scholarly journals SOME HIGHLIGHTS IN SAUDI ARABIA–US RELATIONSHIP IN THE PERIOD 2011-2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hoang Thi Mai Phuong
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Strategic Alliance ◽  
Evaluation Method ◽  
Oil Field ◽  
Strategic Partner ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
Methods Analytical

Saudi Arabia - US relationship has long been known as a strategic alliance, despite the differences between a monarchy and a constitutional republic. So far, Saudi Arabia has been one of the closest allies, the strongest economic partner and an important strategic partner of the US in the Middle East. Even so, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and US has also experienced such ups and downs as the 1973 oil embargo, the terrorist event in the US on 11st September or the political and social crisis in the North Africa - Middle East region that took place in late 2010 and early 2011 (also known as the "Arab Spring"), the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Embassy in Turkey and the attack on the oil field in Saudi Arabia on 14th September, 2019, enormous impacts on the Middle East - North Africa and the world situation. The article briefly summarizes some prominent issues in the Saudi-US relationship between 2011 and 2020. Besides, the article also analyzes the factors that are likely to affect the Saudi-US relationship and some forecasts for the development direction of this relationship in the coming time. The article uses the international relations research methods, analytical methods to synthesize and evaluate, case study method, system-structured method, forecast and evaluation method to objectively evaluate this relationship.

Conclusions

2019 ◽  
pp. 351-362
Author(s):  
Dilip Hiro
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Strategic Alliance ◽  
Islamic Republic ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Government ◽  
Pahlavi Dynasty ◽  
Full Cooperation ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

After Islamic revolutionary movement’s success in overthrowing Iran’s secular Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, Saudi royals felt that full cooperation between their theocratic kingdom and the Islamic Republic would follow. This was not to be. The basic differences between a republic and a monarchy were compounded by the two nations’ contradictory relations with America. The US, the ultimate protector of Saudi Arabia, was decried as the Great Satan by Khomeini. A détente between the two states, forged in 1994, fell apart in 2002. In the renewed rivalry, Riyadh tried to gain an upper hand by stressing Iran as a country of Shias, a minority sect in Islam. Tehran made gains by default in the aftermath of Washington’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and as a result of the Riyadh-led diplomatic and commercial blockade of Qatar in 2017. Its strategic alliance with Syria, ruled by an Alawi president, remained intact. In the Yemeni civil war between Iran-backed Houthi rebels, occupying the capital, and the government of Riyadh-based President al Hadi, the conflict remained unresolved. Bin Salman failed to secure the expulsion of the pro-Iranian Hizbollah ministers from Lebanon’s national unity government. Overall, Tehran enjoyed superiority over Riyadh in the Middle East.

Doha’s Gulf inclusion will fall short of full renewal

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Strategic Alliance ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Value Added Tax ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Us ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
Defence Cooperation

Significance The summit is the focus of rising speculation that the 30-month rift between Qatar and fellow GCC members Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain may be nearing an end. Security concerns after the September 14 attacks on Saudi oil installations attributed to Iran are motivating GCC rulers to de-escalate regional tensions. Impacts Improved relations may re-energise the regionwide implementation of value-added tax, originally planned for 2018. A GCC revival will strengthen but not transform defence cooperation, which continued under the US-led Middle East Strategic Alliance. Gulf states' concerns about Iran could also help to resolve aspects of the conflict in Yemen.

scholarly journals The North African “Extremistan” of the Islamic State Caliphate

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-13
Author(s):  
Adrian Cosmin Basarabă ◽  
Maria-Mihaela Nistor
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
North African ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The North ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
Cellular Matrices

Abstract This article aims at presenting ISIS expansion in North Africa in the first quarter of 2016, with its subsequent implication in the wider framework of Jihadist proliferation worldwide. It can be argued that, while losing real estate in the Middle East, ISIS has started a permanent search for extra-cellular matrices or an ongoing process of de- and reterritorialization. The allegiance and support pledged by other African-based terrorist groups or organizations such as Boko Haram, al-I’tisam of the Koran and Sunnah in Sudan, al-Huda Battalion in Maghreb of Islam, The Soldiers of the Caliphate, al-Ghurabaa, Djamaat Houmat ad-Da’wa as-Salafiya and al-Ansar Battalion in Algeria, Islamic Youth Shura Council, Islamic State Libya (Darnah), in Libya, Jamaat Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, Jund al-Khilafah and Mujahideen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem in Egypt, Okba Ibn Nafaa Battalion, Mujahideen of Tunisia of Kairouan and Jund al-Khilafah in Tunisia and al-Shabaab Jubba Region Cell Bashir Abu Numan in Somalia is an alarming hypothesis of Jihadism reaching “the threshold of inevitability”- syntagm existent in the network theories of David Singh Grewal- turning a whole region, continent of even world into what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call Extremistan.

Desert Geopolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Natalie Koch
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Us Southwest ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Us ◽  
Milk Cows ◽  
History Of

Abstract In 2014 the largest dairy company in the Middle East, Almarai, purchased a farm near Vicksburg, Arizona, to grow alfalfa as feed for cattle in Saudi Arabia. Almarai is headquartered at Al Kharj farms, just outside of Riyadh, where it has a herd of more than 93,000 milk cows. Given that dairy and alfalfa farms both require an immense amount of water to maintain, what explains these developments in the deserts of Arizona and Arabia? The answers are historical and contemporary, demanding an approach to “desert geopolitics” that explains how environmental and political narratives bind experts across space and time. As a study in political geography and environmental history, this article uncovers a geopolitics of connection that has long linked the US Southwest and the Middle East, as well as the interlocking imperial visions advanced in their deserts. To understand these arid entanglements, I show how Almarai's purchase of the Vicksburg farm is part of a genealogy of exchanges between Saudi Arabia and Arizona that dates to the early 1940s. The history of Al Kharj and the decades-long agricultural connections between Arizona and Saudi Arabia sheds light on how specific actors imagine the “desert” as a naturalized site of scarcity, but also of opportunity to build politically and economically useful bridges between the two regions.

Bat Ye’or and Eurabia

2019 ◽  
pp. 170-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sindre Bangstad
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Us ◽  
Muslim Majority

This chapter discusses the life and work of Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), who is widely seen as the doyenne of “Eurabia”-literature. This comes in different varieties and formulations, but in Bat Ye’or’s rendering refers to an ongoing secretive conspiracy which involves both the European Union and Muslim-majority countries in North Africa and the Middle East, aimed at establishing Muslim control over a future Europe or “Eurabia.” Though Bat Ye’or did not coin the term “Eurabia,” she can be credited with having popularized the concept through quasi-academic titles such as Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate. Through its dissemination on various “counter-jihadist” websites and in the work of the Norwegian counter-jihadist blogger Fjordman, her work inspired the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. She also has long-standing relations with Serbian ultranationalists, the Israeli Far Right, and various radical Right activists in Western Europe and the US.

scholarly journals Evaluation of the IGS–Global Ionospheric Mapping model over Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mostafa Rabah ◽  
Ahmed Sedeek
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Evaluation Method ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Electron Content ◽  
Vertical Total Electron Content ◽  
International Gnss Service ◽  
Ionospheric Correction ◽  
Total Electron ◽  
The North ◽  
Using Data

Abstract. Global ionosphere maps (GIM) are generated on a daily basis at CODE using data from about 400 GPS/GLONASS sites of the IGS and other institutions. The vertical total electron content (VTEC) is modeled in a solar-geomagnetic reference frame using a Spherical Harmonics Expansion “SHE” up to degree and order 15. To cover the holes of the first GIM computation stage existing in the North Africa and over the Oceans resulting a shortage of GNSS station in North Africa, an optimum spatial-temporal interpolation technique was developed to cover these holes (Krankowski and Hernandez-Pajares, 2016). The current paper evaluates the ionospheric correction by Global Ionospheric Maps, GIM, provided in (IONEX) files produced by International GNSS Services “IGS”. The evaluation is performed based on investigating the effect of a given GIM ionospheric correction on kinematic relative positioning solutions. The evaluation was done using several baselines of different lengths in Egypt. The results show that there is no significant effect of the provided GIM values on the solution of kinematic processing. The results confirm that although there is a lack of International GNSS Service (IGS stations) over North Africa, GIMs have no effect in mitigating ionospheric error. A new value for the ionosphere correction VTEC values was obtained by a regional, developed algorithm based on zero-differenced phase ionospheric delay (ZDPID) (Tawfeek et al., 2018). These new values of VTEC were fed into GIMs for the specified stations data. A useful result was obtained for correcting the ionospheric error over kinematic solution of many baseline lengths up to 300 km which demonstrates validity of the proposed evaluation method.

scholarly journals US – Iran Proxy War in Middle East Under Trump Administration

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48
Author(s):  
Hino Samuel Jose ◽  
Laode Muhamad Fathun
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
The United States ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Regional Interest ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
Political Security

The heated bilateral relation between Iran and the United States has brought the middle east into another level of problem. The divided geopolitical and regional interest of both countries has led to several and many multidimensional issues, ranging from political, security, and even to economic ones. This article discussed the Iran – US tension on their proxy conflict in the Middle East. This article employs the Regional Security Complex Theory to construct the events related to both states’ proxy conflicts. The polarized region for sure has drawn another line that seems to be more complexed for both countries to achieve mutual understanding and continued peacebuilding. The US withdrawal from JCPOA, killing of Soleimani, and Saudi Arabia – Iran Yemen proxy war exacerbated the status quo. This article perceived that the intertwined issues show how the traditional thought of security should be redefined as both countries try to gain bargaining power. Especially with Iran that was hindered very much by sanctions and embargo placed by the US. This article discusses many important issues on Iran, US, and Saudi Arabia involvement and their correlated dynamics within the UN. This article analyzed Trump’s leadership style in the Middle East and its implication from the proxy war to the Middle East security architecture.

scholarly journals Large-scale geographic survey provides insights into the colonization history of a major aphid pest on its cultivated apple host in Europe, North America and North Africa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.G. Olvera-Vazquez ◽  
C. Remoue ◽  
A. Venon ◽  
A. Rousselet ◽  
O. Grandcolas ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Gene Flow ◽  
North America ◽  
Genetic Differentiation ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
High Genetic Diversity ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

With frequent host shifts involving the colonization of new hosts across large geographical ranges, crop pests are good models for examining the mechanisms of rapid colonization. The microbial partners of pest insects may be involved or affected by colonization, which has been little studied so far. We investigated the demographic history of the rosy apple aphid, Dysaphis plantaginea, a major pest of the cultivated apple (Malus domestica) in Europe, North Africa and North America, as well as the diversity of its endosymbiotic bacterial community. We genotyped a comprehensive sample of 714 colonies from Europe, Morocco and the US using mitochondrial (CytB and CO1), bacterial (16s rRNA and TrnpB), and 30 microsatellite markers. We detected five populations spread across the US, Morocco, Western and Eastern Europe, and Spain. Populations showed weak genetic differentiation and high genetic diversity, except the Moroccan and the North American that are likely the result of recent colonization events. Coalescent-based inferences releaved high levels of gene flow among populations during the colonization, but did not allow determining the sequence of colonization of Europe, America and Morroco by D. plantaginea, likely because of the weak genetic differentiation and the occurrence of gene flow among populations. Finally, we found that D. plantaginea rarely hosts any other endosymbiotic bacteria than its obligate nutritional symbiont Buchnera aphidicola. This suggests that secondary endosymbionts did not play any role in the rapid spread of the rosy apple aphid. These findings have fundamental importance for understanding pest colonization processes and implications for sustainable pest control programs.

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