The United States And Saudi Arabia

Ambivalent Allies

David E. Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000306781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

U.S.-Saudi relations have been marked by ambivalence since their inception over 50 years ago. The Arab-Israeli conflict, the division between buyer and seller of oil, the superpower-small state dichotomy, and the divergence of cultures, traditions, and perceptions have all contributed to the anomalies that have marked the relationship between the two countries, although mutual interest has, over time, outweighed mutual antagonism. Dr. Long examines the major factors affecting their association—economic, commercial, military, and political as well as oil-related factors—and develops the thesis that each has evolved a unique internal dynamic and an existence independent of the others. It is primarily in times of crisis that the factors have overlapped in the minds of decision makers, Saudi and American alike. The author argues that a knowledge of the development of each individual element is crucial for understanding the intricacies of current U.S.-Saudi relations.

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Introduction: Constant Interests Among Changing Perceptions

Relations between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have existed for roughly a half-century. During most of that time, Saudi Arabia has been treated by the West with all but total neglect. Whatever interest existed was generated by the oil companies, an occasional stray diplomat or two, and military planners who were worried less about the country itself than about the enemy hands into which it could fall. Even Western academic interest in the Middle East largely ignored Saudi Arabia. In a 1977 survey of scholarly literature of the region, only 6 of 120 books and 19 of 5,500 articles surveyed mentioned the Kingdom.¹

The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and subsequent Arab oil embargo changed all that. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia found itself in the glare of an international spotlight focusing on oil. New terms such as "petrodollars," "petropower," and "the oil weapon" came into vogue not only in the popular media but also in technical, government, and academic jargon. By that strange process that occasionally causes elements of international relations to appear all out of proportion, Saudi Arabia quickly acquired some of the trappings of a semisuperpower, at least in the areas of international oil and finance. Several years passed before a proper sense of proportion returned. Although one can now view Saudi Arabia with more equanimity than one could in the mid-1970s, the international spotlight on the Kingdom in the post-1973 period has made objective analysis of U.S.-Saudi relations as difficult as did the obscurity of the pre-1973 period.

U.S. Perceptions of Saudi Arabia

The radically changing environment within which U.S.-Saudi relations have been conducted over the years has resulted in changing perceptions in the United States of the nature and priority of its interests with Saudi Arabia. In the 1930s, whatever perception of Saudi Arabia was held at all in the United States was limited to a few oil men and an even smaller number of government officials interested in insuring against trade inequities for U.S. firms doing business overseas.

In the 1940s, official U.S. interest in Saudi Arabia abruptly increased with the outbreak of World War II. Both Saudi Arabia's newly discovered oil resources and its strategic location on the flank of the Near Eastern theater of military operations made the Kingdom of major importance to the United States in the context of the war. This importance began to wane at the end of the war but was quickly revived by the cold war and the direct Soviet threat to the entire Middle East in the postwar years.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 created a major political obstruction to U.S.-Saudi relations. Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Saudi Arabia's role in the Arab-Israeli problem received less priority in Washington than the strategic military threat to the Kingdom emanating from the cold war. In the 1960s, superpower politics entered a period of détente, but in the Middle East the rise of militant Arab nationalism, which professed a closer affinity to the socialism of the Soviet bloc than to the capitalism of the West, was a major factor in preventing détente from spreading to the region.

In 1973, U.S. priorities again underwent a change. Not only had Saudi Arabia become the world's principal oil exporter, but the United States had also become a net importer of oil, dependent on Middle East oil for the first time. Moreover, as the terms of trade shifted from a buyers' market to a sellers' market, the oil-exporting countries took from the oil companies the function of setting prices and production rates. On the political side, the Kingdom, which for years had remained steadfastly on the back bench of intra-Arab politics, suddenly took over the leadership of the Arab moderates and almost single-handedly imposed the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974.

This turn of events produced a great ambivalence in U.S. perceptions of Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, as leader of the resurgent moderate Arab states, so long placed on the defensive by Arab radicals, Saudi Arabia was seen as a strong friend and a vital link in winning the Arabs over to terms that could result in a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. On the other hand, the energy shortage of 1974-1975, largely induced by price hikes decreed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Saudi-led Arab oil embargo, created the image of Saudis as sinister oil shaykhs. This negative image was fostered by Israel and its supporters. They appeared to realize, probably before the Saudis themselves did, that Saudi oil power had the potential to threaten Israel in a way that the combined military power of the Arabs could not, by presenting the United States with difficult choices between its political commitment to Israel and its strategic interest in Arab oil.

In the meantime, the Soviet strategic threat again intensified in the aftermath of the fall of the shah of Iran in 1978 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year. Despite the renewed emphasis on strategic concerns, U.S. perceptions of Saudi Arabia remained ambivalent. Proponents of strong U.S.-Saudi relations argued for stronger defense ties lest the Kingdom go the way of Iran. Critics warned against such ties on grounds that the Kingdom was so unstable that it would probably collapse of its own weight, leaving the United States holding the bag.

Saudi Perceptions of the United States

In contrast to changing U.S. perceptions of Saudi Arabia, Saudi perceptions of the United States have remained relatively constant over the years. This stems in good measure from the Saudi view of the world in general, a view substantially different in many respects from that of other Arab countries. Two apparently contradictory themes are paramount in Saudi perceptions of the world: an extraordinary cultural self-assurance based on a strong sense of self-identity and a heightened sense of insecurity based on the historical experience of being surrounded by enemies.

The similarities of Saudis and the Arabs to the north and west of them—they share a common language and an Islamic religious and cultural heritage—are so pronounced that for many Western observers, and indeed for many Arabs, the differences are somewhat obscured. Yet, it is the differences—as much as if not more than the similarities— that provide the key to understanding the uniquely Saudi world view and hence to understanding Saudi foreign policy behavior generally and toward the United States in particular. These differences can be divided into three areas: perceptions of Pan-Arabism, perceptions of Western imperialism, and perceptions of Pan-Islamism.²

For much of the Arab world, Pan-Arabism is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Its rapid rise was to a great extent a reaction to the rise of nineteenth-century Western secular nationalism and to the abrupt penetration of Western ideas and scholarship into the region. At the same time, U.S. Presbyterian missionaries in what is now Lebanon had as much to do with the rise of modern Arab nationalism as anyone by virtue of their reintroducing many of the Arab classics in Arabic on their own presses. Recognition of the recent nature of Pan-Arabism is embodied in the political parties of Syria and Iraq, the Socialist Arab Ba'th party. Ba'th in Arabic means renaissance or rebirth.

The head-on collision of Western imperialism and traditional Arab society, beginning with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, was another major determinant in the development of Arab nationalism and of contemporary Arab perceptions of the world. For more than 150 years, most of the Arab world was under the influence, if not the direct control, of the European powers.

From this legacy, many positive elements developed. Foreign domination, however, also created frustration, xenophobia, and bitterness, all focused on Western imperialism. Much of the politics of Arab nationalism was thus the politics of dissent. The espousal of Western secular socialist ideologies by most militant Arab nationalists is a case in point. Socialism, insofar as it is a Western, secular ideology, is antithetical to Islamic economic theory. This is not to say that many Western concepts of social welfare are not also found in Islam. Yet, to militant Arab nationalists, who equated capitalism with perceived social and economic inequities suffered under European domination, socialism served both as an ideological avenue to social, political, and economic equality and as an antidote to imperialism. That its appeal was more emotional than theoretical can be seen in the conflicting policies and programs implemented by Arab governments all in the name of socialism.

Another product of the impact of Western imperialism on traditional Middle Eastern society was the rise of Pan-Islamism, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Insulated and isolated for centuries, Islamic society suddenly had to cope with an environment that did not seem to coincide with classical Islam. In reaction to Western imperialism, the Pan-Islamic movement to a great extent arose as an attempt to revitalize the Muslim world, spiritually and otherwise, and to enable it to withstand alien ideas and ideologies.

The Saudi experience with all three of these perceptions—Arabism, Islamism, and Western imperialism—was very different from that of most other Arab states. The ruling elite of the country is from Najd, as central Arabia is called. Central Arabia—the political and spiritual, as well as geographical, heartland of Saudi Arabia—is considered by Najdis to be the heartland of Arabism as well. Unlike Arabs outside the Arabian Peninsula, central Arabians never lost their sense of Arab identity and consequently never felt the need to rediscover it. Najdi Arabian identity is primarily based not on historical, linguistic, cultural, or even religious heritage, important as those factors are, but rather on blood. Virtually everyone can trace his family ancestry as far back as history and his tribal ties beyond that. The assurance of knowing their identity has given most Saudis a self-confidence almost unmatched in the Middle East, particularly outside the Arabian Peninsula. Identity crises, so common among Western-educated elites from traditional societies, are rare indeed in Saudi Arabia.

Perceptions of the Islamic world are also different in Saudi Arabia. Whereas the revival of Pan-Islam took place in the rest of the Muslim world largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to a great extent in reaction to Western secular ideas, Saudi Arabia's Islamic revival took place in the eighteenth century with little or no reference to the West. In 1744-1745, Muhammad bin Saud (c. A.D. 1703-1704 to 1792), amir of the small Najdi town of Dir'iyyah and founder of the AI Saud dynasty, came under the influence of a native religious revivalist, Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab. The latter had come to Dir'iyyah after he had been driven out of the nearby town of Uyainah for his religious beliefs. Abd al-Wahhab's revival, subseuqently called Wahhabism after its founder,³ was drawn from the writings of an early Islamic jurist, Ibn Taymiyyah (c. A.D. 1262 to 1328), who followed the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, the most conservative of the four recognized schools of Sunni Islam. Muhammad bin Saud became the patron of the revival movement, which from that day to this has served as the ideological base for legitimizing Saudi rule.

In the 1920s, when Abd al-Aziz (known in the West as Ibn Saud) was consolidating modern Saudi Arabia, he occupied the Hijaz with its holy cities of Makkah and al-Madina. As guardians of these two holiest sites in Islam, Saudis perceive of themselves as having added responsibility as defenders of the Islamic way of life throughout the Muslim world.

Saudis have had a very different experience with Western imperialism from most of their Arab brothers in that they have never been subjected to European colonial domination. Thus they never developed the inferiority complex toward the West displayed by other Arabs under European political domination, nor did they develop the same degree of frustration and anti-Western xenophobia. For most Saudis, imperialism is seen in terms of a threat to the Islamic world and its Islamic way of life. Their perceptions of the value of relations with the United States are thus far less influenced by the psychological baggage of antiimperialism than are the perceptions of many other Arabs.

Because Western influences were less pronounced in Saudi Arabia than in most of the Middle East until quite recently, the classical Islamic view of international relations has remained more intact. This view basically envisions a bipolar world, made up of the Dar al-Islam (territory under Islamic, or God's, Law) and the Dar al-Harb (territory of war, that is, outside the rule of law). Within Dar al-Islam are not only Muslims, but all monotheists subscribing to a divinely inspired revelation. Called Ahl al-Kitab, the "People of the Book," they include Christians and Jews.

One can quickly see how easy it would be to adapt the present-day bipolar world to the classical Islamic bipolar world. It need not even be done consciously. Dar al-Islam becomes the free world and Dar al-Harb becomes the Communist world, opposed less for its political and economic doctrines than for its essentially secular, atheistic nature.

In light of this perception, one can also more easily understand Saudi foreign policy priorities. For example, dividing the world into North and South, as much of the Third World does, is not a high priority in the Saudi scheme of things. Far more important is the preservation of monotheism against atheist, secular ideologies. This explains Saudi antipathy to Marxism and to secular, radical Arab nationalism and also explains why Saudi foreign aid to the Third World follows a well-defined order of priority. Arab states are accorded first priority, followed by non-Arab Muslim states, and finally by non-Arab, non-Muslim states facing an internal or external Communist threat.

In cooperating with the United States, the Saudis see themselves not as "agents of imperialism," but as fellow monotheists facing a global, atheistic, Marxist threat. The Saudis would no doubt greatly prefer to be the senior partner in defending the free world, a role classical Islam reserves for Muslims alone. Under the circumstances of Western technological superiority, however, such a proposition is simply out of the question. Thus, Saudi perceptions of the world have had such strength and depth as to hold constant the Saudi perceptions of the need for close relations with the United States.

There are, of course, many inconsistencies in adopting the classical Islamic theory of international relations to the contemporary bipolar world, just as there are many inconsistencies in contemporary Western perceptions of bipolarity. Far too many U.S. foreign-policy makers have attempted to force all international problems into the bipolar mold of U.S.-Soviet rivalry whether they fit the mold or not. By the same token, many aspects of the international system do not fit the Saudi bipolar mold either. The most difficult anomaly for them involves the Arab-Israeli problem. Israelis, as Jews, are to be respected as People of the Book. Yet Zionism, in the Saudi view, has not only unjustly deprived Arabs of their basic territorial rights of self-determination but has also, since 1967, usurped control of the third holiest site in Sunni Islam after Makkah and al-Madina—al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Moreover, the prolongation of the problem threatens the entire Arab world by radicalizing its youth, bitter and frustrated over continued Israeli occupation and creeping annexation of the remaining Arab territories of pre-1948 Palestine.

Intellectually, the Saudis have resolved this dilemma by distinguishing between Judaism, a revered religion, and Zionism, an alien, secular, political doctrine. It has become more difficult for the Saudis to rationalize their relations with the United States in terms of the Arab-Israeli problem, however. On the one hand, the United States is seen as the ultimate defense against world domination by communism; on the other hand, it is the ultimate supporter of Zionism. This paradox has been the principal reason for the high degree of ambivalence in Saudi Arabia's relations with the United States since 1948.

At this point, a word of caution is in order regarding how strictly to hold the Saudis to their perceptions of the international system. For the most part, Saudis are no different from any other people in that they are seldom introspective, nor do they consciously or consistently apply psychological or ideological formulas to everyday, foreign-policy decision making. Their perceptions of the world, while widespread, are by no means highly refined into those intellectual models that Western political scientists so love to employ. Moreover, Saudis—as well as most non-Western societies—tend to have a higher tolerance for inconsistency than Western societies, so that conceptual paradoxes bother them much less than they might Western scholars studying Saudi foreign policy behavior.

A second major perceptual ingredient in the Saudi view of the world that influences its relations with the United States is a very highly developed "encirclement syndrome." As is often the case among insular societies, Najdis, surrounded by a sea of sand, have developed over time a perception of constantly being surrounded by enemies. Historically, this perception is not all that far off the mark. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottomans, from their possessions in the Hijaz on the Red Sea and al-Hasa Oasis near the Gulf, constantly harassed Najd; in 1818, an Ottoman-Egyptian force actually invaded central Arabia and destroyed the Saudi capital at Dir'iyyah. When the force departed four years later, the Sauds rebuilt their capital at Riyadh, a short distance away, but the ruins of Dir'iyyah can still be viewed as a reminder of foreign invasion.

In the late nineteenth century, Najd was overrun by the Al Rashids of northern Arabia, who drove the Sauds from Riyadh just before the turn of the century. It was Abd al-Aziz's recapture of Riyadh in 1902 that started him on the road toward the restoration of Saudi rule and the creation of modern Saudi Arabia. In the 1920s, Abd al-Aziz drove the Hashimite King Husayn (Hussein) from the Hijaz; two of Husayn's sons were made rulers of neighboring Iraq and Transjordan (renamed Jordan in 1948) by the British and were seen as threats right up to the late 1950s. By that time, Egypt's P...