King Salman of Saudi Arabia has withdrawn from a carefully orchestrated summit with the US that President Barack Obama hoped would assuage Gulf anxieties about the conclusion of a nuclear agreement with Iran.

Until Sunday the monarch had been expected to join other heads of state from the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries at an unprecedented meeting at the White House and a day of talks at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Now the only leaders attending will be the emirs of Qatar and Kuwait.



The deal with Iran, Saudi-led attacks on Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen, and the crises in Syria and Iraq made for a difficult and crowded agenda.

The summit, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, follows months of tension and intensive US diplomacy designed to persuade Riyadh and its neighbours that Washington is not abandoning its Gulf allies in order to normalise relations with Iran.

Salman will be represented instead by the newly appointed Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Nayef, the darling of western countries and the first of the younger generation of Saudi royals to look likely to ascend the throne. The king’s son, and Saudi defence minister, Muhammad bin Salman – who is running the campaign of air strikes in Yemen – will also be there.

Salman’s non-attendance is doubly embarrassing for the White House because, just hours before the news broke, US officials were boasting of how significant his presence was. But officials insisted the last-minute cancellation was “completely unrelated” to the agenda of the meeting and were confident the Gulf delegation remained senior enough for a meaningful summit.

The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said on Monday: “I know there has been some speculation that the change in travel plans was an attempt to send a message to the United States. If so, that message has not been received. There has been no concern raised by our Saudi partners, either before the change in travel plans, or after, about the agenda.”

Later on Monday, the White House said that Salman had spoken with Obama by phone to “express his regret” for missing the summit and to review the agenda for the meeting with Gulf leaders.

Obama had been expected to make a renewed effort to help the GCC states create a regional defence system to guard against Iranian missiles. The Saudis and others appear to accept that a nuclear agreement is inevitable but are keen to extract guarantees that their interests will not be harmed by it, diplomats say.



“We want to be sure that that it will not affect the GCC,” one senior Gulf official said. “That is the bottom line.” Others described the need for a policy of containing Iran, especially with the lifting of economic sanctions. The Qataris and Saudis – now coordinating closely after ending a long period of estrangement – have also been pushing for enhanced US support for anti-Assad rebels in Syria.

The Saudis and Emiratis in particular emphasise Iran’s role in backing the Houthis, and are deeply concerned about its growing influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where the Shia militia Hezbollah – fighting openly in support of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad – is viewed as a tool of Tehran.

John Kerry, the US secretary of state, referred on Friday to “a series of new commitments that will create, between the US and the GCC, a new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives”.



But the New York Times reported that those with hopes for formal security guarantees would be disappointed, with Obama ready only to issue a “presidential statement” because of the need for congressional approval and the administration’s commitment to maintain Israel’s strategic edge over any Arab state.

“There isn’t substance for the summit,” an Arab official who has held discussions with the Obama administration in recent days told the Wall Street Journal. Lining up for a photo-op would not be enough, another senior figure said.

Arab commentators have emphasised the symbolic nature of the event – especially its intimate Camp David location. But as analyst Hisham Melhem observed: “It’s not symbolism that the GCC leaders are concerned with, rather it’s the nightmarish reality of the unraveling of a century-old political order and the fraying of a large swath of Arab lands around them, as well as an ascendant (and in most of their minds belligerent) Iran, trying to ensure its regional hegemony by projecting its power, sometimes directly but mostly by proxy, to build an alternative, if still vague, political scaffolding on the rubble of the dying order.”



Washington’s foreign policy community put a brave face on the changed political dynamics of the summit. “I don’t see it as as much of a snub as some do,” said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie thinktank. “It it really a divorce? I don’t think so. They probably thought it was sending a little bit of a signal but I don’t think it was this catastrophic dismissal of Obama.”

Privately, others speculated on alternative reasons for the last-minute change of royal heart. “The guy [King Salman] is sick, he cannot carry on a conversation for a very long time,” said one former diplomat. “They are sending their two top people. They are the people running the country anyway. You would want them to be there, frankly, not him.”