The Wall Street Journal has a new story, U.S.-Saudi Relations Buckle, Driven by Animosity Between Biden and Mohammed bin Salman, which is as good as you can expect from the US media, which means extremely good in many respects, yet with important omissions and blind spots. Even though this account is appearing in the Journal, as opposed to say the New York Times or Washington Post, it comes off as a concerned but still orthodox account of why a key relationship is going off the rails.
However, the headline demonstrates its core flaw, that the authors, no doubt mirroring conventional wisdom, depict the big reason for the breakdown as personalities, that Biden and Mohammed bin Salman can’t abide each other. The article contends that because the Saudi kingdom is a small place, administratively speaking, the US-Riyadh relationship has always been conducted on a personal basis, to a significant degree between the President and the King or Crown Prince, as appropriate.
Now it is true that both sides have made the deteriorating relationship pretty personal. Reading between the lines, just the same way the Biden Administration deliberately goaded China in its Alaska summit, so to Team Biden appeared to try to set out to put the Saudis in their place:
When Mr. Biden was elected, Prince Mohammed huddled with advisers at a seaside palace to complete a plan to woo the new president, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Saudis delivered a few concessions on a topic Mr. Biden had campaigned on—human rights—including the eventual release of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent women’s-rights campaigner who says she was tortured in detention, and two Saudi-American prisoners. And they quickly patched up a feud with neighboring Qatar after leading an economic boycott against it which Mr. Trump had initially supported.
Mr. Biden’s response shocked Prince Mohammed, the people said. In his first weeks in office, the president froze Saudi arms sales, reversed a last-minute Trump administration decision to label Yemen’s Houthi rebels a foreign terrorist organization, and published the intelligence report on Mr. Khashoggi’s killing which Mr. Trump had previously dismissed.
For the Biden administration, these steps were a necessary correction. To the Saudis, Mr. Biden’s early moves were a slap in the face.
Admittedly, the fact the Saudis have also made responses that look petty has made it easy to focus on the poor dynamics. As we recounted, the US was incandescent when OPEC+ cut production by 2 million barrels. The Saudis would have none of the US chiding accusing them of being Rooskie stooges and they released details intended to put the Biden administration in a bad light, that they had effectively conceded the necessity of the output cut but has pressed the Saudis to put it off for a month, clearly to help Biden at the midterms.
Nowhere does the article acknowledge that the US and EU are trying to break OPEC+ with their oil price cap scheme. Nor does it acknowledge that other Middle Eastern OPEC members cleared their throats to say they supported the cuts (as in denied the US charge that the went along because the Saudis insisted).
The Saudis have continued goading the US by not inviting it to the new, so-called Davos in the Desert. Moon of Alabama describes how the US press is covering for this diss in Some Media Won’t Tell You When The Saudis Snub Biden.
If you read the article carefully so to not be distracted by the (intriguing) backstory of how the US historically dealt with the Saudi royals for decades, which has the effect of turning the tale into a bit of a celebrity drama, it does contain what is the underlying driver of the breakdown: the Saudis want to redefine the relationship in light of different power dynamics and needs and the US wants none of it.
First, the US is no longer a dominant customer for Saudi oil. From the article:
Since the 1940s, Washington’s relationship with this insular dynastic monarchy grew around an implicit understanding that the U.S. would ensure Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity and the Muslim kingdom would keep oil flowing to a global economy dominated by America.
Those calculations have changed over time. The Saudis once sold the U.S. over 2 million barrels of oil every day, but that’s fallen to less than 500,000 barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. grew to become the world’s biggest oil producer, and China is now the biggest buyer of Saudi oil, followed by India.
Second, and critically, the Saudis despite being huge US weapons buyers, do not value US security guarantees as much as they once did. Maybe not being able to prevail in Yemen despite US help has something to do with that? Again from the Journal:
“Oil-for-security is dead,” said Ayham Kamel, head of Middle East and North Africa at political-risk advisory firm Eurasia Group. “The two sides seem to be having a problem accepting that that old deal is over, with Riyadh focused on security and Washington focused on oil.”
I’ve featured this clip repeatedly, but it makes a key point that official outlets can’t afford to see, let alone relate: America has performed badly in the Middle East and has largely withdrawn from that theater, so any security guarantees are debased compared to their historical value.
For those who have time, the somewhat coded discussion of Iran’s part of this story, starting with Iran effectively breaking the JCPOA process starting at 1:22:30, or you can go straight to Biden and MbS part at 1:27:30 (you can watch at 1.25x):
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The article effectively admits that even though the Administration is mad as hell, it can’t do much about an increasingly intransigent independent Saudi Arabia. First, no one is going to admit that too many college tuitions depend on weapons sales to the Saudis. Second, with as Ritter pointed out, Israel looking weak, the US needs the Saudis even more for the perception that they are players in the Middle East.
No one is yet discussing the unthinkable: that the Saudis would start buying weapons. If the oil production cut made steam come out of Biden Administration ears, they’d go nuclear if they could. Aggressive regime change operations would swing into action pronto. And the Saudis would face major switching costs in terms of having to train on and bel able to repair different weapons system.
So the US and Saudis are like the rich unhappy couple that find a divorce too expensive and messy to pursue. But the US is then faced with its limited ability to stop the Saudis from engaging in what it regards as cheating on the relationship. The article points out:
The next big test comes in early December, when three events with major significance for global energy markets are set to collide: another OPEC+ meeting and plans by the European Union for an embargo of Russian oil and by the Group of Seven wealthy nations to cap the price of Russian crude.
I don’t expect the Saudis to do much, certainly not as much as the US wants, if (now more like when) the Russian oil restrictions kick in and Russia delivers on its threat not to sell crude at a non-market price. If the Journal think things are ugly now, odds favor than they ain’t seen ‘nuthin yet.