Guarding the Gulf: the U.S. military and Arabian peninsula base politics

The 2003 expulsion of the United States military from Saudi Arabia represented a phenomenon that has long plagued U.S. government strategists and military officials across Southwest Asia since the Second World War: U.S. military expulsion from a foreign country. This work examines which conditions lead a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country to expel the U.S. military from local host bases. It is not obvious that a single tipping point exists. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, for example, both expelled the U.S. military on several occasions in 1962 and 1973 respectively, while in Oman the U.S. military was able to avoid expulsion in the 1980s through increased military and economic aid and promises of a light military footprint. Understanding this puzzle of which factors lead to base eviction or renegotiation of basing terms sheds light on the pressure points in the national security strategies and policies of the GCC countries, as well as how the U.S. basing and indeed foreign policy have adapted historically to ever changing political conditions in host countries.

These 'base politics' dynamics are not new for most Southwest Asian countries as they endeavor to strike a balance between domestic security concerns like political coups and external security threats like military invasion from a neighboring country. In such a volatile environment, U.S. military operations can be adversely affected if ordered to vacate a foreign military base when host nation domestic security concerns outweigh perceptions of regional threats. More importantly, the U.S. military often underestimates the turbulent domestic security challenges and forces that can affect base politics. Such deliberate and public international events thus elicit important questions about why and when such events occur in nations that host a foreign military power like the United States.