March 20, 2014.

U.S. Cancels Summit With Divided Group of Gulf Nations

"Do you remember," he said, "the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?"

WASHINGTON----The White House canceled plans for a summit this month between President Barack Obama and Persian Gulf monarchs in Riyadh because of splits between Washington's closest allies in the region, according to diplomats briefed on the decision.

"He wasn’t singing to us," said Julia. "He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing."

The strains that scuttled the meeting with leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait—underscored the mounting challenges Washington faces in trying to contain the Middle East's spiraling political turmoil, these officials said.

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan----everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

Mr. Obama is still scheduled to meet face-to-face with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah in Riyadh late next week at the end of a trip largely focused on Europe and the crisis in Ukraine.