Saudi Arabia challenges Hezbollah in Lebanon, the UAE brings AI into government, and a former DIA chief dispels the claim that North Korea offers lessons to Iran. To subscribe to this daily roundup by Mideast specialist Joseph Braude, click here.
Saudi Arabia ends $4 billion in Saudi aid to Beirut and calls on the Lebanese government to expel Hezbollah. The decision, reports The Media Line, follows a remark by Lebanese President Michel Aoun defending Hezbollah’s presence as a “complement” to the Lebanese army, and bucks the American policy of pretending the group doesn’t dominate the government.
UAE appoints AI czar. Abu Dhabi crowned Omar Bin Sultan as the country’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence as part of a cabinet reshuffle. In a sense, it follows last week’s attention-grabbing decision by Saudi Arabia to grant citizenship to a robot.
Former DIA chief David Shedd tells Al-Majalla that the Iranian leadership, more sophisticated than its North Korean counterpart, has little to learn from the standoff between Pyongyang and Washington. In an interview with Joseph Braude, Shedd said, “I’d offer three categories of observations on this question. The first one is, Iran views itself as an ancient Persian nation-state and society that has a very rich history in terms of its role in the region. In the way that North Korea is isolationist, that is not true of Iran, and therefore its objectives are very different. So I don’t think you can just say, they’re looking at North Korea and building — euphemistically speaking — a bigger wall to the world. My second observation, tied to the first one, is, that Iran’s growing and deepening relationship with Russia is not one they want to put at risk in the way that apparently King Jong Un of North Korea is prepared to do by irritating China. I don’t think that China’s patience is infinite with North Korea. This is not by any means to suggest that Russia has a ‘patron’ relationship with Iran. Yet it is a deepening relationship — and I think the Iranians don’t want to put that at risk. My third observation is that I think Iranians pride themselves in being very sophisticated negotiators, in terms of not only preserving but also sustaining their regime while at the same time engaging with the outside world, in a way that is incomparable with North Korea. If we were having the conversation over the actions that North Korea has taken by comparison with Iran, I truly would say, the Iranian regime is not suicidal. I’m not sure I can say that about the North Korean regime. That’s what makes the problem even more complicated. The North Korea problem is a more complex one because we actually do not know what Kim is prepared to do. In other words, there’s uncertainty because of its isolation, whereas Iran does not want to divorce itself from the international community in that way.”
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