Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy

Kenneth Katzman

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Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy (CRS Report for Congress)

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Release Date	Revised May 12, 2021
Report Number	RS21513
Report Type	Report
Authors	Kenneth Katzman
Source Agency	Congressional Research Service
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Summary:

Kuwait has been pivotal to the decades-long U.S. effort to secure the Persian Gulf region because of its consistent cooperation with U.S. military operations in the region and its key location in the northern Gulf. Kuwait and the United States have a formal Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA), under which the United States maintains over 13,000 military personnel in country and prepositioned military equipment in Kuwait to project power in the region. Only Germany, Japan, and South Korea host more U.S. troops than does Kuwait. Kuwait usually acts in concert not only with the United States but also with allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman). However, Kuwait tends to favor mediation of regional issues over commitments of military force. Kuwait is the lead Gulf mediator of the intra-GCC rift that erupted in June 2017 when Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain moved to isolate Qatar. Kuwait hosts the operational command center for U.S.-led Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) that is combating the Islamic State. The Kuwaiti government has not intervened in Syria’s civil war, instead hosting donor conferences for civilian victims of the conflict and providing aid to Jordan’s hosting of Syrian refugees. Kuwait is participating militarily in the Saudi-led coalition that is trying to defeat the Shiite “Houthi” rebel movement in Yemen, but has also worked to forge a diplomatic solution to that conflict. Kuwait has supported U.S. efforts to contain Iran and has periodically arrested Kuwaiti Shiites that the government says are spying for Iran, but it also engages Iran at high levels. However, the government has not fully shut down channels that wealthy Kuwaitis use to fund extreme Islamist factions in the region. Experts had long assessed Kuwait’s political system as a regional model for its successful incorporation of secular and Islamist political factions, both Shiite and Sunni. However, Kuwait’s reputation for political pluralism has been tarnished since 2011 as it has followed other GCC states in incarcerating and revoking the citizenship of social media and other critics. Kuwait’s political stability has not been in question but, since 2011, parliamentary opposition to the ruling Sabah family’s political dominance has broadened to visible public pressure for political and economic reform. Parliamentary elections in July 2013 produced a National Assembly amenable to working with the ruling family, but the subsequent elections held in November 2016 returned to the body Islamist and liberal opponents of the Sabah family who held sway in earlier Assemblies. Assembly oppositionist challenges to government policy led to a cabinet resignation in early November 2017, although the current cabinet does not differ much from the previous cabinet on key policy questions. Kuwait has been increasing its efforts to curb trafficking in persons over the past few years. Years of political paralysis contributed to economic stagnation relative to Kuwait’s more economically vibrant Gulf neighbors such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Like the other GCC states, Kuwait is also struggling with the consequences of the decline in oil prices from 2014 levels. Kuwait receives negligible amounts of U.S. foreign assistance, and has offset some of the costs of U.S. operations in the region since Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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Kuwait: Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy (CRS Report for Congress)