When Barack Obama hosts leaders from six Arab monarchies at Camp David later this week, he will try to reassure them that America has their back against Iran and Islamic radicals.

Privately, he may also be thinking something less friendly: Your days are numbered.

The chaos in the Middle East has put Obama in an awkward position when it comes to the Arab world’s authoritarian regimes. Obama believes they need to reform dramatically or face popular upheavals that could topple their regimes and turn their countries into the next Syria or Libya. In an interview last month, Obama warned that repressive Arab governments should worry more about their own restive publics than about the threat from Iran.

Those words infuriated some of the Arab leaders invited to Camp David this week, who liken their troubled region to a patient bleeding on the emergency room operating table. Save the patient first, they say, by checking radical Islamists and Iran, and the philosophical conversations can come later.

After Saudi Arabia announced Sunday that its king would not attend the summit — he will send his crown prince instead — analysts speculated that lingering irritation at Obama might be a reason. Sources said as few as two of the six invited monarchs might attend, with the others sending senior deputies.

Obama officials say talk of political reform isn’t on the official agenda this week when Obama receives officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional body composed of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Political reform is “not what Camp David is about. That’s not what Camp David was designed to do,” says a senior administration official. “The focus is on strengthening our partnership to face common challenges — whether it’s from Iran or from terrorist groups” like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The official added that human rights and democracy concerns “are always in the background” when Obama deals with the Middle Eastern leaders.

Too far in the background, say human rights activists. “This is going to be a summit that focuses on joint security issues. It’s important, we get that,” says Sarah Margon, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “But the problem is that national security objectives have been so far divorced from the other issues, when in fact addressing those issues would also address stability and security concerns.”

In a letter to Obama last week obtained by POLITICO, Human Rights Watch urged the president to raise issues of political expression and freedom with his GCC guests — all of whose governments, the group says, have treated legitimate political dissent as national security threats since the Arab Spring erupted in early 2011.

Arab officials say they hope the summit will yield new security guarantees from Washington that can help to check the power of Iran, which the Gulf countries consider a growing regional threat.

More generally, the GCC leaders are looking for a warm embrace amid concern that Obama is trying to develop a new strategic partnership with Iran. Some note that Obama often speaks admiringly about the greatness of “Persian civilization,” and they suspect he admires Iran’s culture more than Arab society.

That tension — along with increasingly low expectations for security guarantees that might emerge from the summit — could explain the low attendance expected from the kings, emirs and sultans of the GCC states. The emirs of Kuwait and Qatar are expected to be the only monarchs at Camp David, with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE sending lesser royals. But some of the leaders skipping the summit are elderly or in frail health, and do not often travel long distances.

Obama officials said Sunday that substantive issues were not to blame. And while the president speaks in general terms about reform in the region, his response has been muted to recent political crackdowns inside GCC countries, where dissidents are commonly imprisoned. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE passed harsh counterterrorism laws last year covering broad categories of political and religious dissent. In March, a Saudi court sentenced blogger Raif Badawi to 1,000 lashes, on top of a 10-year jail sentence he is already serving, for “insulting Islam.” Bahrain is a place of what Human Rights Watch calls “unchecked repression” since the Sunni-led regime, with Saudi military backing, put down a 2011 Shiite uprising that called for replacing the monarchy with a republic.

Obama has also eased his pressure on Egypt’s military dictatorship as it consolidates power after a severe crackdown strongly supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have sent billions of dollars to prop up an anti-Islamist government there.

It’s a different reality than the one Obama signaled in the early days of the Arab Spring, when he sought to align himself with the Arab “street” as protests erupted across the Middle East and North Africa.

“[T]he events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore,” Obama said in a May 2011 speech on the upheavals across the Arab world. “[A] new generation has emerged. And their voices tell us that change cannot be denied.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in similar terms. “Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever,” she said in a January 2011 speech in the Qatari capital of Doha.

Since then, however, Obama has watched those popular upheavals plunge Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen into chaos and breed extremist groups such as ISIL.

Those events “are concentrating peoples’ minds more than in early 2011, when the situation was different,” said the senior Obama official.

Obama has also encountered an angry response to his nuclear talks with Iran from Sunni Arab governments, which see Shiite Iran as a mortal enemy.

“The security situation has trumped democracy expansion,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism analyst at the Rand Corporation. “That’s the security reality.”

Many Arab officials argue that they can introduce reforms only incrementally, to avoid angering religious hard-liners and prevent sudden political turmoil. Some note that their regimes are more pro-American than their citizens, and that pure democracy would produce new U.S. enemies in the world’s most oil-rich region.

That argument seems to be winning when it comes to Egypt. In late March Obama restored U.S. military aid to the country that had been partially suspended after Cairo’s military dictator, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, cracked down ruthlessly against political opponents following a July 2013 coup.

That coup ousted a Muslim Brotherhood government democratically elected after the Arab Spring toppled the country’s dictator of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak. Obama had called for Mubarak’s ouster, declaring in February 2011 that “Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”

After suspending the military aid in October 2013, Obama said it would be restored only when Egypt’s military regime showed progress towards democracy. But Obama’s March order — which allowed the transfer of F-16 aircraft and other arms to Egypt — did not mention democracy.

That pleased Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE, which have pumped more than $12 billion into Egypt’s economy and provided political and economic advice to ensure Sisi’s survival against what they view as Islamic extremist opposition. But Obama’s move has drawn criticism from human rights activists on the left and democracy promoters on the right.

“Sisi is creating an unsustainable model,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an interview. “The question for the U.S. is whether rejecting Islam is enough to make you our friend. The answer to me is, over time, no. It’s not enough to just reject radical Islam — you have to embrace systems that will really change the Middle East for the better.”

“We need to stop acting as if the only thing that matters is military power,” says Richard LeBaron, a former U.S. ambassador to Kuwait now with the Atlantic Council. “It is a strategic imperative that we connect with the people of the Middle East and stop worrying so much about their leaders.”

Obama seems to agree. In an interview last month with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for instance, Obama said countries like Saudi Arabia have “alienated” young populations who face high unemployment and have “no legitimate political outlets for grievances.”

“I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading,” Obama said. “It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. … That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”

That talk surprised and annoyed Arab leaders, who call public criticism from the U.S. about their internal affairs counterproductive.

“It’s a conversation we welcome in private,” said UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, speaking at a May 6 Atlantic Council forum.

Otaiba noted that his country has joined a half-dozen military campaigns alongside the U.S., from Kosovo to Afghanistan to the war against ISIL.

“A country that doesn’t share your values fought with you six times,” Al Otaiba said. “We still don’t share your democratic values — but we are great partners.”

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.