Even alliances between countries that share similar cultures and rich, intersecting histories can be acrimonious. France and Israel, for example, provoke vivid and contradictory sentiments for many Americans. Franco-American ties are routinely strained. No one in Washington ever believed that Charles de Gaulle’s nuclear independence, guided by the principles of tous azimuts, shoot in any direction, and dissuasion du faible au fort, deterrence of the strong by the weak, meant that France might try to intimidate the United States. But there were moments when it wasn’t crystal clear whether Paris, free from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, might harmfully diverge from Washington in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Still, even when things have been ugly, quiet and profound military and intelligence cooperation continued with the French, almost on a par with the exchanges between Washington, London, and Canberra. It didn’t hurt that a big swath of affluent Americans have loved Paris and the sunnier parts of France for generations, and that French and American universalism essentially speak the same language. These things matter.
The United States has sometimes been furious at Israel — no other ally has, so far as we know, run an American agent deep inside the U.S. government hoovering up truckloads of highly classified information. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, much disliked and denounced by various American governments, is probably permanent: setting aside the Israeli right’s revanchism, the proliferation of ever-better ballistic weaponry and drones negates any conceivable good faith that might exist in the future between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, who never seem to be able to check their own worst impulses. Geography is destiny: Israel simply lacks the physical (and maybe moral) depth to not intrude obnoxiously into the lives of Palestinians. The Gaza war has likely obliterated any lingering Israeli indulgence towards the Palestinian people — what used to be called, before the Intifadas eviscerated the Israeli left, “risks for peace.” An ever larger slice of the Democratic Party is increasingly uncomfortable with this fate: the rule of (U.S.-subsidized) Westerners over a non-Western, mostly Muslim, people. But the centripetal forces — shared democratic and egalitarian values, intimate personal ties between the American and Israeli political and commercial elites, a broader, decades-old American emotional investment in the Jewish state, a common suspicion of the Muslim Middle East, and a certain Parousian philo-Semitism among American evangelicals — have so far kept in check the sometimes intense official hostility towards Israel and the distaste among so much of the American intelligentsia.
None of this amalgam of culture, religion, and history, however, works to reinforce relations between the United States and Islamic lands. Senior American officials, the press, and think tanks often talk about deep relationships with Muslim Middle Eastern countries, the so-called “moderate Arab states,” of which Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are the most favored. Presidents, congressmen, diplomats, and spooks have certainly had soft spots for Arab potentates. The Hashemites in Jordan easily win the contest for having the most friends across the Israel divide in Washington: sympathizing with the Palestinian cause, if embraced too ardently, could destroy the Hashemites, who rule over sometimes deeply disgruntled Palestinians. American concern for the Palestinian cause rarely crosses the Jordan River. (Neither does even more intense European concern for the Palestinians intrude into their relations with the Hashemite monarchy.)
The Hashemites are witty enough, urbane enough, and sufficiently useful to consistently generate sympathy and affection. Even when King Hussein went to war against Israel in 1967 or routinely sided with Saddam Hussein, his style and his manner (and I’m-really-your-friend conversations with CIA station chiefs and American ambassadors) always encouraged Washington to forgive him his sins. The Hashemites, like the Egyptian military junta, have routinely, if not always reliably, done our dirty work when Washington needed some terrorist or other miscreant held and roughly interrogated. Such things matter institutionally, building bonds and debts among officials.
But little cultural common ground binds Americans to even the most Westernized Arabs. Arabists, once feared by Israel and many Jewish Americans, always had an impossible task: they had to use realist arguments — shouldn’t American interests prefer an alliance with twenty-two Arab countries rather than with a single Jewish one? — without underlying cultural support. They had to argue dictatorship over democracy or belittle Israel’s democracy enough (“an apartheid state”) to make it seem equally objectionable. Outside of American universities, the far-left side of Congress, the pages of The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Review of Books, and oil-company boardrooms, it hasn’t worked — yet. Too many Americans have known Israelis and visited the Holy Land. And too many are viscerally discomfited by turbans and hijabs. Culture — the bond that rivals self-interest — just isn’t that fungible.
Even the Turks, the most Westernized of Muslims, didn’t have a large fan club in America when the secular Kemalists reigned in Ankara — outside of the Pentagon and the Jewish-American community, which deeply appreciated Turkey’s engagement with Israel. The Turks’ democratic culture never really blossomed under the Kemalists, who couldn’t fully shake their fascist (and Islamic) roots. The American military still retains a soft spot for the Turks — they fought well in Korea, and their military, the southern flank of NATO, has a martial ethic and a level of competence far above any Arab army; and they have continuously allowed the Pentagon to do things along the Turkish littoral, openly and secretly, against the Soviets and the Russians.
Yet their American fan club has drastically shrunk as the Turkish government, under the guidance of the philo-Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has re-embraced its Ottoman past, enthusiastically used state power against the opposition and the press, and given sympathy and some support to Arab Islamic militants, among them Hamas. The Turks have pummeled repeatedly Washington’s Kurdish allies in Syria (who are affiliated with Ankara’s deadly foe, the terrorism-fond Kurdistan Workers Party). More damning, Erdoğan purchased Russian S-400 ground-to-air missiles, compromising its part in developing and purchasing America’s most advanced stealth fighter-bomber, the F-35. The Pentagon, always Turkey’s most reliable ally in Washington, feels less love than it used to feel.
No great European imperial power ever really integrated Muslim states well into their realms. Great Britain and France did better than Russia and Holland; the Soviet Union did better than Russia. With imperial self-interest illuminating the way, the British did conclude defensive treaties with allied-but-subservient Muslim lands — the Trucial States and Egypt–Sudan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — that could greatly benefit the natives. The emirs in the Gulf, once they realized that they couldn’t raid Indian shipping without fierce retribution, accepted, sometimes eagerly, British protection, grafting it onto the age-old Gulf customs of dakhala and zabana — finding powerful foreign patrons. The emirates needed protection from occasionally erupting militant forces from the peninsula’s highlands — the Wahhabi warriors of the Saud family.
The British, however, failed to protect their most renowned clients, the Hashemites, in their native land, the Hijaz in Arabia, after wistfully suggesting during World War I that the Hashemites might inherit most of the Near East under Great Britain’s dominion. King Hussein bin Ali had proved obstinate in accepting Jews in Palestine and the French in Syria. Britain switched its patronage to the Nejd’s Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud. Backed by the formidable Ikhwan, the Brothers, the Wahhabi shock troops who had a penchant for pillaging Sunni Muslims and killing Shiite ones, Ibn Saud conquered the Hijaz, home to Mecca and Medina and the Red Sea port of Jeddah, in 1925. Checked by the Royal Air Force in Iraq and the Royal Navy in the Persian Gulf, Saudi jihadist expansion stopped. In 1929 Ibn Saud gutted the Ikhwan, who had a hard time accepting the post-World-War-I idea of nation-states and borders, and created more conventional military forces to defend his family and realm. In 1932 he declared the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The dynasty’s Hanbali jurisprudence remained severe by the standards enforced in most of the Islamic world, but common Sunni praxis and political philosophy held firm: rulers must follow the holy law, but they have discretion in how they interpret and enforce it; in practice, kings and princes could sometimes kick clerics and the sharia to the ground when exigencies required.
Since Britain’s initial patronage, the Saudis officially have remained wary of foreigners, even after the 1950s when the royal family started allowing thousands of them in to develop and run the kingdom. Ibn Saud put it succinctly when he said “England is of Europe, and I am a friend of the Ingliz, their ally. But I will walk with them only as far as my religion and honor will permit.” He might have added that he appreciated the power of the RAF against the Ikhwan on their horses and camels. After 1945, Ibn Saud and his sons sought American protection and investment. They saw that Britain was declining; it was also massively invested in Iran. The modern Middle East has been an incubator of ideologies toxic to monarchies. The three Arab heavyweights of yesteryear — Baathist Iraq, Baathist Syria, and Nasserite Egypt — were all, in Saudi eyes, ambitious predators. The Soviet Union lurked over the horizon, feeding these states and, as bad, Arab communists and other royalty-hating leftists who then had the intellectual high ground in the Middle East. But there was an alternative.
American power was vast, Americans loved oil, and America’s democratic missionary zeal didn’t initially seem to apply to the Muslim Middle East, where American intrusion more often checked, and usually undermined, European imperial powers without egging on the natives towards democracy. (George W. Bush was the only American president to egregiously violate, in Saudi eyes, this commendable disposition.) American oilmen and their families came to Saudi Arabia and happily ghettoized themselves in well-organized, autonomous, well-behaved communities. The American elite hardly produced a soul who went native: no T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, or Harry St. John Bridger Philby — passionate, linguistically talented, intrepid Englishmen who adopted local causes, sometimes greatly disturbing the natives and their countrymen back home. A nation of middlebrow pragmatic corporations, backed up by a very large navy, Americans seemed ideal partners for the Saudi royals, who were always willing to buy friends and “special relationships.” As Fouad Ajami put it in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, “The purchase of Boeing airliners and AT&T telephones were a wager that the cavalry of the merchant empire would turn up because it was in its interest to do so.”
But Americans could, simply by the size of their global responsibilities and strategies, be unsettling. In Crosswinds, Ajami’s attempt to peel back the layers of Saudi society, he captures the elite’s omnipresent trepidation, the fear of weak men with vast wealth in a region defined by violence:
“The Saudis are second-guessers,” former secretary of state George Shultz said to me in a recent discussion of Saudi affairs. He had known their ways well during his stewardship of American diplomacy (1982–1989). This was so accurately on the mark. It was as sure as anything that the Saudis lamenting American passivity in the face of Iran would find fault were America to take on the Iranians…. In a perfect world, powers beyond Saudi Arabia would not disturb the peace of the realm. The Americans would offer protection, but discreetly; they would not want Saudi Arabia to identify itself, out in the open, with major American initiatives in the Persian Gulf or on Arab–Israeli peace. The manner in which Saudi Arabia pushed for a military campaign against Saddam Hussein only to repudiate it when the war grew messy, and its consequences within Iraq unfolding in the way they did, is paradigmatic. This is second-guessing in its purest.
Saudi Arabia has had only one brief five-year period, from 1973 to 1978, when the Middle East (Lebanon excepted) went more or less the way that the royal family wanted. They weren’t severely threatened, their oil wealth had mushroomed, internal discontent had not metastasized (or at least was not visible to the royal family) and everybody — Arabs, Iranians, Americans, Soviets, and Europeans — listened to them respectfully. In 1979, when the Iranian revolution deposed the Shah, and Sunni religious militancy put on muscle, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the golden moment ended. Enemies multiplied. Since then, as Nadav Safran put it in Saudi Arabia, The Ceaseless Quest for Security “the Saudis did not dare cast their lot entirely with the United States in defiance of all the parties that opposed it, nor could they afford to rely exclusively on regional alliances and renounce the American connection altogether in the view of the role it might play in various contingencies…the leadership …endeavored to muddle its way through on a case-by-case basis. The net result was that the American connection ceased to be a hub of the Kingdom’s strategy and instead became merely one of several problematic relationships requiring constant careful management.”
Which brings us to the current Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country — easily the most detested Saudi royal in the West since the kingdom’s birth. With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the most indefatigable Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, MBS is the most consequential autocrat in the region. And the prince made a proposal to America — a proposal that may survive the Gaza war, which has reanimated anti-Zionism and constrained the Gulf Arab political elite’s decade-old tendency to deal more openly with the Jewish state. To wit: he is willing to establish an unparalleled tight and lucrative relationship with Washington, and let bygones be bygones — forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and all the insults by Joe Biden — so long as America is willing to guarantee Saudi Arabia’s security, in ways more reliable than in the past, and provide Riyadh the means to develop its own “civilian” nuclear program. Saudi Arabia would remain a major arms-purchaser and big-ticket commercial shopper and a reliable oil producer (the prince is a bit vague on exactly what Saudi Arabia would do with its oil that it isn’t doing now or, conversely, what it might not do in the future if Riyadh were to grow angry). And the Saudis would establish diplomatic relations with Jerusalem — clearly the pièce de résistance in his entreaty with the United States. With the Gazan debacle, the appeal of MBS’ pitch will increase for Israelis and Americans, who will seek any and all diplomatic means to turn back the anti-American and anti-Zionist tide.
MBS and the Jews is a fascinating subject. It is not atypical for Muslim rulers, even those who sometimes say unkind things about Jews, to privately solicit American, European, and Israeli Jews. Having Jews on the brain is now fairly common in the Islamic world, even among Muslims who aren’t anti-Semites. Imported European anti-Semitism greatly amped up Islam’s historic suspicions of Judaism: in the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad is clearly disappointed by the Jewish refusal to recognize the legitimacy, the religious continuity, of his calling, which led to the slaughter of an Arabian Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza. Dissolve to the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, the wars and their repeated Arab defeats, the centrality of Israel in American and Soviet Middle Eastern foreign policy, the prominence of Jewish success in the West, especially in Hollywood, the constant chatter among Western Christians about Jews — all came together to give Al-Yahud an unprecedented centripetal eminence in the modern Islamic Middle East.
When MBS came to the United States in 2018, he and his minions engaged in extensive Jewish outreach. The prince admires Jewish accomplishment. His representatives are similarly philo-Semitic. The head of the World Muslim League, Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Issa, sometimes sounds as if he could work for B’nai B’rith International. Not that long ago, before 9/11, the League, an official organ of the Saudi state, pumped a lot of money into puritanical (Salafi) missionary activity, competing with the “secular” Egyptian establishment and the clerical regime in Tehran as the most ardent and well-funded proliferators of anti-Semitism among Muslims. So it is intriguing that MBS, whose father long had the Palestinian dossier at the royal court, has developed what appears to be a sincere and, at least for now, non-malevolent interest in Jews.
One suspects that the prince sees a certain religious and cultural affinity with Jews: Judaism and Islam are juristically and philosophically much closer to each other than Christianity and Islam. MBS is sufficiently well-educated — he has a law degree from King Saud University — to know this; he has now traveled enough, and met enough Jews around the world, to feel it. Nearly half of the Jews in Israel came from the Middle East. The other half — the Ashkenazi, or as Bernard Lewis more accurately described them, the Jews of Christendom — often saw themselves, before arriving in Zion, as a Middle Eastern people in exile. Here is a decent guess about MBS’ reasoning: if the Jews, a Middle Eastern people now thoroughly saturated with modern (Western) ideas, could become so accomplished, then Saudi Muslims could, too. The Jewish experience — and association with Jews — might hold the keys to success.
There is a very long list of Muslim rulers from the eighteenth century forward, who, recognizing the vast chasm in accomplishment between Western (and now Westernized Asian) and Islamic lands, have tried to unlock the “secrets” of foreign power and success. Oil-rich Muslim rulers have tried to buy progress with petroleum profits. MBS certainly isn’t novel in his determination to make his own country “modern.” His audacity, even when compared against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who aspired to make Iran “the Germany of the Middle East,” is impressive. There is the prospective giant metal tube in the northwest corner of the country, which, according to the prince’s NEOM vision (“neo” from the Greek and “m” from the Arabic mustaqbal, future), will one day hold upwards of nine million people in a verdant paradise where everyone has the Protestant work ethic and the air-conditioning never breaks down. This is the dreamscape of an Arab prince who is not intellectually shackled by the rhythms and the customs of his homeland. He is building a vast resort complex on the Red Sea, already under construction, which is also being funded from the sovereign wealth fund because Western and Asian bankers remain dubious about its profitability. A dozen five-star luxury resorts, dependent on visiting affluent Europeans, will have to allow topless bathers and a lot of alcohol if they have any chance of making money; thousands of lower-class Saudi men — not imported foreign labor — will in theory keep these resorts running.
The prince is searching for the keys to unleash Saudi Arabia’s non-oil potential — using prestigious Western consultancy firms that promise to bring greater productivity and efficiency to gross national product. He is trying to do what every significant Muslim ruler has done since Ottoman sultans realized they could no longer win on the battlefield against Christians: grow at home greater curiosity, talent, and industry.
Unlike the Arab elites in the lands that started seriously Westernizing in the nineteenth century and have since seen their countries racked and fractured by foreign ideologies, brutal authoritarian rulers, rebellions, and civil and sectarian wars, MBS appears to be an optimist. Under his firm guidance, he believes that Saudi Arabia can leapfrog from being the archetypal orthodox Islamic state to a self-sustaining, innovative, entrepreneurial, tech-savvy, well-educated powerhouse. Ajami, the finest chronicler of the Arab world’s misery, was deeply curious about Saudi Arabia because it was the last frontier, a land with considerable promise that had not yet embraced enough modernity, in all the wrong ways, to cock it up. The Saudi identity has been slow to nationalize — it was decades, perhaps a century, behind the cohering forces that gave Egypt and then Syria some sense of themselves. As Alexis Vassiliev, the great Russian scholar of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, put it:
The idea of a national territorial state, of a “motherland,” was new to Arabian society. The very concept of a motherland, to which individuals owe their primary loyalty, contradicts the spirit of Islam, which stresses the universal solidarity of believers as against non-Muslims. National consciousness and national feelings in Saudi Arabia were confined to a narrow group working in the modern sector of the economy and in the civil and military bureaucracy. Those who described themselves as nationalists were, rather, reformers and modernists, who wanted to create a more modern society. But their sentiments were so vague that the left wing of the “nationalists” even avoided using the name Saudi Arabia because of their attitude to the Al Saud.
Saudi Arabia has been rapidly modernizing since the 1960s. Measured by massive concrete buildings, roads, luxury hotels with too much marble, electrification, communications, aviation, urban sprawl, rural decline, and access to higher education, Vassiliev’s observation is undoubtedly correct: “Saudi Arabia has experienced more rapid change than any other Middle Eastern country and the old social balance has been lost forever.” But spiritually, in its willingness to import Western ideas as opposed to Western gadgets, know-how, aesthetics, and organization, the kingdom changed only fitfully. Royal experiments in reform, especially under King Abdullah (2005–2015), could be ended as quickly as they began.
Before MBS, Saudi rulers and the vast oil-fed aristocracy were deeply conservative at home (if not in their homes), fearful of the outside world that relentlessly corroded the traditions that gave the kingdom its otherworldly, female-fearing, fun-killing, profoundly hypocritical weirdness. But this conservative status quo also offered a certain moral coherence, political stability (the royal family, thousands strong, were collectively invested), as well as a quirky governing class that was fine for decades, through the worst of the Wahhabi efflorescence that followed the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca, with a gay intelligence chief. Saudis might be haughty, lacking the multilingual grace that came so easily to old-school Arabs, who retained Ottoman propriety with first-rate Western educations, but they were aware of their limitations. They gave the impression that they couldn’t compete — even at the apex of Saudi power in the mid-1970s. Most of the royal family likely didn’t want to try. When Ajami was alive (he died in 2014, a year before MBS began his rise), Saudi Arabia hadn’t taken the giant, irreversible leap forward. It has now.
The crown prince has been a one-man wrecking ball, transforming the country’s collective leadership, where princes — uncles, brothers, sons, and cousins — effectively shared power under the king, into a dictatorship. Whatever brakes are still on the system (King Salman is old and ailing but rumors don’t yet have him non compos mentis), they likely will not outlast Salman’s death. There has never been any clear demarcation between the nation’s treasury and the royal family’s purse; MBS appears to have greatly reduced the points of access to the country’s oil wealth to him and his minions. His great shakedown in the Ritz Hotel in Riyadh in November 2017, when nearly four hundred of the kingdom’s richest and most powerful people were forcibly held and squeezed or stripped of their assets, killed the old order. Some “guests” reportedly were physically tortured, had their families threatened, or both. Such behavior would have been unthinkable before. Traditional kingdoms always have informal rules that buttress the status quo and check arbitrary power. The crown prince’s new-age mindset — his determination to stamp out all possible opposition to his modernist vision with him alone at the helm — was vividly on display at the Ritz.
This autocratic thuggery earned little censure in the West, on either the left or right. Some appeared to believe that the rightly guided prince was actually stamping out corruption. Many Saudis, especially among the young, may have sincerely enjoyed the spectacle of the spoiled ancien régime getting its comeuppance. The same unchecked princely temperament, however, reappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, when Jamal Khashoggi crossed the threshold. It is a near-certainty that MBS intended to kill, not to kidnap, the elite dissident. It is not at all unlikely, given the prince’s reputation for work and detail and his aversion to delegating decisions to others, that he personally approved the dissident’s dismemberment.
The crown prince is gambling that Saudi nationalism, which is now real even if its depth is hard to measure, will attach itself to him, as nationalisms do in their need for a leader. He is trying to downgrade Islam by upgrading the nation. He has reined in the dreaded morals police, the mutawwa, who could harass and arrest almost anyone. The urban young, especially if they come from the middle and upper-middle class, have long loathed this police force, which comes from the more marginal precincts of society, and so they find MBS’ mission civilisatrice appealing. The crown prince is essentially trying to pull an Atatürk, who created a Turkish nation-state out of a Muslim empire. Mustafa Kemal created his own cult: he was a war hero, the savior of the Turks from invading Greek Christian armies and World War I victors who were carving up the carcass of the Ottoman state. He fused himself with the idea of nationhood. His tomb in Ankara has tens of thousands of Turkish Islamists respectfully visiting it.
When it came to cult worship, Saudi kings and princes had been fairly low-key compared to most other Middle Eastern rulers. Yet MBS’ sentiments are, again, more modern. He has effectively established a police state — the first ever in Saudi history. His creation is certainly not as ruthless as the Orwellian nightmares of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria; it is neither as loaded with internal spies nor rife with prison camps as Abdul Fattah El-Sisi’s Egypt. But MBS’ Arabia is a work in progress. Those in America and Israel who advocate that the United States should draw closer to MBS, so as to anchor a new anti-Iran alliance in Riyadh, are in effect saying that we should endorse MBS and his vision of a more secular, female-driving, anti-Islamist Saudi Arabia without highlighting its other, darker aspects, or that we should just ignore the kingdom’s internal affairs and focus on what the crown prince gives us externally. This realist calculation usually leads first back to the negatives: without the crown prince’s support of American interests, Russia, China, and Iran, the revisionist axis that has been gaining ground as America has been retrenching, will do even better. And then the positive: Saudi recognition of Israel would permanently change the Jewish state’s standing in the Muslim world — a long-sought goal of American diplomacy.
The prince clearly knows how much Benjamin Netanyahu wants Saudi Arabia’s official recognition of Israel. The Israeli prime minister has loudly put it at the top of his foreign-policy agenda. (Before the Gaza war, it might have had the additional benefit of rehabilitating him at home.) The prince clearly knows how much American Jewry wants to see an Israeli embassy in Riyadh. And after some initial weariness, the Biden administration now wants to add the kingdom to the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan recognizing Israel was good, but Saudi Arabia would be better. Although the White House certainly hasn’t thought through how the United States would fit into an Israeli-Saudi-US defensive alliance, whether it would even be politically or militarily possible, the administration proffered the idea before Biden went to Saudi Arabia in 2022 — or echoed an earlier, vaguer Saudi suggestion of a defensive pact — as part of Riyadh’s official recognition of Israel. Given the importance that MBS attaches to things Jewish, he may well believe his offer of Israeli recognition gives him considerable leverage in future dealings with the United States.
Joe Biden paved the way for MBS’ go-big proposal by making one of the most embarrassing flips in presidential history. Biden came into office pledging to reevaluate US-Saudi ties and cast MBS permanently into the cold for the gruesome killing of Khashoggi and, a lesser sin, making a muck of the war in Yemen, which has led to the United States, given its crucial role in maintaining and supplying the Saudi Air Force, being an accomplice in a bombing campaign that has had a negligible effect on the Shiite Houthis capacity to fight but has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Yemeni civilians. (In civil wars, it is hard to know who is starving whom, but the Saudi role in bringing starvation to Yemen has not been negligible.) Fearing another hike in oil prices before the midterm elections, Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia, fist-bumping MBS and getting not much in return except reestablishing what has been true in US–Saudi relations from the beginning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt hosted two of King Ibn Saud’s sons in Washington: everything is transactional.
MBS’ offer to America arrived with China’s successful intervention into Saudi-Iranian relations. Beijing obtained an agreement for the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, which Riyadh had severed in 2016, after King Salman executed Nimr al-Nimr, the most popular Saudi Shiite cleric in the oil-rich Eastern Province, and Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. Beijing also appears to have aided a Saudi-Iranian ceasefire and an understanding about Yemen. MBS, who had been eager to extricate himself and the Saudi treasury from the peninsula’s “graveyard of nations,” reduced the number of Saudi forces engaged in the conflict; Tehran appears to have convinced the Houthis, at least temporarily, not to lob Iranian-provided missiles into their northern neighbor.
China offers MBS something that Israel and the United States realistically no longer do: a possible long-term deterrent against Iranian aggression in a post-American Middle East. Beijing likely isn’t opposed to the Islamic Republic going nuclear, since this would further diminish the United States, which has under both Republican and Democratic presidents told the world that an Iranian nuke is “unacceptable.” Given Chinese access in Tehran and Moscow, which is developing an ever-closer military relationship with the clerical regime, the value of Chinese intercession will increase. Given Beijing’s economic interest in Saudi Arabia’s oil (it is now the kingdom’s biggest customer), MBS is certainly right to see in the Chinese a possible check on any Iranian effort to take the kingdom’s oil off-market. The Islamic Republic has never before had great-power patrons. The Chinese bring big advantages to Iran’s theocrats — much greater insulation from American sanctions, for example; but they may also corral Tehran’s freedom of action a bit.
In the controversial interview that MBS not long ago gave to The Atlantic, MBS clearly thought he could wait out the Biden administration, and that America’s and the West’s need for Saudi crude, and the rising power of China, gave the prince time and advantage. He has won that tug-of-war. America cannot possibly ostracize the ruler who controls the largest, most easily accessible, and highest-quality pool of oil in the world. The Gaza war will also play to MBS’ advantage as both Israel and the United States will seek Saudi intercession to counter what’s likely to become an enormous propaganda victory for Iran’s “axis of resistance.” The crown prince may well be racing his country towards the abyss, eliminating all the customs and institutions that made the Saudi monarchy resilient and not particularly brutish (not by Middle Eastern standards), but he has been tactically astute with all the greater powers maneuvering around him.
Saudi Arabia is probably the Muslim country that American liberals hate the most. (Pakistan is a distant runner-up.) This enmity is, in part, a reaction to the oddest and oldest American “partnership” in the Middle East, and the general and quite understandable feeling that the Saudi royal family never really came clean about its dealings with Osama bin Ladin before 9/11. Not even post-Sadat Egypt, which has developed a close working relationship with the American military and the CIA, has had the kind of access that the Saudis have had in Washington. Even after 9/11, during Bush’s presidency, Saudi preferences in personnel could reach all the way into the National Security Council. The Saudi distaste for Peter Theroux, an accomplished Arabist and former journalist who wrote an entertaining, biting look into the kingdom in Sandstorms, published in 1990, got him briefly “unhired” to oversee Saudi policy on the NSC because of the fear of Riyadh’s reaction. He got rehired when either Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, realized that allowing Saudi preferences to effect personnel decisions within the White House was unwise and potentially very embarrassing. Given the Gaza war’s demolition of the Biden administration’s Middle Eastern policy, it’s not unlikely that we will see Saudi access in Washington rise again, perhaps rivaling its halcyon days during the Reagan administration. That would be a sharp irony.
Culturally speaking, no two countries had ever been further apart: Saudi Arabia still had a vibrant slave society in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt began America’s relationship with the desert kingdom. Outside pressure, not internal debate among legal scholars and Saudi princes about evolving religious ethics and the holy law, obliged the monarchy to ban slavery officially in 1962. (Bad Western press aside, the Saudi royals may have been truly annoyed at French officials freeing slaves traveling with their masters on vacation.) Ibn Saud had over twenty wives, allotted by the holy law to no more than four at one time, and numerous concubines. When concubines became pregnant, they would usually ascend through marriage, while a wife would be retired to a comfortable and less competitive environment. By comparison, the thirty-seven-year-old crown prince today has only one wife and, if rumors are true, many mistresses — a less uxorious, more acceptable choice for a modern, ambitious man.
Roosevelt’s embrace of the Saudi monarchy established the ultimate realist relationship. The Saudi royals neither cared for America’s democratizing impulse, nor for its incessant conversations about human rights, nor for its ties to Israel, nor, after 1973 and the Saudi-engineered oil embargo that briefly gave the United States sky-rocketing prices and gas lines, for the American chatter in pro-Israel corners about the need to develop plans for seizing Saudi oil fields. Yet the Saudis loved the U.S. Navy and the long, reassuring shadow that it cast in the Middle East. Donald Trump’s embrace of Arabia, however much it may have horrified American liberals and amplified their distaste for the country and its ruling family, just highlighted, in Trump’s inimitably crude way, a bipartisan fact about Saudi-American relations: we buy their oil and they buy our armaments, technology, machinery, services, and debt. Barack Obama sold the Saudis over sixty-five billion dollars in weaponry, more than any president before or since. Both sides have occasionally wanted to make it more than that, to sugarcoat the relationship in more appealing ways. The more the Saudis, including the royals, have been educated in the United States, the more they have wanted Americans to like them. Americanization, even if only superficial, introduces into its victims a yearning for acceptance. Americans have surely been the worst offenders here, however, since they are far more freighted with moral baggage in their diplomacy and trade. They want their allies to be good as well as useful.
Although Americans have a knack for discarding the past when it doesn’t suit them, Saudi and American histories ought to tell us a few things clearly. First, that MBS’ offer to the United States is without strategic advantages. This is true even though Iran may have green-lighted, perhaps masterminded, the attack on October 7 in part to throw a wrench into the U.S.–Israeli–Saudi negotiations over MBS’ proposal. Iranian conspiratorial fears always define the clerical regime’s analysis. Its desire to veto its enemies’ grand designs is certainly real irrespective of whether it thought that Saudi–Israeli normalization was arriving soon or that MBS’ quest to develop a nuclear-weapons-capable atomic infrastructure needed to be aborted sooner rather than later. Iranian planning on the Gaza war likely started long before Biden administration officials and Netanyahu’s government started leaking to the press that normalization was “imminent”; it likely started before MBS’ vague suggestions of a defensive pact between Washington and Riyadh. Leaks about diplomatic progress surrounding a coming deal, however, might have accelerated Iran’s and Hamas’ bloody calculations.
Concerning the crown prince’s nuclear aspirations, which have divided Israelis, caused serious indigestion in Washington, and compelled Khamenei’s attention, they are not unreasonable given that domestic energy requirements for Saudi Arabia — especially the exponentially increasing use of air conditioning — could in the near future significantly reduce the amount of oil that Riyadh can sell. Nuclear energy would free up more petroleum for export and produce the revenue that MBS desperately needs to continue his grand plans. But it is also a damn good guess that MBS’ new attention to nuclear power plants has a lot to do with developing the capacity to build the bomb. Just across the Gulf, the Islamic Republic has effectively become a nuclear threshold state — the Supreme Leader likely has everything he needs to assemble an atomic arm; and the possibility is increasingly remote that either Biden or the Israeli prime minister (whoever that maybe on any given day) is going to strike militarily before the clerical regime officially goes nuclear. And MBS, despite his occasional bravado on Iran and his undoubtedly sincere private desire to undermine the clerical regime, probably doesn’t want to deal with such a denouement. Given how much Netanyahu and most of the Israeli political class have wanted Saudi–Israeli normalization, given how desperate the Biden administration has been to find stabilizing partners in the Middle East, which would allow the United States to continue its retrenchment, MBS could be forgiven for thinking, especially after October 7, that the sacred creed of non-proliferation might well give way to his atomic ambitions.
The Saudis were never brave when they were focused single-mindedly on building their frangible oil industry; now they have vast installations, which the Iranians easily paralyzed in 2019 with a fairly minor drone and cruise missile attack. The same vulnerability obtains for the crown prince’s NEOM projects, which the Iranians, who have the largest ballistic- and cruise-missile force in the Middle East, could severely damage — probably even if the Saudis spend a fortune on anti-missile defense. MBS came in like a lion on the Islamic Republic, attracting the attention and the affection of Israelis and others; it’s not at all unlikely that he has already become a lamb, actually less stout-hearted than his princely predecessors who, in a roundabout way, via a motley crew of characters, using the CIA for logistical support, took on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Still, MBS would want to plan for contingencies. Having nuclear weapons is better than not having them. A Saudi bomb might check Persian predation. And the Saudis are way behind. They have neither the engineers nor the physicists nor the industrial base. And the odds are excellent that the Pakistanis, who though indebted to the Saudi royal family are quite capable of stiffing them, haven’t been forthcoming: they are not going to let the Saudis rent an atomic weapon. And the Russians and the Chinese might not want to give the Saudis nuclear power. It would add another layer of complexity and tension to their relations with the Islamic Republic, which neither Moscow nor Beijing may want. The Europeans and the Japanese are unlikely to step into such a hot mess. Getting nuclear technology from the Americans would be vastly better. Another way, as Ajami put it, to supplement Boeing and AT&T.
Failing on the atomic front, MBS might intensify his dangle of an Israeli embassy in Riyadh — to see what he can get even if he has no intention of recognizing the Jewish state. The Gaza war certainly increases his chances that he can get both the Israelis and the Americans to concede him a nuclear infrastructure with local uranium enrichment. The war makes it less likely, however, that he would want to tempt fate anytime soon by recognizing Israel. Normalization gains him nothing internally among all those Saudis who religiously or politically may have trouble with a Saudi flag — which has the Muslim shahâda, the profession of faith, boldly printed on a green heavenly field — flying in Zion. And the Star of David in Riyadh could be needlessly provocative even to the crown prince’s much-touted young, hitherto apolitical, supporters. The Palestinian cause, which most of the Israeli political elite thought was a fading clarion call, has proven to have astonishing resonance.
But even if MBS is still sincere about this big pitch, neither Washington nor Jerusalem should be tempted. It gives the former nothing that it does not already have. It offers the Israelis far less than what Netanyahu thinks it does. Despite MBS’ grand visions for where his country will be in the middle of the century, Saudi Arabia is actually a far less consequential kingdom than it was in 1973, when it was at the pinnacle of its oil power, or in 1979, when it collided with the Iranian revolution and was briefly on the precipice after the Sunni religious revolutionary Juhayman al-Otaybi, his messianic partner Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, and five hundred well-armed believers took Mecca’s Grand Mosque and shook the dynasty to its core.
Religiously, among Muslims, Saudi Arabia hasn’t been a bellwether for decades. Its generous funding for Salafi causes undoubtedly fortified harsher views across the globe, especially in Indonesia and Western Europe, where so many dangerous Islamic radicals were either born or trained. Religious students and clerics raised in the eclectic but formal traditions of the Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, for example, would go to Saudi Arabia on well-paid fellowships and often come back to Egypt as real Hanbali-rite killjoys. Saudi Arabia helped to make the Muslim world more conservative and less tolerant of Muslim diversity. But relatively few Saudi imams were intellectually on the cutting edge, capable of influencing the radical set outside of Arabia. And it was the radical set outside of Saudi Arabia who mattered most, especially in Egypt, where the politically subservient dons of Al-Azhar lost control and relevance for Muslims who were growing uncomfortable with Egypt’s Westernization, first under the British and then, even more depressingly, under the military juntas of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.
In Saudi Arabia, most of the radical Salafi imams were either in trouble with the Saudi authorities, in exile, or in jail. Saudi royals were once big fans of the Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood because it was hostile to all the leftist ideologies storming the Middle East. Only later did they realize that these missionaries were irreversibly populist and anti-monarchical. Saudi religious funding was like that old publishing theory — throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. The operative assumptions were that more religious Muslims were better than less religious, and that more religious Sunni Muslims would be hostile to Iran’s revolutionary call, and that more religious Sunni Muslims would be more sympathetic to Saudi Arabia. Who preached what and where was vastly less important. There were a lot of problems with every one of those assumptions, which the Saudi royal family realized long before the coming of MBS. But inertia is infamously hard to stop.
For most faithful Muslims today, Saudi Arabia isn’t intellectually and spiritually important. What happened to Al-Azhar in Egypt — its intellectual and jurisprudential relevance declined as it became more subservient to the Westernizing Egyptian military — has been happening in Saudi Arabia for at least thirty years. MBS is intensifying this process. Westerners may cheer him on as he tries to neuter Islam as the defining force within Saudi society, but internationally it makes Saudi Arabia a less consequential state. Saudi Arabia is not a model of internal Islamic reform; it is merely another example of a modernizing autocrat putting Islam in its place — behind the ruler and the nation. The dictatorial impact on religion can be profound: it can reform it, it can radicalize it, it can do both at the same time.
To keep on the Egyptian parallel: Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and opened an embassy in Tel Aviv. He and his military successors have slapped the hands of Al-Azhar’s rectors and teachers when they challenged the legitimacy of the Egyptian–Israeli entente. (Conversely, they haven’t stopped, and they have often subsidized, the perpetual anti-Semitism of Egyptian media, film, and universities.) The peace between Egypt and Israel has obviously been beneficial to both countries, but religiously it made little positive impact on Muslims within Egypt or abroad. When a Muslim Brother, Mohammad Morsi, won Egypt’s first — and so far only — free presidential election in 2012, Israelis and Americans were deeply concerned that he would sever relations with Israel. That didn’t happen, but the fears were understandable; Israel’s popular acceptance within Egyptian society remains in doubt.
If, after the Gaza war, MBS deigns to grant Israel diplomatic relations, it won’t likely make faithful Muslims, or even secular Muslims, more inclined to accept the Jewish state. It might do the opposite, especially inside Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family’s control over the two holiest sites in Islam — Mecca and Medina — makes little to no difference in how that question is answered. Such custodianship confers prestige and obliges the Saudi royal family, at least in the holy cities, to maintain traditional standards. In the past, before modern communications, it allowed Muslims and their ideas to mix. But it absolutely does not denote superior religious authority — no matter how much Saudi rulers and their imams may want to pretend that by proximity to the sacred spaces they gain religious bonus points. One often gets the impression from Israelis that they are in a time warp with respect to Saudi Arabia, that for them it is still the mid-1970s and Riyadh’s recognition would effectively mark an end to their Muslim travails. The Gaza war ought to inform Israelis that the profoundly emotive Islamic division between believer and non-believer and the irredentist claims of Palestinian Muslims against the Jewish state do not lessen because a Saudi crown prince wants to establish a less hostile modus vivendi with Israel and Jews in general.
Perhaps above all else, the Israelis should want to avoid entangling themselves too closely with MBS in the minds of Americans, especially those on the left, who are essential to bipartisan support for Jerusalem. It’s an excellent bet that MBS’ dictatorship will become more — likely much more — oppressive and contradictory in its allegiances. What Safran noted about Saudi behavior from 1945 to 1985 — “attempts to follow several contradictory courses simultaneously, willingness to make sharp tactical reversals; and limited concern with the principle of consistency, either in reality or in appearance” — has already happened with MBS. This disposition will probably get much worse. And Americans aren’t Israelis, who never really see political promise in Muslim lands (neither Islamic nor Israeli history encourages optimism). The choice, in their minds, is between this dictator or that one — and never, if possible, the worst-case scenario: Muslims freely voting and electing Islamists who by definition don’t exactly kindle to Israel or the United States. Americans are much more liberal (in the old sense of the word): for them, autocracies aren’t static, they inevitably get worse until they give way to revolution or elected government. Even realist Americans are, compared to Israelis, pretty liberal. And the principal reason that the United States has so steadfastly supported the Jewish state since 1948 is that it is a vibrant democracy, however troubled or compromised it might be by the Palestinian question or by its own internal strains of illiberalism and political religion. When Israelis and their American supporters tout MBS as a worthwhile ally, they are diminishing Israel’s democratic capital. If MBS really thought diplomatic relations were in his and Saudi Arabia’s self-interest, there would already be a fluttering Star of David in Riyadh. The wisest course for Israelis is to reverse engineer MBS’ hesitation into a studied neutrality.
Religion and mores aside, closer relations with Saudi Arabia will not assist America or Israel against its principal Middle Eastern concern: the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2019, when Iran decided to fire cruise missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco processing plants in Abqaiq and Khurais, briefly taking out nearly half of the country’s oil production, MBS did nothing, except turn to the Americans plaintively. The Emirates, whose ambassador in Washington gives first-rate anti-Iran dinner parties, sent an emissary to Tehran, undoubtedly to plead neutrality and promise to continue to allow the clerical regime the use of Dubai as a U.S.-sanctions-busting entrepôt. The two Sunni kingdoms had purchased an enormous amount of Western weaponry to protect themselves against the Islamic Republic. The Saudi and Emirati air forces and navies are vastly more powerful than their Iranian counterparts. And still they would not duel. They lack what the clerical regime has in abundance: a triumphant will fueled by success and a still vibrant ideology.
The Saudis know, even if MBS’ public rhetoric occasionally suggests otherwise, that the Islamic Republic, even with all its crippling internal problems, is just too strong for them. Iran’s eat-the-weak clerics and Revolutionary Guards, who fought hard and victoriously in Syria’s civil war, became the kingmaker in Iraq, and successfully radicalized and armed the Shiite Houthis of Yemen, can always out-psych the Saudi and Nahyan royals. Also, Trump didn’t help. When he decided not to respond militarily to the cruise missile-and-drone attacks, plus the ones on merchant shipping in the Gulf of Oman three months earlier (he boldly tweeted that the United States was “locked and loaded”), Trump trashed whatever was left of the Carter Doctrine. Washington had assumed responsibility for protecting the Persian Gulf after the British withdrawal in 1971. There is a direct causal line from the Trump administration’s failure in 2019, through its “maximum pressure” campaign that eschewed military force in favor of sanctions, through the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to revive Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, through the White House’s current see-no-redline approach to Iran’s ever-increasing stockpile of highly-enriched uranium, to MBS’ decision to turn toward the Chinese.
It is brutally difficult to imagine scenarios in which the Saudis could be a military asset to the United States in the Persian Gulf or anywhere else in the Middle East. The disaster in Yemen, for which the Iranians and the Houthis are also to blame, tells us all that we need to know about Saudi capacity. Even with American airmen, sailors, and intelligence officers in Saudi command centers doing what they could to inform and direct Saudi planes, Saudi pilots routinely bombed the right targets poorly and the wrong targets (civilians) well. The Saudis mobilized tens of thousands of troops for the campaign, but it’s not clear that they actually did much south of the border. (Small special forces units appear to have fought and held their own.) The UAE’s committed forces, which once numbered around four thousand on the ground, did much more, but they quickly discovered that the coalition gathered to crush the Houthis, who had far more unity and purpose, simply didn’t work. The UAE started hiring mercenaries and pulling its troops out of combat. MBS, who was then the Saudi defense minister and a pronounced hawk, started blaming the UAE, which blamed the Saudis.
If we are lucky, the Yemen expedition has actually taught the crown prince a lesson: that his country, despite its plentiful armaments, is not much of a military power and can ill-afford boldness. If any future American-Iranian or Israeli-Iranian clash happens, we should not want the Saudis involved. Similarly, we should not want an entangling alliance with Riyadh — a NATO in the Persian Gulf — because it will give us little except the illusion that we have Arab partners. We also shouldn’t want it because such an alliance could harm, perhaps irretrievably, the kingdom itself if it re-animated MBS’ martial self-confidence.
About Saudi Arabia, the China-first crowd might actually be more right than wrong. Elbridge Colby, perhaps the brightest guru among the Trump-lite aim-towards-Beijing Republicans, thinks the United States can deploy small detachments from the Air Force and Navy to the Persian Gulf and it will be enough to forestall seriously untoward actions by a nuclear Iran, China, and Russia. Yet the Gaza war has shown that when the United States seriously misapprehends the Middle East, when it sees the Islamic Republic as a non-revolutionary power with diminished Islamist aspirations and malevolent capacity, Washington may be obliged to send two aircraft-carrier groups to the region to counter its own perennial miscalculations. Colby’s analysis has the same problem in the Middle East that it does with Taiwan: everything depends on American willingness to use force. A United States that is not scared to project power in the Middle East, and is not fearful that every military engagement will become a slippery slope to a “forever war,” would surely deter its enemies more convincingly and efficiently. The frequent use of force can prevent larger, uglier wars that will command greater American resources.
If Washington’s will — or as the Iranians conceive it, haybat, the awe that comes with insuperable power — can again be made credible, then at least in the Persian Gulf Colby is right. It doesn’t take a lot of military might to keep the oil flowing. For the foreseeable future, no one there will be transgressing the US Air Force and Navy — unless we pull everything to the Pacific. We don’t need to pledge anything further to MBS, or to anyone else in the region, to protect the global economy. And the global market in oil still has the power to keep MBS, or anyone else, from ratcheting the price way up to sustain grand ambitions or malevolent habits.
It is an amusing irony that Professor Safran, an Israeli-American who tried to help the American government craft a new approach to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s (and got into trouble for it when it was discovered that some of his work had received secret CIA funding), foresaw the correct path for Saudi Arabia today when he was assessing forty years ago its missionary Islamic conservatism, anti-Zionist reflexes, and increasing disposition to maximize oil profits regardless of the impact on Western economies. He advised that “America’s long-term aim should be to disengage its vital interests from the policy and fate of the Kingdom. Its short-term policy should be designed with an eye to achieving that goal while cooperating with the Kingdom in dealing with problems on a case-by-case basis and advancing shared interests on the basis of reciprocity.” In other words, we should treat the kingdom in the way that it has treated us. In still other words, Roosevelt was right: with the Saudis, it should be transactional. Nothing more, nothing less. Day in, day out.
