The US and the West would be deemed to have calculated and factored into facing pressure on the energy and oil prices in the run up to and escalation of Russia-Ukraine war, notwithstanding of course the war is seen as a clear aggression on Ukraine and violation of international laws. Of course Russia started the war in the normal traditional sense, and needs to be pushed back but at the same time the US-led west is in full swing in arming Ukrainians without accompanying effective pressure on Ukraine to sit down for ceasefire negotiations or peace talks, which seems to send the message that both sides and their co-sponsors are content with letting the war machine economy thrive, as far as the optics are concerned.
Saudi Arabia, like other oil-exporting countries, first and foremost must maintain its “bread and butter” oil-dependent economy to feed its citizens and fund “once in a lifetime” radical shakeup of the institutional infrastructure as part of its Vision 2030, like the rest of the OPEC+ group countries, Saudi officials say. Domestic economic security and wellbeing of its citizens comes first.
Saudi Arabia is already embroiled with spiralling domestic debt on never-ending projects as part of its Vision 2030, projects that are often pushed or persuaded by the west, often through western contractors and their western lobbying firms, facilitated by western governments so as to employ significant number of western (and of course American) companies.
The trillion dollar western-designed mega flagship projects such as NEOM city has to be paid for from somewhere and low oil prices wouldn't help, despite the Saudis confirming that it is in the interest of their bilateral security relations with the US that energy prices need to be both balanced and managed in the wider interests of both regional and global economy but after all, there has to be a floor to price falling in any case. The price cannot be pushed down infinitely, Saudi court officials say.
In fact, if any, Saudi establishment views the outright hypocrisy of the free market leader US that on the one hand the US applies reckless pressure on Saudi Arabia to maintain price-lowering mechanism on the global energy market (which Saudi Arabia doesn't actually have full control of) under the pretext of US “security interests” yet on the other hand the America refuses to attend its own domestic citizens' security concerns which includes health and well-being e.g. by refusing to provide free universal health care or worse, refusing to legislate or apply effective federal measures to force-lower the prices of vital life-saving drugs—thanks to powerful lobbying pressures from the big pharma and insurance conglomerates—often forcing Americans to travel either north or south of the border to get vital drugs at a much affordable prices.
US President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrive for the family photo during the Jeddah Security and Development Summit at a hotel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia July 16, 2022 ReutersFor America trying to beef up its national security by ensuring Russia's war machine doesn't get financed through rising energy profits makes little sense when its own citizens at home aren't able to have the security to live while health and well-being security remains neglected.
It is scandalous that America, remains so concern of external security while ignoring the vital internal security of its domestic citizens' health needs—where essential life-saving drugs such as insulin can cost up to 80% more than its neighbouring countries yet the US and the Congress are in no hurry to introduce robust price-lowering mechanism for life-saving drugs and vital treatments, not to mention of ever-rising health insurance premiums and deductibles and co-pays which vast middle class families can barely afford to keep up with the cost, and in many cases many end up borrowing on credit cards with high interests to pay for extortionate insurance deductibles and co-pays for treatments they can't avoid.
Prior to war, thousands of uninsured Americans and low-income insured middle class Americans who otherwise couldn't afford to pay deductibles and co-pays—which could run into thousands of dollars—used to travel to Russia and Ukraine alongside India, Cuba and Mexico for cheaper yet life-saving treatments, with Russia often offering the best value for money. In fact, after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, hundreds if not thousands of Americans still continue to travel to Russia through various costly detours via India and the Middle East for vital treatments which still works out to be better value for money.
Fact is it is the home domestic security—which includes health and social safety net for own citizens—that is just as essential, if not more, as overall national security yet the former is deliberately overlooked (ignoring the gun control measures for now). And it is this irony that America, as a supposedly free market leader, to foreign sovereign nations—states that supposed to be treated as equal partners and allies, as opposed to vassal states—is ratcheting up its security concerns on international platforms more to impress a selective audience, an audience that can be taken for granted without the need to provide their vital domestic security through free universal healthcare and with free from fear of gun crimes.
Put simply, for the American ruling elites-run establishment, the financial power of the big pharma, health insurance lobby and NRA gun lobby (leaving aside the defence contractors and arm manufacturers alongside foreign states' powerful lobbyists such as AIPAC) are more important than the basic health and income security of its citizens. If national security was so important, then starting with the security concerns of basic survival of Americans and their wellbeing such as health and universal income and free tertiary education for all would have been addressed before leaping towards foreign sovereign states for supposed national security concerns. Charity starts at home. Unlike the Democrats, at least the GOP Trump administration didn't pretend otherwise.
Issue is, from Saudi and other major OPEC+ members' perspective, as explained by a Saudi ambassador-grade diplomat posted in a G20 country who wishes to remain anonymous, Saudi Arabia and other major OPEC and Gulf States accepted the compromise with the US in maintaining de facto security alliance by doing the US-led west a favour: to allow trading oil and energy in US dollars, thus underwriting the US Fed's greenback.
That is despite the oil-exporting petrodollar greenback underwriting OPEC/GCC nations are hardly consulted by the USG or Congress or allowed to have a say when it comes to slapping frequent sanctions on a whim on various countries from time to time, often to the detriment of those greenback-underwriting petrodollar nations that still have to remain in close regional or socio-economic and sociocultural trade proximity with those sanctioned states e.g. Pakistan, Turkey, some African countries, Afghanistan (due to large presence of diaspora and Saudi Afghans-led trade), Bangladesh, Venezuela, Palestine etc or states under restricted technological sanctions or FATF-grey listed nations e.g. China, pre-Ukraine invasion Russia, Pakistan etc; both GCC and OPEC countries need to trade with their close proximity non-western emerging markets countries and with countries having strong socio-cultural or socio-economic ties.
Taking Saudis and GCC as inferior non-equal partners becomes more evident when the US and the west (e.g. EU, UK Canada etc) would more often than not simply refuse to trade with Saudi Arabia on “technology-transfer” based exports. Not refusing to trade on a technology-transfer basis or research collaboration, which the US often does with non-NATO allied partners e.g. Israel, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan etc, isn't simply cost effective and neither conforms to Saudi Vision 2030 of becoming self-dependent and self-development goals.
Recently, an editorial article appeared in the London's Financial Times said that the Saudis may have made a “strategic error” [by not heeding US concerns of lowering energy prices through increased oil put]. Well, if that's the case then over the decades without factoring the impatience and sensitivities of majority of the Middle Eastern citizens, America and the west—to the aghast of the majority of the population in the Middle East—continued to support and sustain the brutal illegal occupation over indigenous Palestinians' lands by Eurocentric Zionists-led settler colonial apartheid policies of a Eurocentric settler-state Israel, which is after all, the biggest strategic error committed in the eyes of many in the Global South, let alone the majority of Middle Easterners.
And yes, Saudi Arabia and the US-allied Gulf States are happy to remain under the US security umbrella, but not as “second class vassal states” being supplied with second class “less capable” weapons to fight-off rival common threats from Iran or other hostile powers. That second class less-capable weapon export policy of providing the Saudis with “less-capable” advanced weapons—that so without technology transfer or R&D collaboration—is even enacted in law by the Congress so as to maintain US policy of maintaining “qualitative military edge” (“QME”) for Israel, a state that is seen by majority of the citizens of the Middle East as the last bastion of the ongoing white Eurocentric western supremacy's settler colonial outpost in what supposed to be in a postwar post-colonial post-apartheid era.
To make things worse, that western settler colonial apartheid state Israel gets treated as “first class” ally akin to being a partner getting access to “first class” highly capable weapons—mostly with technology transfer or collaboration—so as to maintain QME. A Saudi royal family with close ties with the royal court and who is currently pursuing postgraduate studies in UK, couldn't have been more clearer:
“[W]hether we [the ruling Saudi establishment] stay or not, the citizens [of Arabia and the wider Middle East] are here to stay and their wrath and frustration can no longer be ignored or continued to be suppressed indefinitely; the clock is ticking. We have extended the hand of Arabian friendship in leap and bounds to continue to appease the American establishment as an ally in good faith—and would still try to continue to do so—but not even once did America reciprocate to address the Saudis' and the wider Arab and Muslim world's key concerns in leap and bounds to accomplish and end once and for all: Israel's settler colonialism through its illegal occupation-led apartheid military regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We were promised [assured] that in return for not obstructing [illegal] Iraq war, Palestine issue would be resolved or at best the US would impose [severe financial aid-led tough measures] on Israel as soon as the war was over so to end illegal occupation and force Israel to settle for peace on international terms [sic]. This one-sided arrangement cannot continue indefinitely. We see this as nothing but a one-sided relationship, manifested in Israel-Palestine and QME to maintain the illegal occupation, as one of the biggest strategic blunders made by the US and the West.”
One senior Saudi official was even more blunt:
“[Israel with the backing of US] implicitly and de facto rejecting the Saudi initiative for peace, otherwise known as the Arab Peace Initiative for a final peace in Palestine and Israel was a sense of betrayal. The west instead viewed it as a starting point while we [the Arab and the Muslim world] viewed it as a matter of ‘national security.'”
The author is a London-based scholar with passion in Arabic, Urdu and Persian literature and poetry, politics and current affairs.
