The Saudis Could Help End the War. Will the US Listen?

A war in the Middle East probably wasn’t what Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney had in mind in Davos earlier this year, when he made a pitch for the world’s so-called middle powers to join together in a world defined by increasingly aggressive military juggernauts.

Nevertheless, his theory is being simultaneously proven and tested in the Persian Gulf. For there can be few clearer examples of the need for what Carney proposed — and the obstacles to achieving it — than the predicament of the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia in particular, as they try to navigate a conflict they didn’t choose and can’t control.