoing crisis in Yemen fits in this equation.
Yemen is a minor-league oil producing country; its oil production peaked at
440 thousand barrels a day in 2002
and has been declining ever since, to about
126 thousand barrels a day in 2014
, less than 0.2% of global oil ...
The Yemen crisis is hardly a surprise. Riyadh has long been concerned by the rise of Sheikh al-Houthi’s followers, who are widely seen as Iran's proxies in southern Arabian Peninsula. After humiliating defeat in the 2009 border skirmishes, the Saudis ...
A second front seems to have been fully opened up in the Middle East by the whirlwind events in Yemen, which few predicted and hence have generated numerous
forecasts
regarding the consequences for the broader security of the Arabia Peninsula and the Middle East as a whole. They
state
that the Yemen crisis will trigger Saudi Arabia’s decline,...
