Back in mid-December, Bruce Reidel assessed the Middle East from the viewpoint of the Saudis and Jordanians and doesn’t like the idea of moving the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and writes in AL Monitor:
The [Saudi] kingdom has a full plate. Low oil prices have hurt the economy and raised unemployment. The king’s war in Yemen is an expensive quagmire, just like Nasser’s. Iran is today’s existential threat, and its proxies are on the march in Syria and Iraq. Tehran will hail an American shift in Jerusalem as validation of its decades of labeling Washington Israel’s protector. If [King] Salman is soft on Jerusalem, the Iranians will have a field day denouncing the king as a puppet of Zionism.
Jordan’s King Abdullah will be in an even hotter seat than Salman. He has his own claim to Jerusalem and a majority Palestinian population. Just a few days ago, the Jordanian monarch presided over a formal reinterment of the remains of Jordanian soldiers killed defending Jerusalem in 1967 in a martyr’s memorial in Amman. The king badly needs American help to cope with the Syrian crisis, but he can’t ignore what happens to Jerusalem.
The Arab world is in the midst of an unprecedented tsunami of chaos, terrorism, sectarian violence and civil war. Al-Qaedism is rampant even if the Islamic State is contracting. All the causes of the Arab Spring are still unaddressed. It is not the time to pour oil on the fire.
I suspect when the shouting’s over, the American symbol won’t be Uncle Sam, but a bull liberally adorned in china fragments.
