COALITION OF THE WARY

摘要

On a humid mid-september night, secretary of state john kerry arrived at the royal palace on saudi arabia's red sea coast to beg the favor of a king. The opulent compound where Abdullah bin Abdul-aziz spends his summers is guarded by machine guns and armored vehicles and hung with sumptuous curtains, giant blue-tinted chandeliers and large portraits of perhaps the most powerful man in the Middle East, his excellency the King himself. Which is why Kerry was there: Abdullah was the linchpin of Kerry's plan to build what President Obama called a "broad coalition of partners"-more than 40 nations so far, from Albania to South Korea-to fight the fanatical terrorists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS). But the King had some demands of his own in return for agreeing to host a training camp for moderate Syrian rebels who can help fight ISIS and for pressuring his kingdom's influential Sunni clerics to denounce the radical terrorist group's ideology.