The ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has caused extensive damage to “Israel’s” global reputation, is raising questions about Saudi Arabia’s openness to normalize relations.
Why is Saudi Arabia open to normalize relations with ‘Israel’?
The world is presently bearing witness to the harrowing events of a genocide. Across television and mobile screens, individuals are observing the tragic spectacle of men, women, and children perishing in some of the most appalling circumstances conceivable. While the genocide may indeed have inflicted significant harm upon “Israel’s” global reputation, it is imperative to acknowledge that Saudi Arabia remains committed to pursuing normalization of diplomatic relations with the regime. Why is this so? Has the death of more than 27,000 not been sufficient to dissuade Saudi Arabia from considering such a move?
Before delving into the underlying causes, it is worth recalling that prior to the start of the war, Saudi Arabia openly signaled its intent to normalize relations with “Israel.” The progress on this front was unfolding at such a remarkable pace that even the general populace struggled to keep abreast of the proximity to striking a deal.
The significance of this advancement became apparent when Saudi Arabia extended an offer to reinstate financial support for the Palestinian Authority following a complete cessation of aid in 2021.
In September 2023, a report by The Wall Street Journal disclosed that a delegation from the Palestinian Authority visited Riyadh to engage in negotiations concerning the terms for endorsing Saudi Arabia’s initiative to normalize ties with “Israel.” These conditions encompassed the reopening of the US consulate in occupied Al-Quds, securing US backing for comprehensive Palestinian representation at the United Nations, and attaining increased control over territories within the occupied West Bank. This diplomatic strategy represented a notable departure from the Palestinian Authority’s previous responses to Bahrain and the UAE normalizing relations with “Israel” in 2020, during which it denounced the Gulf states for betrayal.
In contrast to the occupied West Bank, Gaza has historically faced harsher blockades. Often likened to an “open-air prison,” Gaza has endured extensive restrictions on the movement of goods and people for many years, severely limiting access to basic necessities such as food, water, and electricity. Compounding these challenges is the regime’s imposition of quotas on the issuance of work permits to Gazans. While the regime may perceive an opportunity to improve relations with the residents of the Strip, the approach more closely resembles breadcrumbing, as it offered minimal concessions without addressing the fundamental issues at hand.
Everything seemed to be progressing smoothly until the events of October 7 transpired. The resistance initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, capturing hundreds of Israelis and requesting that thousands of Palestinian hostage-prisoners be released. The operation was executed with remarkable precision, leading to the humiliation and scrutiny of the entire Israeli security apparatus, renowned as one of the world’s most advanced.
Despite the subsequent shedding of Palestinian blood, these events served as a significant wake-up call. The urgency of the matter lies in that a potential normalization agreement would not only exacerbate the already dire living conditions of Gazans but also would have shifted the regional balance of power back in favor of the US. For some time now, China has been increasing influence in the region, particularly after brokering a peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As the US perceived its diminishing influence, the pursuit of a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal became increasingly logical. This issue was deemed a top priority for the US, to the extent that Secretary of State Tony Blinken declared it a “national security interest.”
Saudi Arabia wields significant influence in regional affairs for several compelling reasons. Firstly, its geopolitical positioning establishes it as a key regional player in the Middle East. Bolstered by a formidable military and its custodianship of two of Islam’s holiest sites, Saudi Arabia also boasts one of the world’s largest proven oil reserves and serves as a major exporter of petroleum. As a key member of OPEC, the nation plays a pivotal role in shaping global oil markets. Decisions regarding oil production directly impact the strategies and policies of the cartel, thereby influencing the dynamics of the energy sector on a global scale.
However, there is a downside to Saudi Arabia’s regional influence. A large portion of the Gulf’s wealth and oil-generated revenues are invested in US Treasury bills. This reliance implies that their financial resources are heavily dependent on the economic policies and stability of the US, limiting possibilities for diversification—a significant obstacle for Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030. But some efforts appear to be surreptitiously made. A report by the Financial Times in August 2023 revealed that Saudi Arabia decreased its holdings of US Treasuries to the lowest level in over six years, selling down to $108.1 billion in June from $119.7 billion at the end of the previous year. The reduction marked the third consecutive monthly drop and effectively reflects the kingdom’s shift towards foreign equity and domestic investments. Nevertheless, Saudi wealth continues to be heavily invested in treasury bonds, and it remains uncertain whether it intends to further decrease its holdings.
Beside T-bills, the US provides the highest military aid to the Gulf region. Between 2000 and 2016 alone, the US spent an astounding $123 billion worth of military technology and services to the GCC and the latter placed $215 billion in new orders during the same period. From 2008 to 2015, the majority of Saudi and UAE purchases, totaling $80.2 billion out of a total of $119.2 billion, were motivated by their access to advanced US arms and technology.
Moreover, the longstanding alliance between Saudi Arabia and the US has promoted free-market and Salafist ideologies, overshadowing once-progressive Arabist movements that fell victim to US-led imperialist aggressions. Petrodollar remittances to non-Gulf Arab countries have led to distorted exchange-rate regimes, akin to the effects of Dutch disease, particularly impacting the highly protected economies of Syria and Egypt. Despite their destabilizing geopolitical-rents component in imperialist intervention, these remittances carried the ideological influence of colonially and American-groomed political Islam. Capital outflows from most non-Gulf Arab countries, on the other hand, hold little to no global significance. These flows are evaluated not only monetarily but also for their impact in destabilizing national states and, conversely, strengthening the position of US-led imperialism regionally and globally.
Many would perhaps describe this scenario as examplary of a win-win situation, where Saudi Arabia’s influence grows in tandem with that of the US. However, the increasing emergence of resistance movements has led Riyadh to reconsider its position, where Saudi Arabia’s reliance on US security assistance transforms from an asset to a liability.
The primary objective of the Israeli-Saudi agreement is for Riyadh to acquire a civilian nuclear program, accompanied by security guarantees and potentially undisclosed provisions. While Saudi Arabia could have pursued this technology from China or Russia, its preference for the US underscores its vulnerability to potential sanctions, indicating the difficulty of breaking free from this dependency. As previously established, US imperialism historically extends its global influence through wars of encroachment, militarism, and by sowing discord among populations. For years, it has exploited sectarianism to stoke regional conflicts funded by Wahhabism. With unparalleled military supremacy, the US could feasibly wipe out the entire monarchy if it so desired—simply because it possesses the unrivaled capability to do so.
Hence, as paradoxical as it may sound, security for Saudi Arabia unavoidably entails the hefty price of regional instability, a situation likely to persist as long as it maintains its current trajectory. This challenge is further exacerbated by rising nuclear tensions, illustrated not only by intensified threats against Iran but also by significant deployments of forces and nuclear arsenals across Europe. While the pursuit and possession of nuclear weapons are often accompanied by the assertion that their use is never intended, primarily due to the catastrophic potential for human existence to cease, it indisputably bolsters a country’s strategic leverage.
On a final yet crucial note, recent developments in relations between Saudi Arabia and Russia carry significant implications for global oil markets. Their decision to uphold oil production cuts not only exerts considerable pressure on commodity prices worldwide but also poses a threat to the US’s grip on Saudi assets. Furthermore, the recent announcement of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s accession to the BRICS organization adds momentum to global de-dollarization efforts. It is plausible that nations may outwardly maintain positive relations with the US while covertly pursuing de-dollarization objectives. However, amidst these geopolitical shifts, the grim reality persists: the human cost endured by Gazans, with devastating consequences for civilian infrastructure, essential services, and loss of human lives, continues to mount unabated.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Gaza was among the main topics on the agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin as he arrived in the Middle East region on Wednesday, December 6.
Some news reports referred to the trip as ‘rare’, especially since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022.
We know that the situation in Gaza, namely the Israeli war and the subsequent genocide, is a major objective in Putin’s visit, based on press statements from Russia’s official media.
But we do not know, yet, exactly how Gaza factored in, in Putin’s one-day visit.
Putin’s visit included the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two of the richest and most economically influential Arab countries, which are, like Russia, members of OPEC+ – the larger and most influential group of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Oil prices, energy supplies and the fractious security of the Red Sea waterways are reportedly also part of Putin’s agenda. However, it is unlikely that the Russian president has initiated such an important visit to discuss any of these issues.
Indeed, fluctuating oil prices and achieving OPEC+ consensus regarding production levels have been ongoing issues linking Russia to the Middle East for years, especially since the start of the Ukraine war, which invited unprecedented US-Western sanctions.
But what does Putin have to say about Gaza, in particular?
In the early phase of the Israeli war with the Palestinian Resistance in the besieged Gaza Strip, Russia had taken a guarded position, condemning the targeting of civilians, while calling for a comprehensive political solution.
But, days later, Moscow’s position began evolving into a stronger stance, namely condemning the Israeli war on Gaza, Washington’s blind support for Tel Aviv and the US’ intransigence during UN Security Council meetings.
President Putin, on October 13, compared Israel’s besiegement of the Gaza Strip to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1941. “In my view it is unacceptable, more than two million people live there. Far from all of them support Hamas, by the way, far from all. But all of them have to suffer, including women and children,” he said.
Moscow’s UN ambassador, Vasily Nebenzia, has repeatedly attempted, to no avail, to pass a UNSC resolution demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. His efforts culminated to nil due to US refusal, backed by equally strong rejection of other Western allies of Israel.
Despite his unsuccessful efforts, Nebenzia has used the UNSC as a platform to declare Russia’s progressively strong stances against the Israeli war, going as far as questioning Israel’s long-touted ‘right to defend itself’.
“All they (the West) can do is to keep (talking) about Israel’s alleged right for self-defense, which, as an occupying state, it does not have, as was confirmed by the (UN) International Court consultative ruling in 2004,” Nebenzia said on November 2.
Following the US shameful use of the veto power to block the passing of a UNSC resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the Russian representative Dmitry Polyanskiy stated: “Our American colleagues have condemned thousands – if not tens of thousands – more civilians (..) including women and children, to death, along with the UN workers who are trying to help them.”
But for various reasons, the Russian position did not evolve beyond political rhetoric, however strong, into any tangible strategies.
The typical explanation for Russia’s inability to formulate a practical strategy regarding Gaza is its lack of any serious diplomatic or political capital beyond the current war on Ukraine; and that Moscow was fully aware of the Middle East’s delicate geopolitical balances.
But things began to change – not in Moscow, but in Gaza itself.
Over two months into a war that has resulted in the killing of more than 17,000 civilians, so far, Tel Aviv is finally discovering the limits of its military power.
Moreover, the war gradually began to destabilize the Middle East, involving state and powerful non-state actors, many of whom are close allies to Moscow and protectors of Russian interests in the region.
They include Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq and, of course, Hamas itself.
As a sign of closer relationship between Hamas and Russia, the Palestinian movement has released all Israeli captives with dual Israeli-Russian citizenship.
It has done so without a formal prisoner swap agreement, like the ones that have been mediated through Qatar and Egypt, resulting in the release of scores of Israelis and hundreds of Palestinians, starting on November 24.
Surely, Putin’s visit to the Middle East carries greater meaning than the mere ‘emphasis on the strong relationships’ between Russia and a few Arab countries. This meaning is compounded by the immediate visit to Moscow by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on December 7, also with the sole purpose of discussing the situation in Gaza.
Is it possible that Russia has finally found a geostrategic opportunity in the Middle East that would allow it to expand, in terms of its strategic alliances and political role, beyond Syria?
This expansion must appear as an attractive opportunity for Moscow, especially as early signs of Israeli military failure and, by extent, American failure, in Gaza are becoming unmistakably clear.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is expected to deliver an important speech at the 21st Doha Forum in Qatar on December 10.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, was quoted by the TASS news agency on December 6 as confirming that Lavrov will be discussing the war in Gaza and the overall situation in Palestine and in the Middle East.
“The minister will pay special attention to the problem of Palestinian-Israeli settlement, of course, and security issues in the Middle East,” she said.
None of this, including the potential new Russian ‘vision’ in the Middle East, would have been possible if it were not for the Israeli-US inability to defeat small Resistance groups in a tiny, besieged region like Gaza.
Aside from the setback of the Israeli military machine, which has been financed and sustained by Washington, the genocide in Gaza has cost the US whatever little political credibility it still enjoyed in the Middle East.
Time will tell whether Russia will be able to stake a claim and help define a new Middle East in the post-Gaza war.
However, one of the most important factors that Russia will consider before making any major moves is the tangible outcome of the Israeli war on Gaza.
And, unlike most Israeli wars against Palestinians and Arabs in the past, this time around it seems that Palestinian Resistance – despite its very limited capabilities in the face of a powerful Israel-US military machine – is the one most likely to control the outcomes.
In this Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2019, photo released by the Ministry of Presidential Affairs, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, right, meets Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (AP)
The once close officials, MBS and MBZ, are head to head, competing over who has more influence and presence in the region.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) convened a small group of local media in Riyadh for a rare off-the-record briefing in December and delivered a shocking message, according to the Wall Street Journal. During the meeting, MbS said that the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s longtime ally, had “stabbed us in the back,” he claimed. “They will see what I can do,” he told the group, according to people at the meeting.
A rift has developed between MBS and his former mentor, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), reflecting the struggle for geopolitical and economic clout in the Middle East and global oil markets. That said, the two royals are now feuding over who calls the shots in a Middle East where the US is playing a deteriorating role, according to WSJ.
US officials are concerned that the Gulf competition will make it more difficult to form a coherent security alliance to confront Iran, end the eight-year war on Yemen, and expand Israeli normalization agreements with Arab nations. That said, the rivalry that the US was so determined to orchestrate took a wrong turn, and the latest developments are definitely not in its favor.
“These are two highly ambitious people who want to be key players in the region and the go-to players,” a senior Biden administration official said, adding that “On some level, they still collaborate. Now, neither seems comfortable with the other being on the same pedestal. On balance, it’s not helpful to us for them to be at each other’s throats.”
According to close sources, as per the WSJ, the once-close MBS and MBZ haven’t spoken in more than six months, people close to them said, and their private disputes have spilled out into the open. On that note, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have competing interests in Yemen, undermining efforts to reach a peace agreement in the country, while Emirati resentment of Saudi pressure to boost the global price of oil is causing new schisms in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Economic competitors
The UAE and KSA are both increasingly economic competitors.
In an effort to end the KSA’s economic reliance on oil, MBS is pushing companies to move their regional headquarters to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, from UAE’s Dubai, which has become a tourist hub for Westerners.
He’s also initiating plans to establish digital hubs, attract more visitors, and build logistical hubs to contest the UAE’s status as the Middle East’s commercial powerhouse, according to the WSJ. MBS announced in March the establishment of a second national airline to compete with Dubai’s highly regarded Emirates.
In terms of soft power, the Saudi purchase of Newcastle United, England’s soccer club, in 2021, and investment in worldwide superstar players occurred at the same time as Manchester City, controlled by a senior member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, won the English and European soccer titles.
The Saudi rapprochement, deal with Iran
A UAE official, speaking for the government, said claims of strained relations were “categorically false and lack foundation,” and a Saudi official called the idea “simply not accurate.”
As mentioned in the WSJ report, the Saudi official added that “The UAE is a close regional partner of Saudi Arabia, and our policies converge on a wide range of issues of mutual interest,” adding that the two countries work together with other Gulf neighbors on political, security, and economic coordination.
The UAE official said their “strategic partnership is based on the same objectives and vision for regional prosperity, security, and stability.”
During his meeting with local media outlets, the Saudi leader stated that he had issued a list of requests to the UAE, according to the sources in the UAE, adding that MBS warned that if the smaller Gulf nation did not comply, Saudi Arabia was prepared to take harsh measures, similar to what it did against Qatar in 2017 when Riyadh broke diplomatic relations with it for more than three years and imposed an economic blockade with the support of Abu Dhabi. MBS warned, according to sources who were present, “It will be worse than what I did with Qatar.”
MBS’ step toward diplomacy, away from MBZ
Since the meeting in December, MBS took a step towards diplomacy and ended the political isolation imposed on him after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. He turned to China for assistance in mending Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran and then coordinated Syria’s return to the Arab League, a process that the UAE had begun several years before, according to the WSJ.
MBS is also in talks with the US about formally recognizing “Israel,” which the UAE did in 2020. Moreover, the Crown Prince is also leading diplomatic efforts to quash violence in Sudan, where the UAE backs the opposing side.
MBZ privately criticized the Saudi ruler for his actions, accusing him of undermining ties between the two nations, critically pointing out MBS’ relationship with Russia and its oil policies and “risky moves,” in reference to the deal with Iran.
That said, the Emirati official skipped an Arab summit MBS called for, and also the Arab League’s vote in May to allow Syria back into the circle. On the other hand, MBS himself was absent when MBZ met with Arab leaders at a hastily arranged regional summit in the UAE in January.
“Tensions are rising between them, in part because MBS wants to step out from under MBZ’s shadow,” said Dina Esfandiary, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa Program, adding that “Things are going to get worse because both countries are getting more confident and assertive in their foreign policy.”
A deteriorating alliance
The Saudis and Emiratis have considered themselves the closest of allies, yet their relationship has been strained even before the United Arab Emirates achieved independence from Britain in 1971.
Sheikh Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE’s founding father, resented Saudi dominance of the Arabian peninsula, and then-Saudi King Faisal refused to acknowledge his Persian Gulf neighbor for years, seeking leverage in several territorial conflicts. The United Arab Emirates canceled plans for a unified Gulf central bank in 2009 due to its proposed site in Riyadh. There are still territorial conflicts between the two countries over oil-rich terrain.
With the simultaneous rise of MBZ and MBS, the two countries grew closer. When MBZ’s half-brother, President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, had a crippling stroke in 2014, the Emirati monarch became de facto ruler of his country at the age of 54. When MBS’s father, King Salman, took power in 2015, MBZ began mentoring the young Saudi prince, who was just 29 years old at the time.
According to WSJ, the two men had never met before an overnight camping expedition in the vast Saudi desert. Sources that were present revealed that the outing was accompanied by trained falcons and a small entourage; the outing—roughly equal in Gulf tradition to a round of presidential golf—was a watershed moment in their friendship.
MBS sought advice from MBZ and employed some of the same banks and consultants that the Emiratis used for a similar strategy a decade earlier while developing a plan to change and open up his country. On that note, MBS and MBZ formed a foreign-policy alliance that launched the war on Yemen, assisted Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in a coup, armed Libyan militants in the country’s divided east, and boycotted Qatar.
OPEC competition, dispute
The schism erupted last October when OPEC agreed to cut output, surprising the Biden administration. The UAE agreed to the decrease but privately told US officials and the media that Saudi Arabia had forced them to do so, according to the WSJ.
The dynamic highlighted an ongoing dispute between Saudis and Emiratis over OPEC policy, which Riyadh has long dominated as the world’s top petroleum exporter, WSJ wrote, adding that the Emiratis have increased their oil-production capacity to more than four million barrels per day, with aspirations to exceed five million, but are only allowed to pump roughly three million under OPEC regulation, costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue.
On a more crucial point, the Emirati increase in oil production capacity presents the potential ability to move output up and down and with it global oil prices. Until recently, only Saudi Arabia wielded that sort of market power. Disagreements between the two officials are threatening to derail continuing negotiations to end the war on Yemen, which pits the Saudis, Emiratis, and a variety of Yemeni factions against the Yemeni Armed Forces.
The UAE signed a security agreement with the Saudi-backed Yemeni presidential leadership council in December, granting Abu Dhabi the authority to interfere in Yemen and the waters off its coast. Officials in Saudi Arabia saw it as a challenge to their Yemen strategy. In turn, Saudi Arabia had intentions to construct a pipeline that spreads from the kingdom to the Arabian Sea, through the Yemeni province of Hadramout. However, the plans were jeopardized by UAE-backed forces.
Biden could lose ambitions in Gulf
The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has irritated the Biden administration, which wants friendly Gulf capitals like Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to help build a united front against Iran. On critical issues such as Ukraine and China, neither MBS nor MBZ is completely aligned with Washington.
On that note, in reference to the obvious new political dynamics in the region, US authorities are growing concerned about MBZ’s outreach to Beijing and Moscow, which, like MBS, has strengthened connections with them.
Biden and MBS
Biden took office promising to treat the kingdom as a pariah state in the aftermath of the Khashoggi assassination, which MBS has stated he did not order. Instead, in July 2022, Biden visited Saudi Arabia, helping to end his isolation.
Companies in the United States who were previously unwilling to engage with the kingdom are now reconsidering. This desire is anticipated to grow as a year-end deadline approaches for companies with Saudi government contracts to establish a base in Riyadh rather than flying in from Dubai.
The WSJ explains that according to those familiar with the case, the Biden administration arranged a meeting on May 7 between MBS and the Emirati president’s younger brother, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, who was once seen as a confidant of the Saudi crown prince. Tahnoun had been frozen out, making at least six trips to the kingdom without gaining a meeting with MBS until he received assistance from the US, according to the sources.
With regard to decisions concerning Yemen, MBS told his advisors “I don’t trust them anymore,” before telling them to keep policies as is.
The leak of classified documents suggesting Emirati-Russian intel against the US has caused uncertainty about the future of US-UAE relations amid significant shifts in the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf.
The leak of highly classified Pentagon documents, including reports of the UAE’s alleged intelligence collusion with Russia against the US and UK, has captured headlines both regionally and globally.
According to the US intel reports leaked to the Associated Press, a document implicating the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) entitled “Russia/UAE: Intelligence Relationship Deepening” states:
“FSB officials claimed UAE security service officials and Russia had agreed to work together against US and UK intelligence agencies, according to newly acquired signals intelligence.”
However, while US officials have declined to comment on the document, the Emirati government has vehemently denied any such accusation, calling it “categorically false.”
Although it is impossible to verify the authenticity of the leaked report, western officials and analysts have nonetheless been closely following increased cooperation between Abu Dhabi and Moscow, particularly since the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine.
Ties flourish between Russia and UAE
The claims are certainly credible, as close personal ties exist between the Kremlin and the Emirati ruling elite, and the two governments share similar views on several regional issues. The war in Ukraine has further boosted mutual commercial ties and cooperation between the Russia and the UAE, with non-oil trade increasing by 57 percent during the first nine months of the last year.
In early December 2022, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov estimated that mutual trade between Russia and the UAE will exceed $7.5 billion by the end of 2022 compared with $5.5 billion in 2021, reaching an all-time record in the history of their trade relations.
Additionally, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan’s (MbZ) decision to support the OPEC+ move to slash oil production by two million barrels a day (bpd) in October despite pressure from the US and other countries, has been greatly praised by Kremlin.
It’s worth noting that the emirate of Dubai has witnessed an uptick in investments from affluent Russians, as real estate purchases by Russian nationals in Dubai surged by 67 percent year-on-year. Furthermore, the UAE continues to rank high on the list of preferred travel destinations for Russians, with over a million Russians having visited or relocated to the Emirates in 2022 – an impressive 60 percent increase from the previous year.
In light of the UAE having emerged as a significant destination for wealthy Russians seeking to circumvent western-imposed sanctions, Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College in London, has labeled the UAE as “the most crucial strategic partner for Russia in both the Middle East [West Asia] and Africa.”
A ‘country of focus’ for the US
This flourishing partnership between Moscow and Abu Dhabi has not gone unnoticed in the west, and there are concerns about how cozying up with Russia may affect the UAE’s relations with the west, especially in light of the recent leak of compromising Pentagon intel.
As evidence of this, US Treasury official Assistant Secretary Elizabeth Rosenberg has explicitly designated the UAE as a “country of focus,” noting Russia has been able to evade sanctions and “obtain more than $5 million in US semiconductors and other export-controlled parts, including components with battlefield uses.”
While the UAE has historically been aligned with the US, it has developed its own foreign policy in recent years, according to Dr. Giuseppe Dentice, an expert on International Relations of the Middle East from Centro Studi Internazionali Ce.S.I and a teaching assistant at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. As Dentine explains to The Cradle:
“The UAE has positioned itself as a free rider in the international arena, able to dialogue with the west and Russia and China. This has led the UAE to pursue its own agenda increasingly distant from the US and western interests, but in any case still extremely connected to many of Washington’s objectives in the large quadrant between the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia.”
For Joost Hiltermann, program director of the Middle East and North Africa section at the International Crisis Group think tank, Abu Dhabi is not likely to turn against the US in a major way. Despite pursuing closer ties with Beijing and Moscow, the UAE and other Persian Gulf states have emphasized that the US remains their primary external security partner.
Persian Gulf states pursue strategic balancing
In essence, “the UAE and other Gulf Arab states pursue a foreign policy of strategic balancing and hedging among both regional and global actors,” he tells The Cradle.
Yet, the UAE, along with other Persian Gulf countries, has refrained from aligning with the US in the new cold war, which has become evident in the case of US escalation over Taiwan and the war in Ukraine. In this context, the UAE does not want to miss out on the lucrative opportunity to engage with wealthy Russians, even if it means turning down the west and its preoccupation with the proxy war in Ukraine.
Dentice observes that many regional powers, especially those in the Persian Gulf have taken advantage of this new competitive environment to raise their own ambitions and develop their interests. The case of Russia and its businessmen is emblematic of this condition.
While the US does not necessarily oppose Russians visiting and residing elsewhere, Hiltermann notes that:
“They have an issue with the UAE becoming a hub for sanctions-busting and illicit economies, and they’ve had this concern for some time as US concerns relate to Russia sanctions violations and Iran and Syria sanctions violations.”
However, Hiltermann points out that the US has not always been clear on its sanctions policies and enforcement, which has confused and frustrated regional actors like the UAE. He says “Gulf Arab officials express significant dissatisfaction with US sanctions politics in the region, and often underline their lack of impact and how much they hurt local populations.”
Feeling the pressure
Additonally, Dentice emphasizes that the “UAE must be very careful to balance its own interests with the ambitions of the great powers.” Abu Dhabi should avoid any unnecessary confrontations or the risk of being labeled as a “pariah state” as this could harm its development and reputation as a commercial hub.
Irrespective of growing ties, the UAE has introduced some strict requirements for Russian businessmen and real estate investors who find it ever more difficult to purchase or rent space in Dubai. According to reports, financial and consultancy firms have are being closely observed by US financial regulators, so country business subjects have to be more cautious when dealing with Russia.
Also, despite its “free-rider” foreign policy approach, which requires a difficult balancing act, the UAE as well as other Persian Gulf states still heavily rely on US security arrangements, so many observers believe that sooner or later the UAE will have to agree on some compromise related to western sanctions issues.
Due to US pressure, the UAE has already canceled a license it had issued to Russia’s MTS Bank, and Russia’s largest bank Sberbank was also forced to close its office in Dubai.
Abu Dhabi’s diplomatic dilemma
Despite efforts by Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf capitals to appeal to Washington about the importance of maintaining ties with Moscow by supporting de-escalation measures between Russia and the west – such as prisoner exchanges – it is becoming increasingly challenging to maintain good relations with a Russia so profoundly vilified in western capitals.
Hiltermann doubts whether this approach will be effective in the long run. He points out that while the “US claims that it does not push Gulf Arab states to choose sides, Russia has turned into an existential issue for the US and Europe in many ways, and sooner or later western pressures on the UAE will increase.”
It is clear that the UAE’s foreign policy approach is complex and involves a delicate balancing act between its own interests and the ambitions of great powers. Withstanding its efforts to maintain good relations with both Washington and Moscow, the UAE is increasingly feeling the western pressure to untangle from Russia, especially in the form of sanctions threats.
While Abu Dhabi’s strategic partnerships with a broad range of countries have reaped economic benefits, in the foreign policy realm, the same choices have caused acute diplomatic challenges.
But the UAE cannot merely focus on the great power contests unfolding abroad. Closer to home, Abu Dhabi has had to navigate the changing dynamics in West Asia, including peace talks to end the conflict in Yemen and the game-changing, Beijing-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The UAE’s success and stability in its own region will ultimately hinge on its proficiency in managing these local shifts. Meanwhile, the entry of China and Russia into West Asia offers Abu Dhabi some further leverage in managing Washington’s demands. Unless and until the US decides to draw a hard red line, the Emiratis will likely play all their cards in all arenas.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Breaking the link between the oil and the dollar is a project that has been in the making for quite some time.
Breaking the link between the oil and the dollar is a project that has been in the making for quite some time
On March 10, China brokered a peace agreement between rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, a move which left the West baffled. Some suggested that the world had witnessed the slow and gradual collapse of the old world order. Although the deal may not necessarily achieve full normalization, still points of contact were restored. Such had vexed policymakers while at the same ushering in an era of Chinese diplomatic victory in the area most crucial to US global dominance. The implications of such an agreement are multiple, but the potential loss of Saudi to the US, and the gradual dissolution of their institutional ties, especially the long-standing agreement by which Saudi sells its oil for dollars, may yet prove to be a world significant event.
This detente is a breakthrough in terms of heralding peace and development in the region. It comes at a time when relations between China and the US have reached all-time lows. After several months of provocations aimed at disrupting Beijing through provocations around Taipei, it appears that China had turned the tables on the US’ most sensitive point, which is its hegemony over the gulf. The ramifications are too broad, but here I address the implications of the petrodollar system.
The petrodollar system was born of an agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to peg the sales of oil in exchange for security guarantees and Saudi assistance with US foreign policy missions. Aside from petrodollar recycling, the benefit of pricing oil in dollars has all to do with increasing US indebtedness in the dollar, which in turn increases its wealth, since the US prints the ‘paper dollars’ as the equivalent of world wealth. This also means that the US must lay control not only over current world assets, but must also own the future work and assets of humanity to underwrite its massive wealth. For this, The US must be in control of the world’s strategic resources, choke points, and foremost the ideological production that cripples anti-systemic thought. On a more concrete level, since OPEC entities get paid in none other than the dollar, the profits earned from oil revenues are re-invested in US treasuries and other instruments so as to avoid the loss of value in times of economic downturns. The constant flow of dollars channeled into bonds, allows the US to finance its deficits and to be in a position to trade debts against their future values.
The depth of the US financial market, and the ability of the dollar to be a world medium of savings in addition to world means of exchange, are tied to the global demand for dollars. If the dollarization of oil lessens, then demand for dollars lessens, and the dollar as a safe refuge from financial turmoil abroad also lessens. As can be seen, the US must reconstitute its powers in the military and ideological fields to reinstall the dollar and siphon world wealth through it. Incidentally, the China-sponsored deal represents an image or ideological blow to the US because it has shown China as a peace-maker and the US as war monger. The implications of slow de-dollarisation are that the US may no longer be able to build its wealth by borrowing against a world it controls.
Pricing oil to the US dollar has proved efficient to underwrite the wealth of the US-allied financial class. The equation more control equals more wealth meant that the US’s engagement in imperialist politics has always been about power first, especially ideological power wrought by beating and sanctioning people abroad. The US hegemony is first a hegemony over the global mind of defeated people. As the Arab proverb goes, one makes a friend out of beating him first.
The Saudis were pivotal in the ascent of the US. In addition to the many examples, like aiding the contras to fight Abdel-Nasser in Yemen, and the list goes on, they essentially helped the US win the Cold War because the dollarization of oil permitted them to financially contain Eastern European countries as they overburdened them with dollar debts. Lending to cripple an economy is just as good a weapon as any. Not to forget, the Saudis also allowed the price of oil to be listed on the commodity market by weakening OPEC at the behest of the US. Direct producers of oil lost control of oil prices. Saudi pumped oil earned fewer profits than it should have as a part of the power game with the Soviet Union then. This was owed to a meeting held in 1985 between King Fahd and William Casey, the former CIA director, in which both agreed to increase oil production from 2 billion bpd to 10 billion bpd, leading oil prices to fall from $30 to $10 and eventually resulting in the fallout of the Soviet economy.
In the region, the Saudis assisted US aspirations through the numerous wars against more autonomous states across the region. The proliferation of Salafism and the financing of disruptive militias instigated wars that were a win-win situation for the US. It weakened opposing regimes and made money off military spending.
Yet with war waged on Yemen, tensions with Iran, and a balance of forces tilting in favor of the axis of resistance, it is only rational for the Saudis to forfeit the US and seek longer-term stability through negotiated dialogue. The deal that the US provides Saudi with security as Saudi prices its oil in the dollar seems to be no longer valid. The US is retreating around the globe, and while it cannot afford Saudi security, the Saudis will rethink their pricing oil only in dollars. Add to that the personal vilification of MBS and the openly anti-Arab racism practiced daily in Western media and other channels.
On a more detailed level, Saudi security demands are threefold: first, to grant a major non-NATO ally status; second, to receive additional sales of advanced US weapons; and third, to receive US support for a civilian nuclear energy program. With the first condition fulfilled and the second being contested, the third would evoke the possibility for Saudi authorities to develop their own fissile material, hence enabling the capacity of building a nuclear weapon. The US is less concerned with nuclear proliferation than the military autonomization of Saudi Arabia as this would jeopardize the agreement that safeguards the petrodollar system. US reluctance to respond to Saudi Arabia’s security needs was made obvious when Democrat lawmakers urged US President Joe Biden to discourage Saudis from enhancing their own ballistic missiles and drone capabilities in 2022. A letter was issued just a few days prior to Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in June 2022, and highlighted concerns from the Pentagon that the Gulf state was planning to manufacture solid fuel missiles with assistance from China.
Another relevant factor to consider is threats issued by the US that it would pull away military support following the announcement of the OPEC cut in October 2022, as well as the introduction of the NOPEC bill which would enable lawsuits to be filed against Saudi Arabia and OPEC entities for controlling oil prices. If such a bill would come to pass, it would highlight the possibility of Saudi Arabia being slapped with sanctions. With the Iran-Saudi deal announced, it appears that China has rocked the foundations on which the petrodollar system rests. This was further evidenced by the introduction of a Privileged Resolution by Senators Murphy and Lee calling for a complete halt of US military assistance to Saudi Arabia, noting that “US weapons do not belong in the hands of human rights abusers.”
Breaking the link between the oil and the dollar is a project that has been in the making for quite some time. Both Russia and China have been buying immense amounts of gold to rid their foreign reserves in US dollars and back their own currencies on the gold standard. With their BRICS allies, they are contemplating a common currency that would shift away from transactions carried out in US dollars. Although many signs seem to be pointing out the gradual decline of the petrodollar system, it is unlikely that it may happen in the short run.
The petrodollar will remain the dominant currency as long as the dollar is recognized as the world reserve currency. As we speak, the global share of foreign reserves denominated in US dollars currently fell to slightly below 60%. States and companies across the world are still required to own dollars in order to purchase oil – the most strategic commodity on the global market. After all that is said and done, the decline of the dollar is tied to the decline of the US’s control of the planet, which until now was de-facto ownership of the planet.
Posted on February 26, 2023 by uprootedpalestinians
A significant increase in geopolitical and economic ties with China has offered West Asian states an alternative to the US, which has traditionally been the region’s security guarantor.
F.M. Shakil is a Pakistani writer covering political, environmental, and economic issues, and is a regular contributor at Akhbar Al-Aan in Dubai and Asia Times in Hong Kong. He writes extensively about China-Pakistan strategic relations, particularly Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The prospect of a US-China war has entered the realm of reality. Increased provocations from US military and political officials regarding the status of Taiwan – which China considers to be part of its historic territory – have heightened the possibility of confrontation in recent years.
With only 13 out of 193 UN member states recognizing the government in Taipei as a separate entity, the global community’s reaction to a Washington-led assault over Taiwan’s status remains highly uncertain.
Today, the reaction of strategic West Asia to a hypothetical conflict between the two superpowers is up for grabs. However, given the region’s reluctance to take sides in the Russian-US stand off, it is likely to be equally hesitant to do so in the event of a US-China conflict.
In a memo released on 27 January, US General Mike Minihan, chief of the Air Mobility Command, wrote: “My instinct tells me we will fight in 2025.” General Minihan’s views align with Taiwanese Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng’s statement in 2021 that China will be capable of launching a full-scale invasion of Taiwan by the same year.
In response to General Minihan’s remarks, Mike McCaul, chairman of the US House Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News: “I hope he is mistaken but I believe he is correct.” Adding fuel to the fire, US Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on 29 January, “The chances of conflict in the relationship with China over Taiwan are very high.”
A lot of hot air
Days after the US general issued a warning that Washington may engage in combat with Beijing in the next two years, tensions between the two countries were further exacerbated by the spoof-worthy Chinese spy balloon incident.
According to some senior Republicans and US military leaders, there is a growing concern that a full-scale conflict between the two superpowers is imminent, with the Asia-Pacific (AP) and South Asia (SA) regions likely to be the primary theaters of the conflict.
Jan Achakzai, a geopolitical analyst and former adviser to Pakistan’s Balochistan government, tells The Cradle that:
“The possibility of a war between the United States and China puts everyone on edge, especially the regions that are intricately linked with the US or China. Some nations will be compelled to choose between allying with the US in the case of war or keeping the status quo to lessen the possibility of hostilities.”
Russian involvement in West Asia
Despite nominal trade and geopolitical relations with Moscow, West Asian countries did not support Washington’s position in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, Russia’s veto power at the UN Security Council does have a positive impact on its relationship with regional states, particularly for its ability to prevent expansionist and anti-Arab policies by other permanent council members.
Security and trade remain the two primary pillars of the relationship between Moscow and West Asia, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s image has played a significant role in shaping these ties.
The UAE serves as a major financial hub for Russia, and Moscow may attempt to leverage its influence in the region to urge the UAE to reconsider US-imposed banking restrictions, if it feels that its interests are being compromised.
In addition, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt are among the countries that purchase wheat from Russia, which further solidifies economic ties between Russia and the Arab world.
Moreover, since joining the expanded Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC+) in 2016, Russia and Saudi Arabia have worked closely to regulate oil output and price adjustments as part of OPEC+ agreements.
Putin’s public image has, in part, contributed to a surge in support for Russia in the kingdom. In 2018, when Riyadh faced international criticism over the Saudi-orchestrated murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Russian president made headlines by high-fiving and grinning at the then-isolated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) during the G20 summit in Argentina.
Likewise, his prominent role in thwarting the NATO proxy war in Syria – a geopolitical game changer that, arguably, ushered in global multipolarity – has gained Putin fans across a region that has long suffered from western imperialist designs.
Where will West Asia stand?
Although still a hypothetical scenario, it is worth considering how West Asia would respond to a direct US-China conflict. Many prominent geopolitical analysts have speculated that if West Asia, and particularly the traditionally pro-US Arab states of the Persian Gulf, did not toe the US line against Russia – a significantly smaller regional trading partner than China – its loyalties to Washington in a potential US-China confrontation could be further strained.
Compared to Russia, China has significantly larger investments throughout West Asia. In 2021, bilateral trade between Beijing and the region amounted to $330 billion, with approximately 50 percent of China’s energy supply coming from the energy-abundant Persian Gulf.
China has conducted over $200 billion in trade alone with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. From 2005 to 2021, Beijing invested $43.47 billion in Saudi Arabia, $36.16 billion in the UAE, $30.05 billion in Iraq, $11.75 billion in Kuwait, $7.8 billion in Qatar, $6.62 billion in Oman, and $1.4 billion in Bahrain.
In addition to its investments in trade and energy, China has also invested enormous sums of money in West Asian and North African infrastructure and high-tech development projects via its multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Beijing has entered into strategic cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Algeria, Egypt, and Iran, and has enlisted a total of 21 Arab nations in its ambitious, decade-long effort to revive the historic Silk Road and export its goods to markets throughout Europe and Africa. Currently, infrastructure developed by Persian Gulf nations serves as a transit point for two-thirds of Chinese exports to these continents.
Egypt is a crucial hub for the BRI, with the Economic-Technological Development Area in Egypt’s Suez Canal Economic Zone, near Ain Sokhna, representing one of the major projects for which the two nations signed contracts totaling $18 billion in 2018.
Iraq, the third-largest oil supplier to China after Saudi Arabia and Russia, has also received $10.5 billion from Beijing for BRI-related energy projects, and just this week, agreed to replace its dollar trade with Beijing for the Chinese yuan.
In West Asia, the US plays second fiddle to Beijing
Chinese collaboration with West Asia and North Africa is not confined to trade and economy; Beijing also provides defense equipment to several Arab nations. Since 2019, China and Saudi Arabia have reportedly collaborated on the production of ballistic missiles, and China also sells Saudi Arabia its HQ-17AE air defense system.
Chinese Wing Loong drones have been purchased by the UAE, and Iraq has placed an order for CH-4B drones. Jordan purchased CH-4Bs in 2016, while Algeria acquired CH-5s – the next generation of the CH-4B type – to expand its aviation capabilities in 2022. In addition, Saudi Advanced Communications and Electronics Systems Co. and China Electronics Technology Group are partnering to build a drone factory for local UAV production.
While US President Joe Biden’s administration’s relationship with Riyadh has been strained due to disagreements over human rights and energy policy, China is making significant strides in strengthening its ties with the country.
As Beijing draws closer to Saudi Arabia, the message to Washington from Riyadh is unambiguous: “The people in the Middle East [West Asia] are tired of other countries’ interference because they always come with troubles.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping received a royal welcome in Riyadh last December, marking a seismic shift in Sino-Arab relations and boosting China’s image throughout the Arab world. In contrast, US President Joe Biden’s visit to Jeddah in the summer of 2022 received a lukewarm reception. This may suggest that a recalibration of West Asian geopolitical alliances may be on the horizon.
Despite these trends, analyst Achakzai tells The Cradle that West Asia will behave similarly to the way it did during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict – even given China’s increasing business and military presence in the region. and the US’s declining control over the oil-rich Arab monarchies.
“Depending on the current situation, the motives of the various states in the region may change and divide into two distinct groups: those who would support the US and those who would support a neutral position.”
China values economy over war
In the Asia-Pacific region, the US and its allies are engaged in a contentious relationship with China regarding maritime boundaries, international trade, human rights, and strategic security issues. Despite signing numerous security pacts with regional players, China appears to prioritize building and strengthening economic ties over military cooperation with Asian-Pacific states.
Due to a history of hostile confrontations and divergent geopolitical objectives, both the US and China seek to increase their military presence in the region. In response to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, the US has expanded its military footprint by signing commercial and defense agreements with the Asia-Pacific region.
The two nations have also been at odds over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which many viewed as an effort to contain China’s economic and strategic influence in its own backyard. Additionally, tensions have escalated between Beijing and its neighbors, particularly over territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas.
These efforts have been emboldened by the 5-member Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), which is an informal strategic dialogue between the US, India, Japan, and Australia that seeks “to promote a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.” According to Achakzai:
“Countries that have extensive defense agreements with the US, such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia, are most likely to help America. These nations, which have long benefited from their close connections to the US, must now contend with Chinese territorial ambitions in the region and the South China Sea. The nations having an informal security partnership with the US, such as the Philippines, are likely to back the United States in a confrontation.”
The analyst explained that Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia are expected to remain neutral during the conflict due to their strong business and investment ties with China.
“Other countries in the Asia-Pacific region may feel obligated to support the US if China initiates the conflict. This may apply to countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, which have recently been under Chinese pressure and may need to choose a side to protect their own security,” he noted.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World. Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’
A top US Marine General, James Bierman, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, explained in a moment of candour how the US is “setting the theatre” for possible war with China, whilst casually admitting as an aside, how US defence planners had been busy inside Ukraine years ago, “earnestly preparing” for war with Russia — even down to the “pre-positioning of supplies”, identifying sites from which the US might operate support, and sustain operations. Simply put, they were there,readying the battle space for years.
No surprise really, as such military responses flow directly from the core US strategic decision to actuate the 1992 ‘WolfowitzDoctrine’ that the US must plan and preemptively act, to disable any potential Great Power — well before it reaches the point at which it can rival or impair US hegemony.
NATO today has progressed to war with Russia in a battlespace, which in 2023, may or may not stay limited to Ukraine. Simply put the point is that the shift to ‘War’ (whether incremental or not) marks a fundamental transition from which there is no going back to ab initio — ‘war economies’ in essence, are structurally different to the ‘normal’ from which the West began, and to which it has grown accustomed over recent decades. A war society — even if only partly mobilised — thinks and acts structurally differently from peacetime society.
War is not about gentlemanly conduct… either. Empathy for others is its first casualty — the latter being a requirement for sustaining a fighting spirit.
Yet, the carefully curated fiction in Europe and the US continues that nothing really has, or will ‘change’: we are in a temporary ‘blip’. That’s all.
Zoltan Pozsar, the influential finance ‘oracle’ at Credit Suisse, has already made the point in his latest War and Peace essay (subscription only) that War is well underway – by simply listing the events of 2022:
The G7’s financial blockade of Russia (The West setting the battle space)
Russia’s energy blockade of the EU (Russia begins setting its theatre)
The U.S.’s technology blockade of China (America pre-positioning of sites to sustain operations)
China’s naval blockade of Taiwan, (China demonstrating preparedness)
The U.S.’s “blockade” of the EU’s EV sector with the Inflation Reduction Act. (The US defence planners preparing for future ‘supply-lines)
China’s “pincer movement” around all of OPEC+ with the growing trend of invoicing oil and gas sales in renminbi. (The Russia-China ‘Commodity Battlespace’).
This list amounts to one major geo-political ‘upset’ occurring, on average, every two months — moving the world decisively away from the so-called ‘normal’ (for which so many in the Consuming Class ardently yearn) to an intermediate state of War.
Pozsar’s list shows that the tectonic plates of geo-politics are seriously ‘on the move’ — shifts, which are accelerating and becoming ever more intertwined, yet that still remain far from arriving at any settled place. ‘War’ will likely be a major disruptor (at the very least), until some equilibrium is established. And that may take some years.
Ultimately, ‘War’ does make its impact on the conventional public mindset — albeit slowly. It seems to be fear of the impact on an unprepared mindset that is behind the decision to prolong Ukraine’s suffering, and thus trigger the War of 2023: An admission of failure in Ukraine is seen to risk spooking volatile western markets (i.e. higher interest rates for longer). And frank-talking represents a hard option for a western world — used to ‘easy decisions’, and ‘can kicking’ — to take.
Pozsar, being a finance guru, understandably is focussed in his essay on finance. But conceivably, the reference to Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes is therefore not whimsical, but included as a hint to the possible ‘hit’ to the conventional psyche.
In any event, Pozsar leaves us four key economic takeaways (with brief comments added):
War is history’s principle driver of inflation, and the bankruptcy for states. (Comment: war-driven inflation and Quantitative Tightening (QT) enacted to fight inflation, are policies working in radical opposition to each other. Central Banks’ role attenuates to supporting war needs — at the expense of other variables – in wartime.
War implies an effective and expandable industrial capacity for producing weapons (rapidly), which, in itself, requires secure supply-lines to feed that capacity. (A quality which the West no longer possesses, and which is costly to recreate);
Commodities which often serve as collateral to loans become scarce – and with that scarcity, show up as commodity ‘inflation’;
And finally, War cuts new financial channels i.e. “the m-CBDC Bridge project” (see here).
The point needs underlining again: War creates different financial dynamics and shapes a different psyche. More importantly, ‘War’ is not a stable phenomenon. It can start with petty tit-for-tat strikes on a rival’s infrastructure and then — with every incremental ‘mission creep’ — slip along the curve towards full war. NATO is not just mission creeping in its war on Russia, it is mission jogging — fearing a Ukraine humiliation in the wake of the earlier Afghanistan débacle.
The EU hopes to halt that slide well short of full war. It is nonetheless a very slippery slope. The point of War is to inflict pain and attrit your enemy. To this extent it is open to mutation. Formal sanctions and caps on energy quickly metamorphose into the sabotage of pipelines or the seizure of tankers.
Russia and China however, are certainly not naïve, and have been busy setting their own theatre, ahead of a potential wider clash with NATO.
China and Russia can now claim to have built a strategic relationship, not only with OPEC+, but with Iran and key gas producers.
Russia, Iran, and Venezuela account for about 40% of the world’s proven oil reserves, and each of them are currently selling oil to China for renminbi at a steep discount. GCC countries account for another 40% of proven oil reserves — and are being courted by China to accept renminbi for their oil — in exchange for transformative investments.
This is a significant new battlespace being readied — ending Dollar hegemony through boiling the frog slowly.
The contesting party made the initial strike, sanctioning half of OPEC with those 40% of the world’s oil reserves. That thrust failed: the Russian economy survived — and unsurprisingly — the sanctions ‘lost’ those states to Europe, ‘handing them’ over instead to China.
China meanwhile is courting the other half of OPEC with an offer that is hard to refuse:“Over the next “three to five years”, China will not only pay for more oil in renminbi – but more significantly, ‘will pay’ with new investments in downstream petrochemical industries in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the GCC more broadly. It will, in other words, build out the successor generation economy” for these fossil fuel exporters whose energy sell-by date approaches.
The key point here is that in the future, much more ‘value-added’ (in the course of production) will be captured locally — at the expense of industries in the West. Pozsar cheekily calls this: “Our commodity, your problem… Our commodity, our emancipation”. Or, in other words, the China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World.
Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’ — not just that of the dollar hegemony, but also that of a now uncompetitive western economy.
Emancipation? Yes! Here is the crux: China is receiving Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan energy at a big 30% discount.Meanwhile, Europe still gets energy for its industry — but only at a big mark-up. In short, more, and occasionally all, product added-value will be captured by cheap-energy ‘friendly’ states, at the expense of the uncompetitive ‘unfriendlies’.
“China – the nemesis – paradoxically has been a big exporter of high mark-up Russian LNG to Europe, and India a big exporter of high mark-up Russian oil and refined products such as diesel – to Europe. We should expect more [of this in the future] across more products – and invoiced not just in euros and dollars, but also renminbi, dirhams, and rupees’ ‘, Poszar suggests.
It may not look so obvious, but it is a financial war. If the EU is content to take the ‘easy way’ out of its fall into uncompetitiveness (via subsidies to allow for high-mark-up imports), then as Napoleon once remarked when observing an enemy making a mistake: Observe silence!
For Europe, this means much less domestic production – and more inflation — as price inflating alternatives are imported from the East. The West taking the ‘easy decision’ (since its renewable strategy has not been well thought through), likely will find the arrangement to be at the expense of growth in the West — a course prefiguring a weaker West, in the near future.
The EU will be particularly hard-hit. It has elected to become dependent on US LNG, just at the moment that production from US shale fields has peaked, with what output there is likely ear-marked to the US domestic market.
Thus, as general Bierman outlined how the US prepared the battlespace in Ukraine, Russia and China and the BRICS planners have been busy setting their own ‘theater’.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like it ‘is’: Europe’s stumble towards calamity reflects an embedded psychology of the Western ruling élite. There is no strategic reasoning, nor ‘hard-decisions’ being taken in the West at all. It is all narcissistic Merkelism (hard decisions postponed, and then ‘fudged’ through subsidy handouts). Merkelism is so called after Angela Merkel’s reign at the EU, where fundamental reform was invariably postponed.
There is no need for thinking-things-through, or for hard decisions, when leaders are held by the unshakable conviction that the West IS the centre of the Universe. It is sufficient to postpone, awaiting the inexorable to unfold itself.
The recent history of US-led forever-wars is further evidence of this western lacuna: These zombie wars drag on for years with no plausible justification, only to be unceremoniously dropped. The strategic dynamics were easier suppressed and forgotten however, when fighting insurgency wars — as opposed to fighting two well-armed, peer competitor-states.
The same dysfunctionality has been apparent in many slow-rolling western crises: Nevertheless, we persist… because protecting the fragile psychology of our leaders — and an influential sector of the public — takes precedence. The inability to countenance losing drives our élites to prefer sacrifice by their own people, rather than see their delusions exposed.
Hence, reality has to be abjured. So, we live a nebulous between-times — so much happening, but so little movement. Only when the outbreak of crisis can no longer be ignored — by even the MSM and Tech censors — might some real effort be made to address root causes.
This conundrum however, places a huge burden on the shoulders of Moscow and Beijing to manage the War escalation in a careful fashion — in face of a West for whom losing is intolerable.
[ Last Update: Wednesday, 04 January 2023 10:51 AM ]
Mohammad Bin Salman, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister (File Image)
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman being granted immunity from prosecution in US reassuring dictators around the world that they are safe in America.
In September, as a lawsuit was proceeding against him in a federal court in the United States, Mohammed bin Salman abruptly became Saudi Arabia’s Prime Minister, a role with several rights that he had not enjoyed previously as the country’s Crown Prince.
That dubious move paid off on Thursday, November 17, when the US State Department said that bin Salman enjoyed head of state immunity in US courts effectively dooming the lawsuit filed against him for his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was a loyalist turned dissident who lived in self exile in the United States and wrote articles critical of Bin Salman for The Washington Post.
In late 2018 he traveled to Turkey to obtain papers he needed to marry his Turkish fiancée from the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
On October 2, he entered the diplomatic building. He never left, not on his own feet. A hit squad flown in from Saudi Arabia had been waiting for him inside the consulate where they tortured him to death, and then dismembered his body, taking his limbs outside in suitcases.
Khashoggi’s fiancé, Hatice Cengiz, waited for hours outside the consulate for him to emerge, when he didn’t she alerted the Turkish police.
Soon, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a personal friend of the couple, joined the fray with full force and hardly a day went by without President Erdogan, or the Turkish Government, commenting publicly on the case, thus directing international attention to the Saudi government, or dropping hints that bin Salman, the Crown Prince, may have been personally involved.
Turkish security agencies even released audio tapes from inside the consulate with people yelling and Khashoggi screaming, effectively detailing the grisly murder and keeping the international community focused.
And only a month and a half after the murder, The Washington Post, which had been Khashoggi’s publication of choice, dropped a bombshell. The CIA had concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered Khashoggi murder. The CIA never spoke publicly about their findings on the matter.
Already the world had learned of an earlier princely gambit whereby Mohammed had become Crown Prince through what US media described as a coup d’etat, purging his rivals and holding the then Crown Prince in custody until he agreed to step down.
To learn that the prince had become so emboldened as to order the murder of his critics in a foreign country was seen to have been a step too far, and it seemed that the prince was finally going to be held to account.
There was reason to believe that since President Erdogan was unrelenting in his public admonishments of Saudi Arabia.
Years later, both before and after he assumed office, US President Joe Biden was openly critical of Saudi Arabia. At one point during a presidential debate when he was asked about the Khashoggi case, Biden said he would make the Saudis “pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are”.
All of that angry moral posturing went down the drain of history when the US State Department said that the Saudi Prince had legal immunity in the United States of America as Prime Minister, Saudi King Salman, MBS’s father, had already bent over backwards to make that possible, but even he himself couldn’t believe that the Americans would fall for his scheme that easily.
Legally the prime minister himself as King of the country, King Salman acted against Saudi law by delegating that position to his son in late September just as Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiance, was doing everything she could to have justice served in a court of law.
President Biden’s rhetoric, and his anger over a move by OPEC+ to limit output at a time of energy difficulties for the US and Europe had given further hope even though the Turkish denunciations had already died down years ago.
Fraught as it is with behind the scenes jockeying, betrayals and other moral failures, world politics took away not just one woman’s hope for justice, but the entire world’s faith in the willingness of the US and other governments to stand up to tyranny, despite all the rhetoric to the opposite effect, killing Hatice Cengiz’s hope for justice and perhaps closure.
The US and others had one message for all murderous dictators in the world: You’re safe in America.
US President Joe Biden with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a visit to the Kingdom in July 2022.
The Biden administration has told a US court that Mohammed bin Salman should be granted sovereign immunity in a civil case involving the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, effectively ending a last-ditch attempt to hold the Saudi crown prince legally accountable for the 2018 killing.
In a filing released late on Thursday night, the Biden administration said the crown prince’s recent promotion to the role of prime minister meant that he was “the sitting head of government and, accordingly, immune” from the lawsuit.
“The United States government has expressed grave concerns regarding Jamal Khashoggi’s horrific killing and has raised these concerns publicly and with the most senior levels of the Saudi government,” the Department of Justice said in its filing, adding that the US had also imposed financial sanctions and visa restrictions related to the murder.
“However, the doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law and has been consistently recognized in longstanding executive branch practice as a status-based determination that does not reflect a judgment on the underlying conduct at issue in the litigation,” it said.
The government’s filing included an attached letter from Richard Visek, acting legal adviser to the US state department, instructing the Department of Justice to submit a “suggestion of immunity” to the court.
Legal experts say the US government’s position, which was filed to a US district court, will likely lead judge John Bates to dismiss a civil case brought against Prince Mohammed, known by his initials MBS by Hatice Cengiz, the outspoken fiancee of Khashoggi.
Back in 2019, in the wake of the assassination of Washington Post, then-presidential candidate Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the kingdom’s human rights record.
Biden repeatedly talked about reevaluating and reassessing US-Saudi relations. To his credit, Biden seemed to follow through on this early in his presidency by suspending offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, freezing contacts with MBS, and releasing a brief assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence establishing the Saudi crown prince’s role in and responsibility for Khashoggi’s death.
Thursday’s decision is likely to provoke an angry reaction. The White House had hoped the July trip by President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia would get the rocky US-Saudi relationship back on track but since then, relations have only continued to sour.
The relationship is being reevaluated, the White House has said earlier in October, in the wake of an oil production cut by Saudi-led OPEC+ that the administration saw as a direct affront to the US. Members of Congress, already infuriated by the oil cut and calling for a reevaluation, will likely only be angered further if the prince is given immunity.
The concluding statement of the Arab Summit emphasizes supporting OPEC+’s decision to cut oil production by two million barrels a day.
The Arab Summit demanded lifting the unjust blockade on Gaza.
The Arab League Summit issued, on its second day in the Palace of Conferences in Algiers, the Algeria Declaration document.
The heads of the Arab states stressed “the centrality of the Palestinian cause and full support for the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to freedom and self-determination and the right to return, in addition to making the compensation payments for the Palestinian refugees, in accordance with the United Nations General Assembly Resolution No. 194 of 1948.”
The Summit demanded lifting the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and condemning the Israeli occupation’s brutality and barbaric practices against Palestinians, including assassinations and arbitrary arrests.” The Summit also called for the release of all prisoners and detainees, especially children, women, the sick, and the elderly.
The statement emphasized the necessity of “endorsing the pursuit of the Palestinian state to obtain full membership at the United Nations and urging the countries that have not yet recognized the state of Palestine to do so, coupled with the necessity of supporting the legal Palestinian efforts and attempts to hold the Israeli occupation accountable for its war crimes.”
Moreover, the statement confirmed that the Summit supports the policy of OPEC+, which includes oil-producing countries from inside and outside the OPEC organization, in the global energy market.
Algeria confirmed that it “appreciates the balanced policy of the OPEC+ alliance in order to ensure the stability of the global energy markets and sustainability of investments in this sensitive sector as part of an economic approach that ensures protecting the interests of producing and consuming countries alike.”
On October 5, OPEC+ announced reducing oil by two million barrels a day in order to support the markets facing the risk of a decrease in demand for crude oil due to the economic crisis.
The attending states also rejected “all forms of foreign intervention in the Arab countries’ internal affairs” and expressed their insistence on the principle of finding Arab solutions to Arab problems by strengthening the role of the Arab League in preventing crises and solving them through peaceful means and working to strengthen inter-Arab relations.
The attending Arab countries expressed “full solidarity with the Libyan people and support for the efforts aimed at ending the Libyan crisis through a Libyan-Libyan solution that preserves the unity and sovereignty of Libya and safeguards its security and that of the neighboring countries.”
The statement concluded, “All the states should assume a collective leading role to contribute to the efforts made in order to reach a political solution for the Syrian crisis and address all the political, security, humanitarian, and economic repercussions, through what ensures the unity and sovereignty of Syria and realizes the ambitions of its people.”
Algerian FM Ramtane Lamamra: The success of the Algerian summit is the success of all Arabs
Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra considered on Wednesday that the success of the Algerian summit is the success of all Arabs who knew how to come together and agree after the Corona pandemic and realized the importance of unity and the sensitivity of the regional and global situation.
Lamamra said that “the attendance was significant, positive, and constructive, and everyone was eager to apply whatever can contribute to the Arab unity.”
The Biden administration is now paying the price for its chaotic and inconsistent policy on Saudi Arabia
On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden issued his national security strategy, which boasted, among other things, of his country’s unique capacity to “defend democracy around the world”.
US President Joe Biden at the White House, on 4 October 2022 (AFP)
One of the standout phrases of this unashamed piece of geopolitical fiction was this one: “We are forging creative new ways to work in common cause with partners around issues of shared interest.”
This statement was released just days after Opec+, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, unleashed the biggest shock to oil markets this century by cutting production by two million barrels a day.
It’s chaos – not in the unstable Middle East, but in the corridors of the National Security Council
Despite Riyadh’s latest protestations that the decision was based only on “economic considerations”, the move has triggered a tidal wave of anger among Democratic members of Congress, who are now threatening to suspend arms sales to the kingdom for a year. National security adviser Jake Sullivan has also said the White House was looking into a halt to arms sales. As 73 percent of the kingdom’s arms imports come from the US, this is no mere rhetorical threat.
“If it weren’t for our technicians, their airplanes literally wouldn’t fly… We literally are responsible for their entire air force,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, told reporters. “What galls so many of us in Congress is the ingratitude.”
Incidentally, the same is true of the British firm BAE Systems, which supplies and maintains aircraft for Saudi Arabia, but the UK government is staying silent.
It should not. Because the national security strategy shows that, among other things, the US has lost control of its allies, especially in the Middle East and particularly in the Gulf.
Courting a ‘pariah’
To take Biden’s tenure as an illustration, one of the first things he did upon taking office was to appoint Brett McGurk, a diplomat who had served under previous presidents, as his National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East.
McGurk is famous, or rather infamous, among Sunni political circles in Iraq – let alone pro-Iran Shia ones – for being rather too close to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and latterly its prime minister. McGurk set up the disastrous “fist bump” encounter between Biden and Mohammed bin Salman by negotiating an agreement between Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt over the transfer of two uninhabited but strategically placed islands in the Red Sea, Tiran and Sanafir.
How, then, could Mohammed bin Salman poke such a large finger in Biden’s eye just before the midterm elections, if McGurk had been doing his job? It’s chaos – not in the unstable Middle East, but in the corridors of the National Security Council.
Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 16 July 2022 (AFP)
Or take the decisions that Biden made over Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and Middle East Eye columnist murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Biden abandoned the principles he touted as a presidential candidate to treat the Saudi crown prince as a pariah, the moment he took office.
Upon the publication of a summary of a CIA report on the murder, which concluded that Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing, Biden had an opportunity to put US weight behind a UN investigation into the killing. He notably declined to do so.
The US announced visa restrictions against 76 Saudis implicated in the plot, but did nothing against the man its intelligence services said was behind it.
“The relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the time of the so-called Khashoggi ban. “What we’ve done by the actions that we’ve taken is really not to rupture the relationship, but to recalibrate it to be more in line with our interests and our values.”
Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator, applauded Biden for “trying to thread the needle”, telling the New York Times that the affair was “a classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests”.
Not unnaturally, Mohammed bin Salman concluded that he had gotten away with it. Now, Biden is paying the price.
State of surprise
The American foreign policy establishment has been, since the end of the Cold War, in a permanent state of surprise.
There was surprise that it had “lost Russia” at the end of the 1990s; surprise at the devastation caused by its invasion of Iraq; surprise over Vladimir Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, in which the Russian leader called out the US’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations”; surprise at Putin’s intervention in Syria; surprise over the fall of Kabul; and surprise that strategic decisions such as expanding Nato eastwards would ultimately lead to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
At least the US is showing consistency in its faulty analytics and strategy, and massive blind spots. You can now rely on it to make the wrong choice
A world power that, until Putin’s intervention in Syria, held a monopoly on the use of international force but has squandered its authority in a series of mainly unforced errors. That is why it can no longer lead the democracies of the world.
Alienating China at the very time the US needs President Xi Jinping to contain Putin and stop him from using battlefield nukes, which he is quite capable of doing, is perhaps the biggest strategic mistake it is currently making.
At least the US is showing admirable consistency in its faulty analytics and strategy, and massive blind spots. You can now rely on it to make the wrong choice.
Saudi foreign policy cannot be untangled from the personality of its de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman. He is to international relations what a Nintendo game console is to careful reflection. He presses a button and thinks it can happen. He has an idea, and it has to be true.
I recently met an academic in Tehran who believed Mohammed bin Salman had moved beyond his Game Boy past. He is involved in backchannel negotiations with the Saudis.
Saudi Arabia: Mohammed bin Salman is now the state
“A senior Saudi diplomat told me that MBS started as a kid playing video games,” he told me. “Killing Khashoggi, starting a military intervention in Yemen which would last ‘two weeks’, the siege of Qatar, getting rid of [Lebanese Prime Minister Saad] Hariri were all video games for him, buttons you can press, enemies disappearing from the screen. Out of necessity, he is becoming more strategic.
“Strategic maturity does not come from what you would like to have. It comes out of necessity,” the academic added. “I don’t think the Saudis decided to move beyond that strategic relationship with America. The American hand is still strong. But there are differences happening. The Americans are not seen with the same confidence that was seen in Riyadh.
“Where does it leave the Saudis? The Saudis have been trying to build relations with China and Russia and in the region. Vision 2030 cannot move without calm all around the kingdom. The Saudis see Yemen in two tracks: one, the Saudi-Yemeni track [with the Houthis]; two, the national reconciliation track. But the two rely on each other, and MBS is moving towards a compromise.”
The Iranian academic admitted that this was music to his ears, which was why he thought his Saudi counterpart was playing it, but nor could he discount the temptation to believe it.
Machiavellian tutor
Mohammed bin Salman admires Putin personally. Multiple sources have told me that the inspiration for the Tiger Squad – which killed and dismembered the body of Khashoggi and tried to do the same to Saad al-Jabri, a former minister of state and adviser to deposed crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef – came from the killing of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in London and the attempted poisoning of defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.
But beyond that, Mohammed bin Salman sees the limits of the kingdom’s ties to the US. He used former President Donald Trump as his ticket to the top of the Saudi royal family, but now that the Trump clan is – for the moment – out of power, he sees no reason not to court Russia.
But he remains impulsive, and his tutor in the modern art of Machiavelli, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, is more astute.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (left) with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed in Abu Dhabi, in November 2019 (AFP/Saudi Royal Palace)
In distinction to his pupil, Mohammed bin Zayed still sees his country’s growing trade alliance with Israel as his ticket to influencing US policymakers. It was his ambassador in the US, Yousef al-Otaiba – not the Saudi ambassador – who introduced Mohammed bin Salman to the Trump family and to Washington.
But Mohammed bin Zayed hates being told what to do. One official familiar with relations between the Saudi and Emirati crown princes told me of a plan Mohammed bin Salman once had to run a maglev railway around the Gulf. Only a few of these systems, such as the Shanghai Transrapid, are running in the world, due to the enormous cost of construction.
“MBS makes a plan and tells everyone else how much to invest without consulting them,” the official said. “He had an idea to run a maglev train going around the Gulf. Its [cost] was $160bn, because it’s $1bn a mile. Abu Dhabi’s share was huge. They were furious and stopped the plan.
“MBZ resents being told what to do by MBS, because he thinks he created him. MBS could not conceive of a relationship to him where he is subservient.”
New era of power projection
So while Mohammed bin Zayed went to Russia courting Putin, his officials distanced themselves from the Opec+ oil cut. The Financial Times reported that the UAE and Iraq had “expressed misgivings”.
Foreign policy in the hands of Mohammed bin Zayed is more nuanced than in those of his Saudi protege. This means that every move Mohammed bin Zayed makes is reversible, and therefore tradeable. He calculates each move before he makes it.
Although the two men look in public to be close to each other, in reality, Mohammed bin Salman is moving faster than his neighbour wants him to. The one thing that Mohammed bin Zayed does not want is for Mohammed bin Salman to become his own man. At the same time, the one thing that Mohammed bin Salman will not tolerate is for anyone else to issue him orders.
The US is being tested as much by its allies as by its foes. And for good reason
It happened once over Yemen, where the announcement of the pullout of UAE troops left the Saudi crown prince on his own.
Biden and his advisers may be tempted to take a successful pushback of Russian troops in Ukraine as a starting gun for a new era of American power projection around the world – one whose target is China. But even if Putin is turned back in Ukraine, they would be profoundly wrong to do so.
The US is being tested as much by its allies as by its foes. And for good reason: they sense that the US won’t resume the role of unchallenged leader, which it held briefly for three decades.
The US has learned no lessons from the fall of Kabul. It reacted to its military defeat in Afghanistan by trading up. A geographically limited conflict in Central Asia was replaced by a potentially much larger conflict with China. Large parts of the world have rightly lost faith in this type of leadership.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
يبدو أنّ خيبات الولايات المتحدة الأميركية تتوالى. فقد أثار قرار الدول المصدرة للبترول “أوبك” والدول المنتجة للنفط المتحالفة معها “أوبك بلس” خفض إنتاج النفط بمقدار مليوني برميل يومياً، حالة من الهستيريا والغضب في واشنطن، لما له من تداعيات سلبية على الولايات المتحدة وحلفائها. فعلى خلفية القرار عبّر الرئيس جو بايدن أنه “أصيب بخيبة أمل” ووصف القرار بـ “قصير النظر”، واتهم دول المنظمة النفطية بالانحياز إلى روسيا.
شكل قرار خفض الإنتاج حالة إرباك بالنسبة لإدارة الرئيس بايدن، فالتوقيت الحرج لهذا القرار يأتي قبل شهر تقريباً من موعد إجراء انتخابات التجديد النصفي للكونغرس. وثمة خطر في أنّ هذا الخفض الذي سيدخل سريان المفعول في الأول من تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر من شأنه أن يتسبّب في ارتفاع أسعار البنزين والغاز، ما يعني انّ واشنطن أمام كارثة سياسية كاملة الأركان على إدارة الرئيس الديمقراطي بايدن، خاصة أنّ خصومه الجمهوريين سيستغلون الفرصة الثمينة هذه للإطاحة بمصداقيته أمام الناخبين الأميركيين خلال عملية الاقتراع، كإثبات على السياسة الفاشلة التي تمتع بها عهده.
وعلى خلفية هذا القرار تعالت الأصوات في الكونغرس الأميركي التي تدعو لإعادة النظر في العلاقة مع الرياض، وتأطير العلاقة مع الأخيرة التي اعتبرت الإدارة الأميركية خطوتها بأنها بمثابة انحياز للمملكة في صراعات دولية وأنه قرار بُني على دوافع سياسية ضدّ الولايات المتحدة الأميركية. واللافت انّ ارتفاع وتيرة التوتر بين البلدين ترافق مع طرح النائب الأميركي الديمقراطي توم مالينوفسكي مشروع قانون في مجلس النواب يطالب إدارة الرئيس بايدن بسحب أنظمة الدفاع ضدّ الصواريخ و3000 جندي، وهم قوام القوات الأميركية من السعودية والإمارات. وقال مالينوفسكي في بيان صادر عنه: “لقد حان الوقت لكي تستأنف الولايات المتحدة دورها كدولة عظمى في علاقتها بزبائنها في الخليج”.
وعليه فإنّ حفلة الجنون الأميركية عقب قرار “أوبك بلس”، يفسّرها انشغال واشنطن وحلفائها في السعي الدؤوب لضمان أمنهم الطاقي نظراً لأهمية مصادر الطاقة العالمية. خاصة بعد أزمة أوكرانيا وإغلاق روسيا لصنابير الطاقة والغاز عن أوروبا.
وكخطوات عاجلة أمر الرئيس الأميركي وزارة الطاقة بالإفراج عن 10 ملايين برميل من الاحتياطي البترولي الاستراتيجي الأميركي في الأسواق مع دخول خفض الإنتاج حيّز التنفيذ في الأول من تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر، والاستمرار في اللجوء إلى احتياطي البترول الاستراتيجي كلما اقتضت الحاجة. كما باشر بايدن بمشاورات مع الكونغرس للبحث في آليات إضافية لتقليص تحكم أوبك في أسعار الطاقة وتقليص اعتماد الولايات المتحدة على المصادر الأجنبية للوقود الأحفوري وتسريع ضخ الاستثمارات في الطاقة النظيفة.
من منظورٍ آخر، يبدو أنّ واشنطن تسبّبت بطريقة أو بأخرى بدفع “أوبك بلس” لخفض الإنتاج، عندما قرّرت مؤخراً رفع أسعار الفائدة والدولار، في وقت يستورد العالم النفط بالعملة الأميركية، ورفع قيمته يؤثر على الدول المستوردة للنفط، ما تسبّب بقلة الطلب عليه، ما أدّى لخلق فائض نفطي لدول “أوبك بلس”. واشنطن المذهولة من القرار حمّلت الرياض مسؤولية تداعياته، معتبرة أنّ دوافعه سياسية وانحياز لروسيا وسيشكل دعماً لها لا يُستهان به.
بدورها السعودية رفضت الاتهامات الأميركية التي لا تستند إلى الحقائق، وعلقت بأنّ القرار اتخذ بالإجماع من كافة دول المجموعة، وهو قرار اقتصادي بحت. وما زاد الطين بلة، أنّ قراراً مدعوماً من السعودية بأن تتوقف مجموعة “أوبك بلس” عن استخدام بيانات وكالة الطاقة الدولية، وهي الهيئة الغربية لمراقبة قطاع الطاقة، ما يعكس المخاوف من التأثير الأميركي على البيانات.
وأخيراً، يبدو انّ زيارة بايدن للسعودية في تموز/ يوليو لم تفعل شيئاً يُذكر لتغيير تصميم محمد بن سلمان على رسم سياسة خارجية مستقلة عن النفوذ الأميركي، خاصة أنّ الزيارة أغضبت ولي العهد، الذي كان منزعجاً من أنّ بايدن تحدث علناً عن تعليقاته الخاصة مع العائلة المالكة بشأن وفاة الصحافي جمال خاشقجي. وهذا لا يعني انّ البيت الأبيض سيتجه لاتخاذ قرارات عقابية واضحة تجاه الرياض، فهو وعلى الرغم من العلاقات بين كلّ من المملكة والولايات المتحدة شهدت مداً وجزراً على مدى عقود خلت وحتى الفترة الحالية، إلا انّ الدولتين تتمتعان بشراكة استراتيجية، مدعومة بمصالح مشتركة. فالبلدان يشتركان في رؤية متوافقة تجاه العديد من القضايا الدولية والإقليمية، من مسألة الملف النووي الإيراني، والتحالف الرباعي ضدّ اليمن، وغيرها من الملفات الإقليمية والدولية.
وعليه فإنّ ما يجمع واشنطن والرياض أكبر بكثير مما يمكن أن يزعزع علاقة البلدين الشاملة في كافة المستويات. بيد أنَّ هذه العلاقات تعرّضت وتتعرّض في أوقات كثيرة لمثل هذه الهزات، إلا أنَّه من المستبعد أن تذهب ردود الأفعال إلى مستويات بعيدة، خصوصاً أنّ قرار «أوبك بلس» لم يكن سعودياً بحتاً.
The US-Saudi partnership has often been described as a transactional one; majorly owing to Saudi Arabia’s oil supply in return for US arms in bulk. Since 1943, the equation has been protecting the interests of American oil companies in Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas industry in return for weapons and military equipment.
Saudi Arabia is a vital US asset in West Asia. Since the kingdom has the world’s largest oil reserves, enjoys a geo-strategic position, and has influence in the Arab and Islamic worlds, it remains to be the imperialist US’s pivot to Asia. Saudi Arabia has also been the US’ milking cow, paying tremendous sums of money in return for arms deals over the years.
Tensions, however, rose between the two countries following Saudi pressure on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies [OPEC Plus] alliance last week to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day.
This was after the US was acting in collusion with Saudi Arabia to patch things up in July on the Mohammed Bin Salman-ordered killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The US Intelligence had earlier released a report in which it said that MBS approved the operation to kill and dismantle the journalist.
Recently given a “made up” title of prime minister to secure his impunity at US courts on his role in the killing of Khashoggi, MBS claimed that the decision of OPEC Plus, in which Riyadh is a top producer, was “merely” economic and not politically motivated.
John Kirby, a top spokesperson for the US National Security Council denied the claims and said the Saudi move was wrong. He stated that the Saudis conveyed during the recent weeks their intention to reduce oil production, privately and publicly, knowing this would increase Russian revenues and blunt the effectiveness of sanctions.
In reaction, President Biden issued a vague warning to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, pledged “consequences” and vowed to “take action.” The US claimed that OPEC Plus is aligning with Russia.
Of course, Biden is concerned that decreased oil output could push up the price of gasoline right before the November 8 US midterm elections, when Democrats will defend their control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats are demanding a swift and concrete response.
In a strong expression of US anger over the Saudi oil-production cuts, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez called for freezing all US cooperation with Saudi Arabia on Monday. Menendez claimed that the move serves to boost Russia in its war in Ukraine.
He vowed he “will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough.”
Gulf sources rushed to conclude that the rift between the two countries will not break ties, while pro-US sources lashed MBS and OPEC Plus for the decision and said this move proves Bin Salman is siding with Russia, and that Western leaders should abandon him.
In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war, the West has gone to great lengths to isolate Russia’s economy, which relies in large part on energy exports.
As part of their economic sanctions against Moscow, the US and EU are trying to impose a cap on the price paid to Russia for its oil exports. But that effort could now collapse as global oil prices rise and Europe heads into a winter season when heating costs are expected to soar due to the Ukraine war.
OPEC Plus, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers including Russia, has refused to raise output to lower oil prices despite pressure from major consumers, including the United States.
Russia has hailed the recent decision made by OPEC Plus. The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remarks on October 9, saying the move successfully at least “balances the mayhem that the Americans are causing.”
It is very good that such “balanced, thoughtful and planned work of the countries, which take a responsible position within OPEC, is opposed to the actions of the US,” Peskov said.
For months, the US and Saudi monarchy have been in a tit-for-tat game, seemingly contemplating how to pressure each other in return for gains. Of course, Mohammed bin Salman has gained leverage on the international level following the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war since he controls the oil game, if possible to say.
MBS, who was described by The Economist as “one of the most dangerous leaders” of the world in September is opportunistic; he will do whatever it takes to get what he wants.
Middle East Eye quoted an academic from Tehran as saying “A senior Saudi diplomat told me that MBS started as a kid playing video games. Killing Khashoggi, starting a military intervention in Yemen which would last ‘two weeks,’ the siege of Qatar, and getting rid of [Lebanese Prime Minister Saad] Hariri were all video games for him, buttons you can press, enemies disappearing from the screen. Out of necessity, he is becoming more strategic.”
“Strategic maturity does not come from what you would like to have. It comes out of necessity,” the academic said. “I don’t think the Saudis decided to move beyond that strategic relationship with America. The American hand is still strong. But there are differences happening. The Americans are not seen with the same confidence that was seen in Riyadh.”
By the OPEC Plus move, yes, MBS has shown his influence over the global oil market, but he did upset the foreign policy establishment in Washington. Of course, Washington will not want to risk oil security which is in the hands of the kingdom to a great extent, or drive Riyadh closer to Russia and China; a too simplistic of a prediction. Saudi Arabia still cannot make it through without the US, but Biden needs to take action for the Saudi humiliation.
A serious issue remains in question; what will happen to the West as winter becomes harsher in light of power cuts, the absence of hot water and scarcity and high prices of oil?
Also on the current rift, will Biden invite MBS to Washington and “spank” him like the Saudi game boy did to Lebanon’s Hariri, perhaps in one way or another? Will relations deteriorate and the world see different coalitions as the US says it will reconsider relations with the Saudi monarchy? Or will this be just another bruise in ties between the oil-rich country and the imperialist US before the two resume their US-Saudi waltz?
Related Videos
Exchange of visits between Sana’a and Riyadh… Is the war nearing its end?
In any case | OPEC Plus declares a war on American hegemony
In the war between global finance and energy, one fact remains clear: You can print money but you can’t print oil
There is more to the current struggle between the oil-consuming west and the oil-producing nations than meets the eye and it runs far deeper than the war in Ukraine
On 6 October, when the European Union (EU) agreed to impose a Russian oil price cap as part of a new package of sanctions against Moscow, 23 oil ministers from the OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries spoke out in favor of a sharp cut in their joint production quota.
Their collective decision to decrease output by about two million barrels of oil per day elicited strong reactions in the US in particular, and there was even talk of “declarations of war.” The EU feels duped, as the OPEC+ production cuts could drive up fuel prices and dampen their eight sanctions packages. Despite the narrative of the world edging toward a “post-oil era,” it seems there’s life in the old dog yet, as OPEC remains the talk of the town.
OPEC is as relevant as ever
OPEC and ten non-OPEC energy producers – including Russia – have been coordinating their production policy since December 2016. At the time, analysts gave this “OPEC-plus” format little chance of having an impact.
Back then, I recall the mockery of many who scorned the announcement in the press room of the OPEC General Secretariat in Vienna. But OPEC has weathered the storm of the global oil market in recent years, and has emerged as a key player.
Recall the exceptional situation in the spring of 2020 during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when futures trading for US oil grades were even quoted at negative prices at times, only to rise again to new heights in April 2021.
In contrast to the escapades in the oil market between 1973 and 1985, when there was little consensus among OPEC’s members and many had already written the organization’s obituary – today, former rivals such as Saudi Arabia and Russia are managing to converge their interests into powerful cards.
In those days, it was normal practice for Riyadh to take into account and execute Washington’s interests within OPEC: A single phone call from the US capital was enough. When the US oil company ARAMCO – which acted like an extended arm of the US in the kingdom – was nationalized by Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s as part of the sweeping nationalization trends around the world, compensation was promised to the US on a mere handshake.
The era of the “Seven Sisters,” a cartel of oil companies that divided up the oil market, came to an end then. However, for US policymakers – at least, psychologically – this era still persists. “It’s our oil,” is an expression I often hear uttered in Washington. Those voices were particularly loud during the illegal US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Financial market versus the energy market
To really understand the core of the conflict in Ukraine – where a proxy war rages – one must break down the confrontation thus: The US and its European allies, who represent and back the global financial sector, are essentially engaged in a battle against the world’s energy sector.
In the past 22 years, we have seen how easy it is for governments to print paper currency. In just 2022, the US dollar has printed more paper money than in its combined history. Energy, on the other hand, cannot be printed. And therein lies a fundamental problem for Washington: The commodity sector can outbid the financial industry.
When I wrote my book “The Energy Poker” in 2005, I also dealt with the currency question, i.e. whether oil will be traded in US dollars in the long term. At the time, my interlocutors from the Arab OPEC countries unanimously said that the US dollar would not be changed. Yet, 17 years later, that view has devolved starkly.
Riyadh is warming up to the idea of trading oil in other currencies, as indicated this year in discussions with the Chinese to trade in yuan. The Saudis also continue to purchase Russian like other West Asian and Global South states, they have opted to ignore western sanctions on Moscow, and are increasingly preparing for the new international condition of multipolarity.
Washington, thus, no longer maintains its ability to exert absolute leverage on OPEC, which is now repositioning itself geopolitically as the enlarged OPEC+.
US reacts: Between defiance and anger
The OPEC+ ministerial meeting on 6 October was a clear foreshadowing of these new circumstances. The inherent tensions between two world views unfolded immediately in the post-meeting press room where a Saudi oil minister put the western news agency Reuters in its place, and where US journalists fiercely attacked OPEC for “holding the world economy hostage.”
The next day, a tough policy was grudgingly announced by the White House. The OPEC+ production cuts has Washington vacillating between sulking and seeking revenge – against the once-compliant Saudis, in particular. In a few weeks US midterm elections will be held, and the ramifications of spiking fuel prices will no doubt unfold at the ballot box.
For almost a year, President Joe Biden has been expanding US fuel supply via the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but has been unable to calibrate either the price of oil or runaway inflation. The US Congress is threatening to use the so-called “NOPEC” bill – under the legal pretext of banning cartels – to seize the assets of OPEC governments.
The concept has been floating around for decades on Capitol Hill, but this time new irrational emotions may own the momentum. But hostile or threatening US actions are likely to backfire and even accelerate the geopolitical shifts taking place in West Asia, which has been edging out of the US orbit in recent years. Many Arab capitals have not forgotten the unseating of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and how quickly the US abandoned its longterm ally.
“It’s the economy, stupid”
The price of oil is a seismograph of the world economy and also of global geopolitics. With the production cuts, OPEC+ is simply planning in anticipation of upcoming recessionary consequences. Moreover, some producing countries are failing to create new capacities in view of the investment gap that has persisted since 2014: a low price of oil simply cannot be sustained if there is no major capital investment in its sector.
The energy supply situation is expected to further worsen as of 5 December, when the oil embargo imposed by the EU comes into force.
The fundamental laws of supply and demand will ultimately determine the many distortions in the commodity markets. The anti-Russian sanctions created by the EU and other states (a total of 42 states) have disrupted global supply, and that has man-made supply and pricing consequences.
The two major global financial crises – real estate and banks in 2008, and the pandemic in 2020 – led to the excessive printing of paper money. Ironically, it was China that moved the paralyzed global economy out of the first crisis: Beijing stabilized the entire commodity market in 2009/10 by serving as the global locomotive and bringing the yuan into the trading schemes.
China, the well-oiled machine
Until the early 1990s, China satisfied its domestic oil consumption with domestic oil production, ranging from 3-4 million barrels per day. But fifteen years and a rapidly-expanded economy later, China had turned into the world’s number one oil importer.
This status reveals the crucial role of Beijing in the global oil market. While Saudi Arabia and Angola are important oil providers, Russia is the main gas supplier for China. As former Premier Wen Jiabao once aptly observed: “any small problem multiplied by 1.3 billion will end up being a very big problem.”
For the past 20 years, I have argued that pipelines and airlines were moving east not west. Arguably, one of Russia’s biggest mistakes was to invest in infrastructure and contracts for a promising but ungrateful European market. The cancellation of the South Stream project in 2014 should have served as a lesson to Moscow not to enlarge Nord Stream as of 2017. Times, nerves, and money could have been better spent on expanding the grid heading east.
It’s never been about Ukraine
Ever since the start of Ukraine’s military conflict in February 2022, we have essentially been watching the western-led financial industry waging its war against the eastern-dominated energy economy. The momentum will always be with the latter, because as stated above, in contrast to money, energy cannot be printed.
The oil and gas volumes needed to replace Russian energy sources cannot be found on the world market within a year. And no commodity is more global than oil. Any changes in the oil market will always influence the world’s economy.
“Oil makes and breaks nations.” It is a quote that epitomizes the importance of oil in shaping global and regional orders, as was the case in West Asia in the post-World War I era: First came the pipelines, then came the borders.
The late former Saudi oil minister Zaki Yamani once described oil alliances as being stronger than Catholic marriages. If that is the case, then the old US-Saudi marriage is currently undergoing estrangement and Russia has filed for divorce from Europe.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The old adage is that a good foreign policy is the reflection of the national policy. In this sense, a perfect storm is brewing on the foreign policy front in the US, triggered by the OPEC decision on 5 October to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day.
On the one hand, this will drive up the gas price for the domestic consumer and on the other, will expose the US administration’s lop-sided foreign policy priorities.
At its most obvious level, OPEC’s move confirms the belief that Washington has lost its leverage with the cartel of oil-producing countries. This is being attributed to the deterioration of the US’ relations with Saudi Arabia during the presidency of Joe Biden. But, fundamentally, a contradiction has arisen between the US interests and the interests of the oil producing countries.
Petro-diplomacy
That being said, contradictions are nothing new to the geopolitics of oil: the 1970s and 1980s witnessed two major “oil crises.” One was man-made while the other was an interplay of historical forces — the Yom-Kippur War of 1973 and Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the downstream of the former, the Arab nations weaponized oil and proclaimed an oil embargo on western nations which were perceived to have supported Israel in the war.
The result was that the price of oil rose nearly 300 percent in less than six months, crippling the world’s economy. In the US, President Richard Nixon asked petrol stations not to sell gasoline from Saturday night through until Monday morning to cope with the crisis, which affected industry more than the average consumer.
In 1979, the Iranian Revolution hit oil production rates and the world’s oil supply shrunk by 4 percent. As panic set in, demand for crude oil shot up and prices more than doubled.
Biden’s folly
The Biden administration has tempted fate by underestimating the importance of oil in modern diplomacy, and ignoring that oil will remain the dominant energy source across the world for the foreseeable future, powering everything from cars and domestic heating to huge industry titans and manufacturing plants.
Even the steady transition to green energy over time is largely dependent on the continued availability of plentiful, cheap fossil fuel. However, the Biden administration overlooked the fact that those who have oil reserves wield a huge amount of power over our oil-centered energy systems, while those who buy oil are, on the contrary, cripplingly dependent on the market and the diplomatic relations which drive it.
The western powers are far too naive to think that an energy superpower like Russia can be simply “erased” from the ecosystem. An “energy war” with Russia is therefore destined for failure.
Historically, western nations understood the imperative to maintain good diplomatic relations with oil-producing countries. But Biden threw caution into the wind by insulting Saudi Arabia – when in the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections, he vowed to make the kingdom a “pariah” state.
Despite his highly-publicized visit to Jeddah in July 2022 to mend fences, the Saudis distrust American intentions, and we are unlikely to see any improvement in US-Saudi relations under Biden’s administration.
The congruence of interests on the part of the OPEC to keep the prices high is essentially because they need the extra income for their expenditure budget and to maintain a healthy investment level in the oil industry. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April projected Saudi Arabia’s breakeven oil price — the oil price at which it would balance its budget — at $79.20 a barrel.
Although the Saudi government does not disclose its assumed breakeven oil price, a Reuters report suggested that a preferred price level would be around $90 to $100 a barrel for Brent crude — at which level, it won’t have a huge impact on the global economy. Of course, anything over $100 will be a windfall.
Dictating who can and can’t sell oil
Meanwhile, a “systemic” crisis is brewing. It is only natural that OPEC views with skepticism the recent moves by the US and the EU to curtail Russia’s oil exports. The west rationalizes these moves as being aimed at drastically reducing Russia’s revenues from oil exports (which translates into resilience to fight the war in Ukraine.)
The latest G7 move to put a cap on the prices at which Russia can sell its oil is taking matters to an extreme.
OPEC regards price caps as a paradigm shift, as it implicitly challenges the cartel’s assumed prerogative to ensure that global oil supply matches demand, where one of the key measures of supply-demand balance is price. Arguably, the west is de facto setting up a rival cartel of oil-consuming countries to regulate the oil market.
No doubt, the west’s move is precedent-setting — namely, to prescribe for geopolitical reasons the price at which an oil-producing country is entitled to export its oil. If it is Russia today, who is to say it will not be Saudi Arabia or Iraq tomorrow? The G7 decision – if it gets implemented – will erode OPEC’s key role regulating the global oil market.
OPEC fights back
As such, OPEC is proactively pushing back with its recent decision to cut down oil production by 2 million barrels per day and keep the oil price above $90 per barrel. OPEC estimates that Washington’s options to counter OPEC+ are limited. Unlike in the past energy history, the US does not have a single ally today inside the OPEC+ group.
Due to rising domestic demands for oil and gas, it is entirely conceivable that the US exports of both items may be curtailed. If that happens, Europe will be the worst affected. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo warned that as winter approaches, if energy prices are not brought down, “we are risking a massive deindustrialization of the European continent and the long-term consequences of that might actually be very deep.”
He added these chilling words: “Our populations are getting invoices which are completely insane. At some point, it will snap. I understand that people are angry . . . people don’t have the means to pay it.” De Croo was warning about the likelihood of social unrest and political turmoil in European countries.
The economic and political fallout
Without a doubt, this is a tectonic shift in geopolitics which may probably turn out to be more important than the conflict in Ukraine in the making of the multipolar world order.
This perfect storm in Biden’s foreign policy can also impact the US midterm elections in November and deliver a Republican majority in the Senate, which could set the tempo for the 2024 US presidential election.
The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that by turning away from Russian energy, Europe has become a captive market for the US oil companies which are now making “crazy money,” but the high cost of it is draining away the competitiveness of the European economy.
“Production is collapsing. Deindustrialization is coming. All this will have very, very deplorable consequences for the European continent over probably, at least, the next 10-20 years,” Peskov said.
Incidentally, Russia stands to gain the most from OPEC+cuts. The expert opinion is that oil prices will move higher from current levels through year-end and next year. That is to say, Russia will not cut any output while the price of oil is set to rise in the coming months.
As oil prices rise, Russia will not have to cut even a barrel of its production so long as it has a big enough market after December to sell the crude now going to Europe. Again, Moscow, for its part, reiterates that it will not supply oil to countries that would join the G7 price cap. In doing so, it is matching the Biden administration’s non-market instruments.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Related Videos
Putin outlines Russia’s energy policy against the West
Independent US Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia and an end to military aid to the conservative kingdom for lowering oil production.
“If Saudi Arabia, one of the worst violators of human rights in the world, wants to partner with Russia to jack up US gas prices, it can get Putin to defend its monarchy,” the Vermont senator tweeted Friday after the OPEC+ bloc announced a cut in daily oil production.
“We must pull all US troops out of Saudi Arabia, stop selling them weapons & end its price-fixing oil cartel,” he added.
In August, the United States approved massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth more than $5 billion, amid criticism of their ongoing military aggression in Yemen which has inflicted heavy civilian casualties.
The State Department said Saudi Arabia would buy 300 Patriot MIM-104E missile systems and related equipment for an estimated $3.05 billion. The missile systems can be used to shoot down long-range incoming ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as fighter jets.
Separately, the United States will sell Terminal High Altitude Area Defense [THAAD] System Missiles and related equipment to the UAE for $2.25 billion.
Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC-PLUS, which groups up the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers including Russia, announced this week it would cut oil production to prop up falling prices.
“Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the murder of a Washington Post columnist with a bone saw. Its disastrous war in Yemen has led to the deaths of 377,000 people and a humanitarian crisis. It’s now siding with Russia to damage our economy. Our support for Saudi Arabia must end,” Sanders tweeted on Friday.
Sanders also expressed similar feelings on Wednesday when he said the US “must end OPEC’s illegal price-fixing cartel, eliminate military assistance to Saudi Arabia, and move aggressively to renewable energy.”
The No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act of 2021, or the NOPEC bill prohibits a foreign state from engaging in collective action impacting the market.
The NOPEC bill allows the US Attorney General to sue companies such as Saudi Aramco in federal court.
In a related move, a group of lawmakers has introduced a new bill that aims to end the US’ military support to Saudi Arabia.
House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Sean Casten and Susan Wild launched the motion on Wednesday.
“We see no reason why American troops and contractors should continue to provide this service to countries that are actively working against us,” they said.
Several congressional Democrats have had similar remarks on the announcement, which is poised to counter sanctions on Russian oil and potentially drive up gas prices ahead of the midterm US elections.
US Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer rebuked Saudi Arabia. The senior Democratic senator from New York threatened Saudi Arabia, saying Riyadh will pay the price for what he called its “deeply cynical action” of supporting a 2 million-barrel cut in oil supplies, which will put more pressure on the American economy.
“What Saudi Arabia did to help Putin continue to wage his despicable, vicious war against Ukraine will long be remembered by Americans. We are looking at all the legislative tools to best deal with this appalling and deeply cynical action, including the NOPEC bill,” Schumer tweeted on Friday.
Legislation introduced in the House by Representatives Sean Casten [D-Ill.], Tom Malinowski [D-N.J.] and Susan Wild [D-Pa.] would remove American troops and military hardware from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The number two Democrat in the Senate, Senator Dick Durbin, also demanded the passage of the legislation this week, and voiced support for a broader reevaluation of the Washington-Riyadh relationship, specifically seeking “unanswered questions” about the role of the Saudi state in the 9/11 attacks.
“The Saudi royal family has never been a trustworthy ally of our nation,” Durbin said Thursday. “It’s time for our foreign policy to imagine a world without this alliance with these royal backstabbers.”
Families of victims of the attacks have for years pushed the US government to declassify and make public more information about 9/11, which was a series of strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage in the United States.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts and independent researchers have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
Certain documents related to the FBI’s investigation of 9/11 reportedly contain evidence of Saudi involvement in the strikes.
Successive US administrations have refused to release the classified documents because they reportedly could expose a potential link between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen out of 19 alleged 9/11 attackers were Saudi nationals.
Several US senators and House lawmakers have been calling for the disclosure of 28 pages that purportedly contain evidence of Saudi involvement in financing and backing the alleged 9/11 hijackers. The pages were extracted from a 2002 Congressional inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks.
US State Secretary Antony Blinken said on 6 October that Washington is reviewing various options regarding its relationship with Saudi Arabia after the decision by OPEC+ nations to cut oil production levels by two million barrels per day (bpd).
“As for the relationship [with Riyadh] going forward, we’re reviewing a number of response options. We’re consulting closely with Congress,” Blinken said during a visit to Peru on Thursday.
But while he failed to detail any of the steps being considered in response to what many called a humiliatingblow for US President Joe Biden, the state secretary did say Washington “would not do anything that infringes upon its interests.”
The decision to significantly cut production levels by OPEC+ – a group of OPEC and non-OPEC nations that includes Russia – was allegedly made to prevent a crash in the energy market by driving up oil prices.
In the hours ahead of Blinken’s comments, Democrat lawmakers in the US congress called to slash military sales to Saudi Arabia, professing a sudden concern for the brutal war in Yemen – which Washington has been fueling since 2015.
“I think it’s time for a wholesale re-evaluation of the US alliance with Saudi Arabia,” Senator Chris Murphy, chairman of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee on West Asia, told CNBC.
Representative Ruben Gallego, meanwhile, suggested Washington once again take back Patriot missile defense systems deployed in Saudi Arabia. “If they like the Russians so much they can use their very ‘reliable’ military technology,” Gallego said on Twitter.
Saudi Arabia is the largest customer of US-made military equipment, with billions of dollars in orders approved by the State and Defense departments every single year.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised to end military support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen.
However, he has failed to keep his promises, whitewashing the atrocious human rights records of both Saudi Arabia and Israel, and even considering lifting a ban on selling “offensive weapons” to the kingdom.
Washington has recently increased its military presence in Yemen, in what officials say is an attempt to control the country’s oil fields as it does in Syria.
But despite Biden’s bid to keep the US as the largest exporter of weapons in the world, a recent poll by the Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF) shows that the majority of young US citizens – aged 18 to 29 – are opposed to the continued supply of US weapons to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
OPEC+ member states have agreed an oil production cut of two million barrels per day, a statement published on the group’s website reads.
The reduction, which is the largest cut since early 2020, will take effect in November, the cartel announced on Wednesday.
According to OPEC, the step comes “in light of the uncertainty that surrounds the global economic and oil market outlooks, and the need to enhance the long-term guidance for the oil market, and in line with the successful approach of being proactive, and preemptive, which has been consistently adopted” by the group.
The cuts are much harsher than most experts had anticipated earlier this week, and are now expected to stem the latest drop in global prices for crude.
Energy ministers from the OPEC+ group led by Saudi Arabia and its allied non-members, including Russia, have held a meeting at the cartel’s Vienna headquarters on Wednesday for the first time since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.
The decision on output reduction comes despite intense lobbying by the White House to keep oil production at current levels or higher – something US President Joe Biden had hoped to secure during his visit to Saudi Arabia in July.
On Tuesday, CNN cited an unnamed senior official as saying that Washington had mobilized all available resources ahead of the oil cartel gathering, with the Biden administration “having a spasm and panicking.” The efforts were described as “taking the gloves off.” Some of the talking points drafted by the US administration suggested the potential cut would be viewed as “a hostile act” and a “total disaster.”
Meanwhile, most officials from OPEC+ member states said any reduction would be a “technical, not a political decision” and cited a “risk of recession” as contributing to the cuts, as they entered the OPEC headquarters in Vienna.
Suhail Al Mazrouei, the energy minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said that OPEC+ is a “technical organization,” when asked whether the proposal would potentially damage relations with the US.
No one wanted to play football with Muhammad bin Salman. Sure, the boy was a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, but so were 15,000 other people. His classmates preferred the company of his cousins, who were higher up the assumed order of succession, a childhood acquaintance recalls. As for the isolated child who would one day become crown prince, a family friend recounts hearing him called “little Saddam”.
Home life was tricky for bin Salman, too (he is now more commonly known by his initials, [MBS]. His father, Salman, already had five sons with his first wife, an educated woman from an elite urban family. MBS’s mother, Salman’s third wife, was a tribeswoman. When MBS visited the palace where his father lived with his first wife, his older half-brothers mocked him as the “son of a Bedouin”. Later, his elder brothers and cousins were sent to universities in America and Britain. The Bedouin offspring of Prince Salman stayed in Riyadh to attend King Saud University.
As young adults, the royals sometimes cruised on superyachts together; MBS was reportedly treated like an errand boy, sent onshore to buy cigarettes. A photo from one of these holidays shows a group of 16 royals posing on a yacht-deck in shorts and sunglasses, the hills of the French Riviera behind them. In the middle is MBS’s cousin, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire investor dubbed “the Arabian Warren Buffett”. MBS, tall and broad-shouldered in a white t-shirt, is pushed to the farthest edge.
Fast forward to today, and MB has moved to the center of the frame, the most important decision-maker in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy but MBS’s 86-year-old father, though nominally head of state, is rarely seen in public anymore. It has been clear for several years that MBS is in charge. “In effect,” a former Saudi intelligence agent told me, “King Salman is no longer king.”
At first glance the 36-year-old prince looks like the ruler many young Saudis had been waiting for, closer in age to his people than any previous king – 70% of the Saudi population is under 30. The millennial autocrat is said to be fanatical about the video game “Call of Duty”: he blasts through the inertia and privileges of the mosque and royal court as though he were fighting virtual opponents on screen.
His restless impatience and disdain for convention have helped him push through reforms that many thoughts wouldn’t happen for generations. The most visible transformation of Saudi Arabia is the presence of women in public where once they were either absent or closely guarded by their husband or father. There are other changes, too. Previously, the kingdom offered few diversions besides praying at the mosque; today you can watch Justin Bieber in concert, sing karaoke or go to a Formula 1 race. A few months ago, I even went to a rave in a hotel….
But embracing Western consumer culture doesn’t mean embracing Western democratic values: it can as easily support a distinctively modern, surveillance state. On my recent trips to Saudi Arabia, people from all levels of society seemed terrified about being overheard voicing disrespect or criticism, something I’d never seen there before. “I’ve survived four kings,” said a veteran analyst who refused to speculate about why much of Jeddah, the country’s second-largest city, is being bulldozed: “Let me survive a fifth.”
The West, beguiled by promises of change and dependent on Saudi oil, at first seemed prepared to ignore MBS’s excesses. Then, in late 2018, Saudi officials in Istanbul murdered a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, and dismembered his body with a bone saw. Even the most pro-Saudi leaders turned away.
…. After Putin invaded Ukraine in February, the price of crude shot up. Boris Johnson was on a plane within weeks. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, previously a sworn enemy of the crown prince, embraced MBS in Riyadh in April. War even forced America’s president into a humiliating climbdown. On the campaign trail in 2020 Joe Biden had vowed to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah”. But on July 15th he went to make his peace with MBS– trying to avoid shaking MBS’s hand, he instead opted for a fist bump that left the two looking all the chummier. Even critics at home acknowledged MBs’s victory. “He made Biden look weak,” said a Saudi columnist in Jeddah. “He stood up to a superpower and won before the world.”
For MBS, this is a moment of triumph. His journey from the fringe of a photograph to the heart of power is almost complete. He will probably be king for decades. During that time, his country’s oil will be needed to sate the world’s enduring demand for energy.
A kingdom where the word of one man counts for so much depends utterly on his character. The hope is that, with his position secure, MBS will forswear the vengefulness and intolerance that produced Khashoggi’s murder. But some, among them his childhood classmates, fear something darker. They are reminded of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, a one-time modernizer who became so addicted to accumulating power that he turned reckless and dangerous. “At first power bestows grandeur,” a former Western intelligence officer told me, of MBS. “But then comes the loneliness, suspicion and fear that others will try to grab what you grabbed.”
During the early years of MBS’s ascent, I was vaguely aware of him as one prince among many. I probably wouldn’t have paid him much attention if an old contact of mine hadn’t joined his staff. His new boss, my contact said, was serious about shaking things up. He arranged the meeting at a faux-ancient mud-brick village on the outskirts of Riyadh in 2016. As my Economist colleagues and I approached, the gates of MBS’s compound suddenly slid open, like a Bond-villain’s lair. In the inner chamber sat MBS.
Reform has often been promised in Saudi Arabia – usually in response to American hectoring – but successive kings lacked the mettle to push change through. When the Al-Saud conquered Arabia in the 1920s, they made an alliance with an ultra-conservative religious group called the Wahhabis. In 1979, after a group of religious extremists staged a brief armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Al-Saud decided to make the kingdom more devout to fend off a possible Islamic revolution, as had just happened in Iran. Wahhabi clerics were empowered to run society as they saw fit.
The Wahhabis exercised control through the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, otherwise known as the religious police. They whacked the ankles of women whose hair poked through their veil and lashed the legs of men who wore shorts. The arrangement suited the House of Saud. Wahhabism provided social control and gave legitimacy to the Saudi state, leaving the royals free to enjoy their oil wealth in the more permissive environments of London and Paris, or behind the gates of their palaces.
I’m loth to admit it now, but as the prince talked in Riyadh about his plans to modernize society and the economy, I was impressed by his enthusiasm, vision and command of the details. He gave what turned out to be accurate answers about how and when his reforms would happen. Though he was not yet crown prince, he frequently referred to Saudi Arabia as “my” country. We arrived at around 9pm. At 2am, MBS was still in full flow.
MBS was affable, self-assured, smiling. His advisers were more subdued. If they spoke at all, it was to robotically repeat their master’s lines. Yet when MBS left the room to take a call, they started chatting animatedly. As the prince re-entered, silence fell.
Like many in those early years, I was excited about what MBS might do for the kingdom. When I returned to the capital a few months later I saw a number of men wearing shorts. I kept looking over my shoulder for the religious police, but none came – they had been stripped of their powers of arrest.
As crown prince, MBS introduced a code of law so that judicial sentencing accords with state guidelines, not a judge’s own interpretation of the Koran. He criminalized stoning to death and forced marriage. The most overt change involved the role of women. MBS attacked guardianship laws that prevented women from working, travelling, owning a passport, opening a business, having hospital treatment or divorcing without approval from a male relative. In practice, many Saudi women have found these new rights hard to claim in a patriarchal society, and men can still file claims of disobedience against female relatives. But MBS’s reforms were more than cosmetic. Some clerics were jailed; the rest soon fell into line.
For foreigners, Riyadh is less forbidding these days. “I’m afraid I’ll be caught for not drinking,” a teetotal businessman told me. “There’s cocaine, alcohol and hookers like I haven’t seen in southern California,” says another party-goer. “It’s really heavy-duty stuff”.
When MBS first entered public life, he had a reputation for being as strait-laced as his father, rare among royals. That quickly changed. Many of the people interviewed for this article said that they believe MBS frequently uses drugs, which he denies. A court insider says that in 2015 his friends decided that he needed some r&r on an island in the Maldives. According to investigative journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck in their book “Blood and Oil”, 150 models were recruited to join the gathering and were then shuttled “by golf cart to a medical center to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases”. Several international music stars were flown in, including Afrojack, a Dutch dj. Then the press blew MBS cover.
Thereafter, the prince preferred to unwind off the Red Sea coast. At weekends his entourage formed a flotilla by mooring their yachts around his, Serene, which has a driving range and a cinema. According to a former official, “dj MBS”, as his friends called him, would spin the discs wearing his trademark cowboy hat. The yacht is only one of the luxuries MBS has splurged on. He also bought a £230m ersatz French chateau near Versailles, built in 2008 (the meditation room doubles as an aquarium). He is said to have boasted that he wanted to be the first trillionaire.
We put these and other allegations in this article to MBS’s representatives. Through the Saudi embassy in London, they issued a broad denial, saying “the allegations are denied and are without foundation.”
MBS’s loosening of social mores reflects the values of many of his youthful peers, in Saudi and beyond – as does his taste for the flashier side of life. Yet despite the social revolution, the prince is no keener than Wahhabi clerics on letting people think for themselves. Shortly before lifting a ban on women driving in 2018, MBS’s officials imprisoned Loujain al-Hathloul, one of the leaders of the campaign for women’s rights. Her family say jailers waterboarded and electrocuted her, and that Saud al-Qahtani, one of MBS’s closest advisers, was present during her torment and threatened to rape her. [A un investigation found reasonable grounds to believe that Qahtani was involved in the torture of female activists. Qahtani allegedly told one of these women: “I’ll do whatever I like to you, and then I’ll dissolve you and flush you down the toilet.”] Hathloul was charged with inciting change to the ruling system. The message was clear: only one person was allowed to do that.
MBS is ruthlessly ambitious – he reportedly loved reading about Alexander the Great as a teenager – but he also owes his rise to some extraordinary twists of fortune. Succession can be an unpredictable affair in Saudi Arabia. The monarchy is only two generations old, founded in 1932, and the crown has so far moved from brother to brother among the founding ruler’s sons. That has become harder as the prospective heirs age. MBS’s father wasn’t tipped to be king, but after his two older brothers died unexpectedly in 2011 and 2012, he was catapulted up the line of succession.
When Salman became the heir-designate aged 76, he needed a chief of staff. Most courtiers expected him to choose one of the suave, English-speaking children of his first wife. Instead he appointed a son who spoke Arabic with a guttural Bedouin accent. [MBS has learned English fast since then: when we met in 2016 he sometimes corrected his translator.]
The choice to elevate MBS was less surprising to those who knew his father well. Salman had dedicated himself to his job as governor of Riyadh rather than chasing more lucrative commissions, and was a stickler for 8am starts, even in his 70s. He was known as the family disciplinarian, not averse to giving wayward royals a thwack with his walking stick or even a spell in his private prison. He clearly saw something of himself in his sixth son. MBS might love video games, but he was also a hard worker and keen to advance.
MBS put few limits on what he was prepared to do to achieve control. He earned the nickname Abu Rasasa – father of the bullet – after widespread rumors that he sent a bullet in the post to an official who ruled against him in a land dispute [Saudi officials have previously denied this rumor]. He was fearsome in private, too. “There are these terrible tempers, smashing up offices, trashing the palace,” says a source with palace connections. “He’s extremely violent.” Several associates describe him as having wild mood swings. Two former palace insiders say that, during an argument with his mother, he once sprayed her ceiling with bullets. According to multiple sources and news reports, he has locked his mother away.
It’s hard to say how many wives he has; officially, there’s just one, a glamorous princess called Sara bint Mashour, but courtiers say he has at least one more. MBS presents his family life as normal and happy: earlier this year he told the Atlantic magazine that he eats breakfast with his children each morning [he has three boys and two girls, according to Gulf News – the eldest is said to be 11]. One diplomat spoke of MBS’s kindness to his wife. But other sources inside the royal circle say that, on at least one occasion, Princess Sara was so badly beaten by her husband that she had to seek medical treatment.
We put this and other allegations in this piece to MBS’s representatives, who described them as “plain fabrication”, adding that “the kingdom is unfortunately used to false allegations made against its leadership, usually based on politically [or other] motivated malicious sources, particularly discredited individuals who have a long record of fabrications and baseless claims.”
MBS finally got a taste of political power in 2015 when Salman became king. Salman appointed his son deputy crown prince and minister of defense. One of MBS’s first moves was to launch a war in neighboring Yemen. Even America, the kingdom’s closest military ally, was told only at the last minute.
There was an obvious obstacle in MBS’s path to the throne: his cousin, the 57-year-old heir-designate, Muhammad bin Nayef. Bin Nayef was the intelligence chief and the kingdom’s main interlocutor with the CIA. He was widely credited with stamping out al-Qaeda in Saudi after 9/11. In June 2017 bin Nayef was summoned to meet the elderly king at his palace in Mecca.
The story of what happened next has emerged from press reports and my interviews. It seems that bin Nayef arrived by helicopter and took the lift to the fourth floor. Instead of the monarch, MBS’sagents were waiting. Bin Nayef was stripped of his weapons and phone, and told that a royal council had dismissed him. He was left alone to consider his options. Seven hours later, a court videographer filmed the charade of MBS kissing his cousin, then accepting his abdication as crown prince. King Salman kept a back seat throughout. Bin Nayef is now in detention [his uncle, who also had a claim to the throne, apparently intervened to try and protect bin Nayef, but was himself later detained]. The staged resignation – an old trick of Saddam Hussein’s – would become MBS’s signature move.
That was just the warm-up act. In October 2017 MBS hosted an international investment conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. At “Davos in the desert”, the likes of Christine Lagarde, Son Masayoshi and other business glitterati listened to MBS’s pitch for Saudi Arabia’s post-oil future, including the construction of Neom, a new $500bn “smart city”. The event was a hit. Diplomatic grumblings about the war in Yemen or the fate of America’s security partner, Muhammad bin Nayef, faded.
The gathering was also an opportunity to invite back royals who were often abroad. Once the foreigners had left, MBS pounced. Hundreds of princes and businessmen were swept up. According to a biography of MBS by Ben Hubbard, a New York Times journalist, one of them realized something was amiss only when they got to their hotel room: there were no pens, razors or glasses – nothing that could be used as a weapon.
MBS held the detainees in the Ritz-Carlton for several weeks [the Marriott and other hotels were also commandeered to house the overflow]. Prisoners’ phones were confiscated. Some were said to have been hooded, deprived of sleep and beaten until they agreed to transfer money and hand over an inventory of their assets. All told, MBS’s guests at the Ritz-Carlton coughed up about $100bn.
Even royals previously thought untouchable, such as the powerful prince who ran the national guard, got similar treatment. Princess Basma, the youngest child of the second king of Saudi Arabia, was jailed for three years without charge or access to a lawyer; after being released she still had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, according to a close associate of hers.
The crushing of the royals and business elite was billed as a crackdown on corruption – and undoubtedly it netted many corruptly acquired assets, which MBS said would be returned to the Saudi treasury. The methods, however, looked more like something from a gangster film than a judicial procedure.
Interrogations were overseen by Saud al-Qahtani, who reported directly to MBS whenever a detainee broke and gave out their bank details. [All the allegations in this piece concerning Qahtani were put to him via his lawyer. No response was given.] Qahtani had installed himself as one of MBS’s favored henchmen, though earlier in his career, he’d plotted against Salman and his son, trying to sideline them with rumors that Salman had dementia. Qahtani was so loyal to the former faction that he’d named his son after his then boss. According to a former courtier, on the day of the old king’s funeral the two men had it out: MBS slapped Qahtani in the face. Later, MBS let Qahtani prove his worth and brought him on to his staff. Qahtani duly named his younger son Muhammad.
On paper, Qahtani was a communications adviser, a former journalist who understood Twitter and used an army of bots and loyal followers to intimidate critics on social media [his office included giant screens and holograms that staff used for target-practice with laser guns]. In practice he was entrusted with MBS’s most important and violent missions – the ones that established his grip on power.
His remit extended far beyond Saudi’s borders. In 2016 he kidnapped Prince Sultan, a minor royal who had been bad-mouthing MBS. MBS offered his jet to fly Sultan from Paris to Cairo – instead, the plane was diverted to Saudi Arabia. According to Hope’s and Scheck’s book, Qahtani posed as Captain Saud, an airline pilot, though surprisingly one who had an expensive Hublot watch.
Even people who have nothing to do with politics have become afraid to speak near a functioning mobile phone
With rendition strategies like this, and the cash tap shut off, even royals who weren’t inside the Ritz-Carlton felt the pressure to divest themselves of ostentatious assets. The father of the Saudi ambassador to Britain put Glympton Park, his beloved 2,000-acre estate in the Cotswolds, up for sale. Riyadh’s jewellers did a roaring trade pawning the diamonds of lesser royals. “It’s like the Romanovs selling their Fabergé eggs,” said an adviser to an auction house.
Many commoners rejoiced at the downfall of their entitled elite. Princes and princesses who once lived off huge handouts began looking for jobs. Their titles became irrelevant. Unable to afford the cost of irrigation, their green ranches became desert again. Banks turned them away. One financial adviser recalled his response to princes trying to get credit on the strength of their royal status: “You call yourselves princes, but they say there’s only one prince now.”
The Ritz-Carlton episode was just one element of an extraordinary project of centralization. MBS yanked control of various security services back from the princes. He took charge of Aramco, the semi-autonomous state oil company. He installed himself as boss of the sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. “He destroyed all the powerful families,” says a retired diplomat. By late 2017, law, money and security in Saudi all flowed directly from him.
Among those who lost out were the fellow princes who had pushed a young MBS to the edge of the family photo on the yacht all those years ago. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in the center of that shot, surrendered part of his $17bn wealth. As the shakedown widened, MBS’s elder half-siblings put up their yacht for sale. Many of his cousins were locked up. “Payback time,” one victim said.
While MBS was squeezing the elite at home, he was forging some important friendships abroad.
MBS and Donald Trump, who was elected president in 2016, had a lot in common. Both had the hunger of the underdog and loathed the snooty policymaking establishments in their countries; they reveled in provocation. The historic compact, by which Saudi Arabia provided oil to American consumers and America guaranteed the country’s security, had frayed in recent years. Barack Obama’s hurried exit from Iraq in 2011 and his nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 had left Saudi Arabia worried that it could no longer rely on American protection. America’s development of its own shale-oil reserves had also reduced its dependence on Saudi oil. Then Trump and MBS got cozy.
With the Trump administration’s tacit [and sometimes explicit] support, MBS set about treating the entire Middle East much as he did Saudi Arabia, trying to push aside rulers whom he found to be inconvenient. He announced a blockade of Qatar, a tiny gas-rich state to the east of Saudi Arabia. In 2017, angered by Lebanon’s dealings with Iran, MBS invited the prime minister, Saad Hariri, a long-time beneficiary of Saudi patronage, on a starlit camping trip. Hariri turned up, had his phone confiscated and soon found himself reading out a resignation speech on tv.
Both moves ultimately backfired. But Trump’s Middle East adviser, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, did little to discourage such antics. Together, he and MBS dreamt up a new regional order over WhatsApp, calling each other “Jared” and “Muhammad”. Their rapport was so great that, at Kushner’s prompting, MBS started the process of recognizing “Israel”. His father, still officially king, put a stop to that.
MBS visited America in March 2018, hanging out in Silicon Valley with Peter Thiel and Tim Cook, and meeting celebrities, including Rupert Murdoch, James Cameron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. Many people were keen to meet the man who controlled a $230bn sovereign-wealth fund. To his frustration, they were less willing to reciprocate by investing in the kingdom.
That October the intercontinental bonhomie came to an abrupt halt. I was due to go to a conference in Turkey that month. A Saudi journalist I knew, Jamal Khashoggi, got in touch to suggest meeting up: he was also going to be in Istanbul, for an appointment at the consulate. Khashoggi was a court insider whose criticisms of MBS in the Washington Post and elsewhere had attracted much attention. He seemed to be making more effort than usual to stay in touch. While I was at the conference a friend of his phoned me: Jamal still hadn’t emerged from the consulate, he said. By the time I got there, Turkish police were cordoning off the building.
The full story soon came out in leaked intelligence reports and, later, a un inquiry. A Saudi hit squad, which reportedly coordinated with Saud al-Qahtani, had flown to Istanbul. As they waited for Khashoggi to enter the consulate, they discussed plans for dismembering his body. According to tapes recorded inside the consulate by Turkish intelligence, Khashoggi was told, “We’re coming to get you.” There was a struggle, followed by the sound of plastic sheets being wrapped. A CIA report said that MBS approved the operation.
MBS has said he takes responsibility for the murder, but denies ordering it. He sacked Qahtani and another official implicated in the intelligence reports. The fallout was immediate. Companies and speakers pulled out of that year’s Davos in the desert; the Gates Foundation ended its partnership with Misk, an artistic and educational charity set up by the prince. Ari Emanuel, a Hollywood agent, cancelled a $400m deal with the kingdom.
The crown prince seems to have been genuinely surprised at the animus – “disappointed”, says an associate. Hadn’t he committed to all the reforms the West had been asking for? Perhaps he had underestimated the outcry provoked by going after a well-connected international figure, as opposed to a royal unknown outside Saudi Arabia. Or perhaps he understood Western governments’ priorities better than they did themselves. They had done little when Muhammad bin Nayef, their partner in battling terrorism, had disappeared; they had shrugged at reports of torture in the Ritz-Carlton, and at MBS’s reckless bombardment of Yemen. Why did they have so much to say about the killing of a single journalist?
Three years after the Khashoggi killing, Davos in the desert opened with the singer Gloria Gaynor. As images of smiling children flashed up on a giant screen behind her, she broke into her disco anthem, “I Will Survive”, asking the audience: “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?”
The chief executives of private-equity giants BlackRock and Blackstone were back, as were the heads of Goldman Sachs, SocGen and Standard Chartered. Even Amazon sent a representative despite the fact that its boss, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post, the paper that employed Khashoggi. Meanwhile, Qahtani was creeping back into favor at the royal court – although he had been implicated by the un for Khashoggi’s murder, a Saudi court took the decision not to charge him.
MBS revitalized the near-dormant sovereign-wealth fund, pumping tens of billions of dollars into tech, entertainment and sports, to create a softer, more appealing image of Saudi and co-opt new partners. In April 2020, the fund led a consortium to buy Newcastle United, a premier-league football team [the deal took 18 months]. The following year it launched an audacious bid to create Saudi’s own golf tour, the LIV series, hoping to lure players with a prize pot of $255m, far larger than that of American tournaments. At the first LIV tour this year, some top players boycotted the event, others went for the cash.
Joe Biden has proved tougher to woo. Soon after becoming president, Biden withdrew American military support for the war in Yemen. He wouldn’t talk to MBS, insisting that communications go through King Salman instead. He didn’t even nominate an ambassador to Riyadh for 15 months. The chat everywhere was that Saudi-American relations were in a deep freeze. Then, in February 2022, MBS had a stroke of luck: Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the days after war broke out, Biden himself tried to call MBS. The crown prince declined to speak to the president. He did take Putin’s call, however. The two men were already close. MBS had personally brought Russia into an expanded version of the OPEC cartel in order for Saudi Arabia to keep control of global oil production. Putin cemented the friendship in 2018 at the g20 summit in Buenos Aires, which took place weeks after the Khashoggi killing. While Western leaders shunned MBS, Putin gave the Saudi ruler a high-five before sitting down next to him.
MBS’s defiance of America seems to have paid off. After months of evasion, Biden reluctantly agreed to meet MBS in Jeddah in July, on the prince’s own turf and his own terms. The visit gave MBS recognition but did little to rebuild relations. There wasn’t even a concrete assurance of increasing oil production.
Some in the American foreign-policy establishment remain hopeful that MBS could become a helpful partner in the region, pointing to his recent retreat from confrontation with Qatar and his eagerness to find a diplomatic exit from Yemen. Perhaps, they say, he is maturing as a leader.
This seems optimistic. MBS’s disastrous campaign in Yemen was ostensibly in support of the country’s president but in April, hours after being summoned to a meeting and offered Arabic coffee and dates, Yemen’s president was reading out a resignation speech on tv. MBS took it upon himself to get rid of him personally – suggesting that his mode of international diplomacy remains as high-handed as ever. “What they’ve learned”, says one foreign analyst, “is don’t murder journalists who dine regularly with congressmen in the United States.”
The West has taught MBS something else, too – something that autocrats the world over may draw comfort from. No matter the sin, they would argue, if you sit tight through the odium and fury, eventually the financiers, the celebrities, even the Western leaders, will come running back. At 36, MBS has time on his side. Some observers fear that he may become only more dangerous as oil reserves start to decline and the treasure trove shrinks. “What happens when he’s a middle-aged man ruling a middle-income country and starts to get bored?” asks a diplomat who knows MBS personally. “Will he go on more adventures?”
Earlier this year, I visited an old friend in his office in Saudi Arabia. Before we started talking, he put his phone in a pouch that blocks the signal, to prevent government spies from listening in. Dissidents do that kind of thing in police states like China, but I’d never seen it before in Saudi Arabia. It isn’t just people involved with politics who are taking such precautions: most Saudis have become afraid to speak near a functioning mobile phone. People used to talk fairly openly in their offices, homes and cafés. Now, they are picked up for almost nothing.
As we chatted over the whir of his office air conditioning, my friend reeled off a list of people he knew who had been detained in the past month: a retired air-force chief who died in prison, a hospital administrator hauled away from his desk, a mother taken in front of her seven children, a lawyer who died seven days after his release from prison. “These people aren’t rabble rousers,” my friend said. “No one understands why.”
Officially, the government says it has no political prisoners. Rights groups reckon that thousands have been swept up in MBS’s dragnet. I’ve covered the Middle East since the 1990s and can’t think of anywhere where so many of my own contacts are behind bars.
Few ordinary Saudis predicted that when MBS was done trampling on the elites and the clerics, he would come for them next. Bringing Saudis into the modern, networked, online world has made it easier for the state to monitor what they are saying. A Red Crescent employee called Abdulrahman al-Sadhan used to run a satirical Twitter account under a pseudonym. In 2018 MBS’s agents arrested him and held him incommunicado for two years. American prosecutors later charged two former Twitter employees with allegedly handing over the real names behind various accounts to a Saudi official – al-Sadhan’s family believes that his name was among them. [The trial of one employee is ongoing; he denies passing on information to Saudi officials.]
On the face of it, MBS has nothing to worry about. Public opinion polls – if they can be trusted – suggest he is popular, particularly with younger Saudis. But there is a growing sense that discontent is brewing beneath the surface. MBS has broken crucial social contracts with the Saudi populace, by reducing handouts while, at the same time, dispensing with the tradition of hearing the feedback of ordinary people after Friday prayers.
It isn’t hard to imagine some of the issues they’d raise if they had the chance. Many people are struggling as the cost of living rises. When other governments were cushioning their citizens during the pandemic, MBS slashed fuel subsidies and tripled vat. Unable to afford the cost of pumping water, some farmers left crops to wither in the field. Fees for permits and fines have spiraled, too. Though MBS speaks eloquently about the country’s youth, he is struggling to find them jobs. Unemployment remains stubbornly stuck in double digits. Half of the jobless have a university degree, but most white-collar workers I met on MBS’s mega-projects were foreign.
Saudi Arabia’s attempts to diversify its economy – and so compensate for the long-term decline of oil reserves – isn’t going well either. The pandemic delayed plans for a rapid increase in international tourism. Extorting billions of dollars from your relatives may not be the best way to convince investors that the kingdom is a liberal haven.
The young prince has reversed even the baby steps towards democracy taken by previous kings. Municipal elections have been suspended – as a cost-cutting exercise, explains the supine press. The Shura Council, a consultative body of 150 people, has only met online since the pandemic [other institutions have gathered in person for months]. “I wish I had more of a voice,” said one member. Whenever I mentioned the prince, his leg twitched.
A frequent visitor to the royal court says MBS now gives the impression of someone who’s always thinking that people are plotting against him. He seems to be preoccupied with loyalty. He fills key posts either with young royals, foreigners with no local base to threaten him or people he has already broken. A government minister, Ibrahim Assaf, was one of those locked up in the Ritz-Carlton – two months later MBS sent him to the World Economic Forum as his representative. A senior executive on one of his construction projects is someone who says he was tortured in one of his prisons. “He went from being strung naked from his ankles, beaten and stripped of all his assets to a high-level project manager,” says a close acquaintance of the man.
All remain vulnerable to MBS’s tantrums. Saudi sources say he once locked a minister in a toilet for ten hours. [The minister later appeared on tv blabbering platitudes about the prince’s wisdom.] A senior official I’ve spoken to says he wants out. “Everyone in his circle is terrified of him,” says an insider. And that could make it hard for him to govern a country of 35m people effectively. Former courtiers say no one close to MBS is prepared to offer a truthful assessment of whether his increasingly grandiose schemes are viable. “Saying no”, says one, “is not something they will ever do.”
If MBS has a mission beyond extending his power, you might expect to find it in Neom, the city he promised to build in the desert. Neom would be nothing less than “a civilizational leap for humanity”, he said in 2017. Head-spinning details followed. The city’s food would be grown on hydroponic walls on a floating structure. It would be powered by the world’s largest green-hydrogen plant. Thousands of snow-blowers would create a ski resort on a nearby mountain. One day it would have driverless cars and passenger drones.
According to the official timetable, the main city would be completed by 2020. Further districts would be added by 2025. The prince’s tourism minister, Ahmed al-Khateeb, dismissed rumors that the timetable was proving over-ambitious. “Come see with your eyes and not with your ears,” he urged. So, I went.
Finding Neom was the first problem. There were no road signs to it. After three hours’ drive we came to the spot indicated by the map. It was bare, but for the odd fig tree. Camels strolled across the empty highway. Piles of rubble lined the road, remnants of the town bulldozed to make way for the mighty metropolis.
The designated area is nearly the size of Belgium. As far as I could tell, only two projects had been completed, MBS’s palace, and something Google Earth calls “The Neom Experience Centre” [when I drove to see it, it was obscured by a prefabricated hut]. The only other solid building I could see was a hotel constructed before Neom was conceived: The Royal Tulip. A poster in the lobby urged me to “Discover Neom”. But when I asked for a guide the hotel manager cursed my sister with Arabic vulgarities and tried to shoo me away. There was no sign of the media hub with “frictionless facilitation”, “advanced infrastructure” and “collaborative ecosystems” promised by the Neom website. Neom’s head of communications and media, Wayne Borg, said he was “out of Kingdom at present”.
The hotel restaurant was teeming with consultants – all the ones I met were foreign. I later found a Saudi project manager. “We think we’re about to start working, but every two months the consultants coin a new plan,” he told me. “They’re still doing plans of plans.” There was a kind of manic short-termism among these foreigners. Many were paid $40,000 a month, plus handsome bonuses. “It’s like riding a bull,” one of the Neom consultants told me. “You know you’re gonna fall, that no one can last on a bull longer than a minute and a half, two minutes, so you make the most of it.”
Despite the high salaries, there are reports that foreigners are leaving the Neom project because they find the gap between expectations and reality so stressful. The head of Neom is said by his friends to be “terrified” at the lack of progress.
Eventually, I found a retired Saudi air-force technician who offered to drive me around the city for $600. He took me to a sculpture standing in the desert with the words, “I love Neom”. A short way farther on we found a new stretch of tarmac, said to mark the edge of the dream city. Beyond it, the lone and level sands stretched far away.
The presidents of Russia, Iran, and Turkey convened to discuss critical issues pertaining to West Asia, with the illegal US occupation of Syria a key talking point
The Tehran summit uniting Iran-Russia-Turkey was a fascinating affair in more ways than one. Ostensibly about the Astana peace process in Syria, launched in 2017, the summit joint statement duly noted that Iran, Russia and (recently rebranded) Turkiye will continue, “cooperating to eliminate terrorists” in Syria and “won’t accept new facts in Syria in the name of defeating terrorism.”
That’s a wholesale rejection of the “war on terror” exceptionalist unipolarity that once ruled West Asia.
Standing up to the global sheriff
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his own speech, was even more explicit. He stressed “specific steps to promote the intra-Syrian inclusive political dialogue” and most of called a spade a spade: “The western states led by the US are strongly encouraging separatist sentiment in some areas of the country and plundering its natural resources with a view to ultimately pulling the Syrian state apart.”
So there will be “extra steps in our trilateral format” aimed at “stabilizing the situation in those areas” and crucially, “returning control to the legitimate government of Syria.” For better or for worse, the days of imperial plunder will be over.
The bilateral meetings on the summit’s sidelines – Putin/Raisi and Putin/Erdogan – were even more intriguing. Context is key here: the Tehran gathering took place after Putin’s visit to Turkmenistan in late June for the 6th Caspian summit, where all the littoral nations, Iran included, were present, and after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s travels in Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, where he met all his Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) counterparts.
Moscow’s moment
So we see Russian diplomacy carefully weaving its geopolitical tapestry from West Asia to Central Asia – with everybody and his neighbor eager to talk and to listen to Moscow. As it stands, the Russia-Turkey entente cordiale tends to lean towards conflict management, and is strong on trade relations. Iran-Russia is a completely different ball game: much more of a strategic partnership.
So it’s hardly a coincidence that the National Oil Company of Iran (NIOC), timed to the Tehran summit, announced the signing of a $40 billion strategic cooperation agreement with Russia’s Gazprom. That’s the largest foreign investment in the history of Iran’s energy industry – badly needed since the early 2000s. Seven deals worth $4 billion apply to the development of oil fields; others focus on the construction of new export gas pipelines and LNG projects.
Kremlin advisor Yury Ushakov deliciously leaked that Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in their private meeting, “discussed conceptual issues.” Translation: he means grand strategy, as in the evolving, complex process of Eurasia integration, in which the three key nodes are Russia, Iran and China, now intensifying their interconnection. The Russia-Iran strategic partnership largely mirrors the key points of the China-Iran strategic partnership.
Iran says ‘no’ to NATO
Khamenei, on NATO, did tell it like it is: “If the road is open for NATO, then the organization sees no borders. If it had not been stopped in Ukraine, then after a while the alliance would have started a war under the pretext of Crimea.”
There were no leaks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) impasse between the US and Iran – but it’s clear, based on the recent negotiations in Vienna, that Moscow will not interfere with Tehran’s nuclear decisions. Not only are Tehran-Moscow-Beijing fully aware of who’s preventing the JCPOA from getting back on track, they also see how this counter-productive stalling process prevents the collective west from badly needed access to Iranian oil.
Then there’s the weapons front. Iran is one of the world’s leaders in drone production: Pelican, Arash, Homa, Chamrosh, Jubin, Ababil, Bavar, recon drones, attack drones, even kamikaze drones, cheap and effective, mostly deployed from naval platforms in West Asia.
Tehran’s official position is not to supply weapons to nations at war – which would in principle invalidate dodgy US “intel” on their supply to Russia in Ukraine. Yet that could always happen under the radar, considering that Tehran is very much interested in buying Russian aerial defense systems and state of the art fighter jets. After the end of the UN Security Council-enforced embargo, Russia can sell whatever conventional weapons to Iran it sees fit.
Russian military analysts are fascinated by the conclusions Iranians reached when it was established they would stand no chance against a NATO armada; essentially they bet on pro-level guerrilla war (a lesson learned from Afghanistan). In Syria, Iraq and Yemen they deployed trainers to guide villagers in their fight against Salafi-jihadis; produced tens of thousands of large-caliber sniper rifles, ATGMs, and thermals; and of course perfected their drone assembly lines (with excellent cameras to surveil US positions).
Not to mention that simultaneously the Iranians were building quite capable long-range missiles. No wonder Russian military analysts estimate there’s much to learn tactically from the Iranians – and not only on the drone front.
The Putin-Sultan ballet
Now to the Putin-Erdogan get together – always an attention-grabbing geopolitical ballet, especially considering the Sultan has not yet decided to hop on the Eurasia integration high-speed train.
Putin diplomatically “expressed gratitude” for the discussions on food and grain issues, while reiterating that “not all issues on the export of Ukrainian grain from the Black Sea ports are resolved, but progress is made.”
Putin was referring to Turkiye’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, who earlier this week assured that setting up an operations center in Istanbul, establishing joint controls at the port exit and arrival points, and carefully monitoring the navigational safety on the transfer routes are issues that may be solved in the next few days.
Apparently Putin-Erdogan also discussed Nagorno-Karabakh (no details).
What a few leaks certainly did not reveal is that on Syria, for all practical purposes, the situation is blocked. That favors Russia – whose main priority as it stands is Donbass. Wily Erdogan knows it – and that’s why he may have tried to extract some “concessions” on “the Kurdish question” and Nagorno-Karabakh. Whatever Putin, Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev may really think about Erdogan, they certainly evaluate how priceless is to cultivate such an erratic partner capable of driving the collective west totally bonkers.
Istanbul this summer has been turned into a sort of Third Rome, at least for expelled-from-Europe Russian tourists: they are everywhere. Yet the most crucial geoeconomic development these past few months is that the western-provoked collapse of trade/supply lines along the borders between Russia and the EU – from the Baltic to the Black Sea – finally highlighted the wisdom and economic sense of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC): a major Russia-Iran-India geopolitical and geoeconomic integration success.
When Moscow talks to Kiev, it talks via Istanbul. NATO, as the Global South well knows, does not do diplomacy. So any possibility of dialogue between Russians and a few educated westerners takes place in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the UAE. West Asia as well as the Caucasus, incidentally, did not subscribe to the western sanctions hysteria against Russia.
Say farewell to the ‘teleprompter guy’
Now compare all of the above with the recent visit to the region by the so-called “leader of the free world,” who merrily alternates between shaking hands with invisible people to reading – literally – whatever is scrolling on a teleprompter. We’re talking of US President Joe Biden, of course.
Fact: Biden threatened Iran with military strikes and as a mere supplicant, begged the Saudis to pump more oil to offset the “turbulence” in the global energy markets caused by the collective west’s sanction hysteria. Context: the glaring absence of any vision or anything even resembling a draft of foreign policy plan for West Asia.
So oil prices duly jumped upward after Biden’s trip: Brent crude rose more than four percent to $105 a barrel, bringing prices back to above $100 after a lull of several months.
The heart of the matter is that if OPEC or OPEC+ (which includes Russia) ever decide to increase their oil supplies, they will do it based on their internal deliberations, and not under exceptionalist pressure.
As for the imperial threat of military strikes on Iran, it qualifies as pure dementia. The whole Persian Gulf – not to mention the whole of West Asia – knows that were US/Israel to attack Iran, fierce retaliation would simply evaporate with the region’s energy production, with apocalyptic consequences including the collapse of trillions of dollars in derivatives.
Biden then had the gall to say, “We have made progress in strengthening our relations with the Gulf states. We will not leave a vacuum for Russia and China to fill in the Middle East”.
Well, in real life it is the “indispensable nation” that has self-morphed into a vacuum. Only bought-and-paid for Arab vassals – most of them monarchs – believe in the building of an “Arab NATO” (copyright Jordan’s King Abdullah) to take on Iran. Russia and China are already all over the place in West Asia and beyond.
De-Dollarization, not just Eurasian integration
It’s not only the new logistical corridor from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Astrakhan and then, via the Caspian, to Enzeli in Iran and on to Mumbai that is shaking things up. It’s about increasing bilateral trade that bypasses the US dollar. It’s about BRICS+, which Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are dying to be part of. It’s about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which formally accepts Iran as a full member this coming September (and soon Belarus as well). It’s about BRICS+, the SCO, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) interconnected in their path towards a Greater Eurasia Partnership.
West Asia may still harbor a small collection of imperial vassals with zero sovereignty who depend on the west’s financial and military ‘assistance,’ but that’s the past. The future is now – with Top Three BRICS (Russia, India, China) slowly but surely coordinating their overlapping strategies across West Asia, with Iran involved in all of them.
And then there’s the Big Global Picture: whatever the circumvolutions and silly schemes of the US-concocted “oil price cap” variety, the fact is that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – the top powerful energy-producing nations – are absolutely in sync: on Russia, on the collective west, and on the needs of a real multipolar world.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 