From the early 1970s until Muammar Qadhafi’s toppling in 2011, Moscow and the Libyan Jamahiriya enjoyed cordial relations. During the Cold War, Libya played an important role as the forward base of Soviet interests in the Mediterranean. Although Moscow and Tripoli never entered into a formal alliance, Soviet military instructors were frequent guests in Libya, its military was equipped with Soviet weapons, and Qadhafi was supportive of Moscow’s highly-advertised efforts to back anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle around the globe. Even more important, both nations enjoyed substantial economic cooperation. The relationship became strained in 1992, however, as the government of the newly established Russian Federation joined the international sanctions regime against Libya. Yet, with the exception of this brief intermezzo, Qadhafi’s friendly regime was perceived by Russia’s foreign-policy makers as an important asset in the Mediterranean.

Unlike the West — particularly the United States — Russia backed the Jamahiriya for pragmatic reasons: it was oil-rich and willing to purchase Russian weapons. The two countries had a history of close relations. In 2008, Vladimir Putin went so far as to apply Libya’s Soviet-period debt of around $4.5 billion to a massive $3 billion purchase of sophisticated Russian weapons. Russian Railways, a national monopoly, and Qadhafi’s government also signed a $2.6 billion contract to build a 550-kilometer rail line between Sirte and Benghazi. Moscow would also benefit from $150 million in construction projects, in addition to an estimated $3.5 billion in energy deals.¹ High-level contacts have remained active between Moscow and Tripoli ever since.

As a direct result of the Libyan uprising of 2011, Russia withdrew from this key North African nation, losing contracts worth an estimated nine to ten billion dollars.² Wary of alleged U.S.-led interventions across the world, Moscow pointed to the West and NATO as the main source of unrest in the country. Top Russian officials, including President Putin and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, accused Washington and its allies of taking down Libya’s legitimate government, resulting in widespread bloodletting and the rise of jihadist groups.³ While Putin — in contrast to Qadhafi’s high-ranking personal friends from Italy and France — never turned his back on the Libyan dictator, Moscow joined the Western-led arms sanctions in 2011 against the warring sides. Yet, several months thereafter, Moscow sought to return to Libya, establishing close relations with a leader of the civil war, Marshal Khalifah Haftar, and unilaterally resuming the supply of military hardware to the country as early as 2012.

As a result of trilateral negotiations involving Libya, Britain and the United States, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi decided on December 19, 2003, to abandon his country’s weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) programs. The first George W. Bush administration attributed the dismantlement agreement to a consistently applied policy of sanctions and isolation throughout the 1980s and 1990s.² A few years later, Ambassador John Bolton and hardline neoconservatives, who espoused the implementation of a similar policy towards North Korea, criticized the second Bush administration for prematurely easing pressure on Pyongyang.³

However, despite eight years of a mostly confrontational approach towards Pyongyang during Barack Obama’s administrations, augmented sanctions have only motivated the Kim regime to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons.⁴ During Obama’s presidency, North Korea conducted four of its six nuclear tests (in 2009, 2013 and two in 2016). President Donald Trump’s steps to further increase economic and diplomatic pressure during his first year in office resulted in a September 2017 nuclear blast with a magnitude that dwarfed previous tests conducted by the recalcitrant state.⁵

Disappointed with the failure of sanctions to bring about dismantlement and aware of intelligence estimates placing North Korea a heartbeat away from achieving the capability to strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear weapons, Ambassador Bolton publicly considered — shortly before being appointed national security advisor — toppling the Kim regime by military force.⁶ President Trump and Secretaries Pompeo and Mnuchin, however, credit sanctions with pushing Pyongyang to the negotiating table and view the vague declaration that concluded the June 2018 Trump-Kim summit as a positive development to be followed by further negotiations. Yet, almost 12 months of negotiations, including a second summit in February 2019, have failed to bring about dismantlement. In this regard, the administration insists on a rapid and complete North Korean dismantlement prior to lifting sanctions.⁷

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania was one of eight sovereign nations that severed relations with the State of Qatar when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) crisis erupted in June 2017.¹ This move underscored both Nouakchott’s desire to curry favor with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Mauritanian government’s deep concerns about Islamist activity in African, Arab and Muslim countries.² As Mauritania’s president, Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz, blames the Muslim Brotherhood “for the destruction of several Arab countries,” Nouakchott is fully supportive of Saudi Arabia’s anti-Islamist and anti-Qatari foreign policy and has consistently backed Riyadh and Abu Dhabi against Doha throughout the past Gulf Crisis.³

At a time in which Mauritania’s leadership sees Qatari-backed Islamists as a terror menace that threatens the Maghrebi country’s security, Nouakchott’s severing of ties with Doha was largely about rejecting what the Mauritanian regime perceives as outside interference in its internal affairs. Nouakchott’s opposition to Qatar must be further analyzed within the context of myriad social, political and economic crises that have left the leadership in Mauritania — much as in other autocratic Arab regimes — viewing Qatar’s media culture — principally by the Al Jazeera network — and the emirate’s anti-status-quo foreign-policy agenda as threatening to stability in Mauritania.

TIES WITH SAUDI ARABIA

Mauritania’s historically close links with Saudi Arabia predate the country’s independence from France in 1960. Mauritania had vested interests in establishing an increasingly cooperative relationship with Riyadh, largely due to issues regarding Morocco. As many prominent Moroccans made claims to Mauritania, arguing that it belonged to “greater Morocco,” the leadership in Mauritania was nervous about the ambitions of Rabat, which did not even recognize Mauritania until 1969, when the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had its founding meeting in the Moroccan capital.⁴ King Faisal’s historic visit to Mauritania in 1972 strengthened Riyadh-Nouakchott ties and served to help facilitate a thaw in Mauritanian-Moroccan relations, making the kingdom particularly valuable to Nouakchott from a diplomatic perspective.⁵ During this period, Saudi Arabia was extending the kingdom’s religious influence in Mauritania and other Arab/African countries through charitable projects, religious schools, mosque construction and Islamic centers. To this day, Saudi Arabia’s religious influence is evident in Nouakchott, where the main mosque is known as “the Saudi mosque.”⁶