From Qaboos to Haitham, Saudi Arabia ranks first

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HE Sultan of Oman Haitham bin Tariq’s first foreign visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia can be considered as a step towards the future that the people of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) aspire for, as its charter calls for integration among the six member states.

In addition, it happened under very sensitive international and regional circumstances, which call for continued consultation among brothers to reach a single vision that would help in developing joint mechanisms to achieve the strategic goal of the GCC.

During this visit, the first step of integration was achieved through the establishment of a Saudi-Omani Coordination Council, which, together with the Saudi-Emirati Coordination Council, constitutes the third pillar in creating an exceptional model for Gulf integration and cooperation at the regional and Arab levels.

There is no doubt that this integration can only be achieved by national hands, which necessitates benefiting from the Gulf brains that have studied in the most prestigious national and international universities, and employing them to serve the system as a whole.

The march of Oman’s renaissance in the 1970s made total dependence on the people of the country its strategic goal by encouraging Omanis to work in various professions so that there were neither any imbalances in the demographic structure nor any exodus of national workforce abroad.

In the same manner, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which in recent years recorded the largest number of students on overseas scholarships and has tens of thousands of students studying in national universities, implemented a well-studied process for job localization with great facilities for national and foreign investments.

This similarity between the two countries’ policies forms the basis for their visions “Saudi Arabia 2030” and “Oman 2040”, in addition to the third base in the GCC – the United Arab Emirates – which has launched a large number of strategic projects in recent years. All of these constitute the road map to a modern cooperation council, and a more solid economy protected by a GCC security and military umbrella.

Based on that comes the historic visit of Sultan Haitham bin Tariq to Saudi Arabia to open prospects for more strategic relations between the two countries, and to be a link in the chain of coordination among the rest of the GCC countries in order to move at a steady pace towards the union that the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz aspired for.

He was the first to highlight its importance at the Riyadh Summit in 2011, and to assert at the time that, “Experiences taught us not to stop at our reality and say we are satisfied. Whoever does that will find himself at the end of the convoy and will face loss. Therefore, we have to move beyond the stage of cooperation to the union in one entity that achieves good and averts evil”.

There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Oman, with all their historical, diplomatic, geopolitical and strategic weight, as well as economic capabilities and international relations, can play a huge role in this development process that started from Neom, the city of the future of the Gulf as a whole.

A point to highlight is that the first visit of the late Sultan Qaboos was in 1971 to Saudi Arabia, and that of Sultan Haitham bin Tariq was also to Saudi Arabia. This is because of the strategic depth it represents for all of the GCC nations.

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

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