Sweden Breaks Arms Agreement, Saudi Arabia Recalls Ambassador

[Purveyor]

1. Europe Stands Up to Saudi Arabia

Mar 11, 2015 10:48 AM EDT
By Leonid Bershidsky

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Americans often criticize Europe for its weakness and lack of principle on foreign policy, from its alleged softness on terrorism and Russian aggression, to its over-reliance on multilateral diplomacy. There are, however, some high-profile cases in which European governments stand up for their values even to their countries' economic detriment. They've recently done just that in the matter of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Sweden announced this week that it's canceling its 10-year-old military cooperation agreement with the Gulf monarchy, which brought Swedish companies more than half a billion dollars from 2011 to 2014. Germany, too, cut off arms exports to the Saudis this year, passing up hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues for its defense industry.

Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest arms importer. This year, research company IHS predicts, it will account for every seventh dollar spent globally on defense imports, increasing its purchases by 52 percent to $9.8 billion. If European firms give up their slice of this huge and growing market, it may be impossible to ever get it back, because the U.S. is hungry for more Saudi orders. In 2014, according to IHS, the U.S. filled $8.4 billion worth of orders from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, compared with $6 billion in 2013.

No wonder the lobbying in Europe in favor of the arms deals is fierce -- but the German and Swedish governments have proved resistant to it so far.

Germany supplied 209 million euros ($225 million) worth of military hardware to the Saudis last year, a quarter of the country's total defense exports to the Middle East. Volker Kauder, head of the parliamentary faction of Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party, has argued that organizations like Islamic State -- which Saudi Arabia fights as part of a U.S.-led coalition -- "cannot be swayed by moral appeals," so military cooperation should go hand in hand with political partnership. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has recently flown to Riyadh to calm the troubled relationship with the Saudis, earning the nickname "Sigmar of Arabia" from the German press, and some parliament deputies who went with him openly voiced their disapproval of the arms sales suspension.

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http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-11/europe-stands-up-to-saudi-arabia