Last week’s GCC summit in Riyadh forged the necessary consensus among the six member states to jointly tackle Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its malign activities in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Together, the Gulf states want their deep concerns over this pivotal danger to be addressed in any revised international nuclear accord with Iran, and have restated that “any danger that threatens one of them threatens all of them.”

The UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman have also coalesced around Saudi leadership, by endorsing King Salman’s vision for the unity, solidarity and stability of the Gulf region; agreeing to implement the circular carbon economy approach launched by Saudi Arabia during its presidency of the G20; and aligning their national visions for economic diversification with the eventual goal of Gulf economic union, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman alluded to in his opening remarks.

Through last week’s Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden apparently sought to unite the world to rescue democracy, which is facing a critical crisis. Instead, the online event has set the world apart, with charges that its real intent was to contain China’s rise and seek US hegemony. By excluding almost half of the world, the occasion also exposed the Biden administration’s rhetoric on multilateralism as conflicting with its resolve for unilateralism.

But the US has faced such a credibility gap in its global standing with increasing frequency throughout the last three decades.

With the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the US could have chosen to partner with the world to achieve global goals. Instead, successive Republican and Democratic administrations shed their ideological imperatives to dictate to the world — undertaking “humanitarian” interventions in troubled spots with devastating consequences. So much so that even President Barack Obama, despite his liberal credentials, opted for a troop surge in Afghanistan.