At a summit meeting at Camp David in May with the member states of the GCC—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman—President Barack Obama publicly promised these countries “ironclad” American support, but at the same time privately chided them for their passivity and told them he was under no pressure from the Middle East-weary American people to become further entangled in their regional disputes. A consistent complaint of the Obama administration is that numerous American allies in the greater Middle East, including, notably, Turkey, as well as the Gulf states, expect the United States to do the hardest fighting against their regional enemies—enemies who pose far more immediate threats to their interests than they do to American national security.

When I noted to Carter that he appeared to be expressing publicly a set of critical observations that Obama had privately expressed to Gulf leaders at Camp David, he said: “It wasn’t hidden at Camp David, I can tell you that.”

He went on, “I’ve said the same things to them: ‘Guys, you come and complain to us but you’re not in the game. You have to get in the game. This stuff that you want”—advanced aircraft, mainly—“doesn’t do you any good when the Houthis are overrunning Yemen.’” Carter said that the U.A.E., which recently lost 45 troops in a single day in Yemen, is a country more fully committed to fighting on its own behalf. “The Emiratis have a small but capable force, but the other Gulf states, Egypt, and so forth, they don’t. Egypt still has a very large conventionally oriented, war-with-Israel military, which is odd, given the kaleidoscope of problems they have around them.”

Carter and I came to this discussion about the Gulf states and their limitations by way of a related discussion concerning the maintenance, by the Pentagon, of Israel’s so-called qualitative military edge. For years, the United States has promised Israel that it would not help provide to Arab states weapons systems that would be anything near the technological equal of systems—American-made and otherwise—that Israel deployed. In recent years, Israel has worried less that countries like Saudi Arabia would use these weapons against it—after all, Israel and Saudi Arabia are in complete agreement that Iran represents a common existential threat—than that these weapons would fall into the hands of Sunni extremists. Though he has doubts that countries like Saudi Arabia need some of the weapons systems they seek from the United States, Carter also acknowledged that it would be better for the U.S., and Israel, if the Gulf states did their weapons shopping in America. (So far in 2015, the U.S. government has approved the sale of $115 million worth of arms to Kuwait, $150 million to Bahrain, $845 million to the U.A.E., and $19.5 billion to Saudi Arabia.)