Let’s not forget that Biden pledged to turn Saudi Arabia into a ‘pariah state’ during the presidential campaign.
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have never been allies.
I f you didn’t know any better, you might think the U.S.–Saudi relationship, consummated during a brief meeting between U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi king Abdulaziz Ibn Saud aboard the U.S.S. Quincy in February 1945, was at risk of totally rupturing. According to an April 19 report in the Wall Street Journal, ties have gotten so tense that Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) screamed at Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national-security adviser, during a trip to the kingdom last fall. “The relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has hit its lowest point in decades,” the paper intones, weighed down by disagreements over everything from energy policy and Iran to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This isn’t hyperbole. If President Trump’s four-year tenure was celebrated in the kingdom as a golden era of relations, complete with shiny orbs, excessive praise, and declarations of Saudi Arabia as an “important ally and partner,” the bilateral relationship during Biden’s first year and a half can be charitably described as icy or indifferent. There is no love lost in the Biden administration to Saudi sensitivities, particularly from the man at the top. Let’s not forget that Biden pledged to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah state” during the presidential campaign, ordered the declassification of a U.S. intelligence-community assessment faulting MBS for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and has insisted that the aging King Salman (MBS’s father) be his main point of contact. There are real, concrete differences on key issues, the most notable being the Biden administration’s decision (the correct decision, in my view) to withdraw offensive U.S. military support to Riyadh’s military campaign in Yemen, a seven-year quagmire that severely dented the kingdom’s reputation in Western capitals. Saudi diplomats are also concerned about U.S. attempts to renegotiate a return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The Saudis have lashed out at what they perceive as U.S. disobedience and disloyalty, often using the media to voice grievances against U.S. policy and personnel. In March, reports emerged that Saudi officials were in talks with China about accepting yuan as payment for oil shipments, a not-so-subtle shot at the U.S. dollar’s prominence as the world’s reserve currency. The kingdom’s invitation to Chinese president Xi Jinping, coming at the same time that MBS refused to speak with President Biden during a call, is leading some observers to wonder whether the Biden administration is losing Saudi Arabia as a strategic U.S. ally to China, the kingdom’s top trading partner, and an economic behemoth more than willing to invest in the oil-rich monarchy.
The whole notion of a U.S.–Saudi alliance, however, is about as realistic as Greek mythology. Like the terms “isolationism,” “leadership,” and “rules-based international order,” “alliance” gets thrown around so often that it begins to lose its meaning. To speak of an “ally” in international relations is to suggest that two or more countries have a binding, mutual commitment to one another’s defense. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia simply don’t fit in this category. The two nations don’t have identical security interests or common values, nor are they working off a common perception of what the ideal political order in the Middle East should look like. That infamous FDR–Ibn Saud meeting on the U.S.S. Quincy wasn’t so much the start of a decades-long alliance as it was the dawn of a formal diplomatic relationship — one that over time grew into a pragmatic, unofficial arrangement whereby Washington provided security assistance to Riyadh in exchange for the Saudis’ ensuring reliable oil supplies. When the Saudis allowed the U.S. to station approximately 500,000 U.S. troops in the kingdom on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they did so not as a favor to Washington, but because a half-million soldiers from the world’s most powerful country was a pretty good deterrent against further adventurism from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Once Saddam was gone for good eleven years later and the threat to the kingdom dissipated, the Saudi royal family was no longer keen to have U.S. troops based on its soil.
The Saudis, in other words, have always done what was in their own best interests — even if this meant undermining Washington’s position. This extends to the oil-for-security framework that has governed U.S.–Saudi relations since the end of World War II. The Saudis understand that crude-oil production is their trump card, and they haven’t been hesitant to brandish it as leverage in the past. Take the 1973 oil embargo, when Riyadh and other Arab producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) banned the sale of crude to the U.S. in retaliation for Washington’s resupply of the Israeli military. Or go back to a more recent time, in 2014, when Riyadh and its OPEC partners flooded the global oil market in an attempt to bankrupt U.S. shale producers and eliminate competition. Even today, the Saudi royal family is refusing Washington’s request to pump more oil to stabilize prices. The Biden administration may be upset about Saudi Arabia’s policy, but it shouldn’t come as a big surprise; why, after all, would Riyadh boost production when current prices are resulting in higher returns for the Saudi state?
Unfortunately, the myth of the U.S.–Saudi alliance continues to be invoked, unabated and oftentimes unchallenged. The conventional wisdom, propagated by veteran Saudi watchers such as former Wall Street Journal publisher and author Karen Elliott House, is that Washington can’t afford to fully antagonize the Saudi monarchy because China and Russia are actively waiting on the sidelines to assert their power in the Persian Gulf. The fact that Beijing and Moscow lack the capacity to police the Middle East’s waters, wish to stay out of the fray of the region’s politics, and have no intention of repeating Washington’s foolish mistakes over the past 20 years is conveniently left unexamined.
U.S.–Saudi relations are no doubt in the doldrums. But it’s important to understand why relations are in a rough patch: Both countries are simply expecting too much of each other, which is why both often walk away disappointed, if not downright angry. If the U.S. wants to fix this state of affairs, it should spend a little less time groveling and begging for forgiveness and a little more time acknowledging that U.S. and Saudi interests are more likely to diverge than to coalesce. The U.S. should defend its interests as vigorously as the Saudis defend theirs.