time.com/6155374/arab-world-reactions-ukraine/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=ideas_&linkId=155517853
How the Arab World Is Responding to the War in Ukraine
There’s only one Arab leadership that is genuinely pro-Putin: the Assad regime in Syria. Every other Arab state is generally prioritizes its Western ties, and none is trying to pivot to Moscow. But this does not mean Arab states are hostile to the Kremlin. They generally see in Russia a substantial global power that continues have relevance in their region—and sometimes intervenes in ways that are helpful to their interests. Moscow is also a useful capital to publicly ‘flirt’ with when relations are strained with Western capitals (particularly DC).
So Arab states’ complex reactions to the Ukraine invasion is far less about Russia than it is about the West. Over the last decade, Arab leaders have had a growing sense that the West is an unreliable partner. Part of that has to do with their autocratic expectation that the West would stand by Western-allied autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak during the Arab uprisings of 2011, a stance that frankly would have been consistent with Western policy until then and since. But there has also been a keen awareness that the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, has failed to show the will to hold its own in several theatres: from the so-called ‘red-line’ in Syria over chemical weapons in 2013, to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, to the chaotic abandoning of Afghanistan in 2021. Many Arab leaders also note with concern that America’s “pivot to Asia” is a pivot away from the Arab region.
In the early days of the Russian invasion, it was clear that Arab states wanted to keep their options as open as possible, and not alienate Moscow if they didn’t need to. That doesn’t make them pro-Moscow; it means they assess that the world as becoming more multi-polar, and that the West had not given much indication that there would be much of a cost to trying to be “creatively neutral.”
That’s changed. The West has signaled that Russia’s invasion is not a case where ‘neutrality’ is going to work, at least not if states want to continue the same kind of close relationship that has so far characterised most Arab-Western ties. Arab states know that if they want to continue with their modernisation drives—in terms of technical developments, technology and investment—there is no substitute at present for the West.
Article then briefly talks about how Arab countries will try and use this to their benefit to get concessions from the West.