RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Obama arrived here Wednesday morning, barely a day after publicly expressing support for the long-delayed release of congressional documents that concluded Saudi officials in the United States might have played a role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The documents — 28 pages of intelligence from a congressional report — have fueled suspicions for years, despite the conclusion of the official 9/11 Commission that no senior officials in the kingdom were involved in the attacks.
The charge, which Saudi officials deny, is one of a series of delicate diplomatic issues that Mr. Obama is certain to confront during discussions with the Saudi monarch, King Salman.
The Obama administration’s deal with Iran to limit that country’s nuclear weapons program has unnerved the kingdom. The president’s decision not to order airstrikes against the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in 2013 was viewed in the kingdom as hesitation in the face of an implacable foe. And the Saudis were angered by Mr. Obama’s comments in a recent article in The Atlantic in which he suggested that Persian Gulf countries were not pulling their weight in assuring the region’s security.
Just before leaving for his six-day trip to the Middle East and Europe, Mr. Obama told CBS News that he hoped that the confidential section of the congressional report would be released soon, though he cautioned that the information it contained might not be conclusive.
He said in the CBS interview that his director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, was reviewing the documents for possible release, but he urged an orderly process, saying that “what can end up happening is if you just dump a whole bunch of stuff out there that nobody knows exactly how credible it is, was it verified or not, it could end up creating problems.”
Questions about the possibility of Saudi involvement in the terrorist attacks almost 15 years ago have also given rise to a bill in Congress that would allow American citizens to sue the Saudi government. The legislation has strong, bipartisan support;, Saudi officials have threatened to sell off nearly $1 trillion in assets if the bill becomes law.
In the CBS interview, Mr. Obama said he opposes the legislation because it would open the United States government to legal retaliation from citizens of other countries, adding: “This is not just a bilateral U.S.-Saudi issue. This is a matter of how, generally, the United States approaches our interactions with other countries.”
Taken together, the possible release of the documents and the pending legislation have added one more serious point of contention that Mr. Obama will face during the meeting with King Salman and other gulf leaders during his visit.
G.C.C. ESSENTIAL FACTS
- The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, more commonly known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, was founded in 1981 to facilitate economic, political and military cooperation among its six member states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
- The combined population of its member states in 2014 was 51.5 million, or about the size of South Korea, according to the World Bank.
- Gross domestic product for the G.C.C. in 2014 was $1.643 trillion, according to the World Bank, which would make it as a single country the 12th largest economy in the world, between Canada and Australia.
- On a G.D.P. per capita basis, the G.C.C. countries are some of the wealthiest in the world, with four of the top 12 countries in 2014, according to the World Bank: Qatar (No. 1, $140,649), Kuwait (No. 5, $73,245), the United Arab Emirates (No. 7, $67,674) and Saudi Arabia (No. 12, $52,010).
- A common market was introduced in 2008 and a customs union finalized in 2015. Efforts to create a single currency have stalled.
- The military arm of the G.C.C., the Peninsula Shield Force, was deployed to Bahrain during the uprising there in 2011.
- In March 2014, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recalled their ambassadors from Qatar over a dispute for its support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- A rail network connecting the six member states is expected to be completed by 2018.
“The challenge, of course, is that the two sides have very different views on what a more assertive, more confident gulf role in the region, and more confident role of the Saudis in particular, would look like,” said Perry Cammack, a former State Department official who is now an associate in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Before Mr. Obama’s trip, White House officials repeatedly acknowledged the tensions, saying they had grown out of the difficulty in confronting what they called the region’s most tumultuous period in decades. Rob Malley, the president’s top Middle East adviser, told reporters last week that “our views and those of some of our partners in the region, and Saudi Arabia in particular, have not always been perfectly aligned.”
Yet aides said they hoped that the common cause of combating terrorism and regional instability would be enough to make the meeting with the king, and a summit meeting with other Persian Gulf leaders on Thursday, productive.
In Britain, Mr. Obama will also try to mend fences after he suggested in the Atlantic article that Europeans were “free riders” in securing the Continent. And hespecifically criticized the British prime minister, David Cameron, as being “distracted” during the 2011 military campaign that killed Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.
The president is also likely to weigh in on the fate of the European Union as British voters prepare to decide in a referendum whether the country will leave the union. Mr. Obama has said he opposes a British exit from the union, which is commonly referred to as “Brexit.”
“The E.U. is one of the great accomplishments of the post-World War II era,” said Charles A. Kupchan, the senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council. “It has succeeded in helping remove war from Europe, and we are concerned about the health and vitality of that experiment.”
“We would not want to see a Brexit that could potentially damage the European Union and increase the challenges that it faces,” he said.
Yet Mr. Obama’s support may arrive too late. Mr. Cameron has been campaigning for Britain to remain in the union, but his political standing has been undermined by revelations from the leak of financial documents in Panama that he profited from an offshore investment fund.
“A lot of the credibility of the ‘remain’ campaign is about his popularity,” said Heather Conley, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and now a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “When he has a tough day, that’s a bad day for the referendum as well.”
Mr. Obama will conclude his trip with a visit to Germany, where he plans to tour the country’s largest industrial trade show and deliver a speech about the broad challenges still facing Europe.
Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser, said the speech presented an opportunity for Mr. Obama to “step back” and talk about the future of Europe even as it faces terrorism, a refugee crisis, fighting in Ukraine and economic slowdowns.