Shifting Sands

Four and a half years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia is still under intense scrutiny in the United States. And with good reason. Even as Saudi leaders have struggled to shut off homegrown support for jihad, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Saudi citizens have made the trek to fight in the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq. The government's responses -- such as broadcasting the miniseries Deceit in the Name of Jihad -- have smacked of desperation. Saudi Arabia's rulers, it appears, are more frustrated than confident and less in control than they would like to be.

Some observers even question how earnest these efforts have been. Last June, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and several other senators introduced the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005, which claims that the kingdom continues to abet international terrorism. Such suspicion runs deep in the United States, not least because the current mujahideen problem in Iraq is partly the result of the Saudi regime's support for jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer and home to a quarter of the world's proven oil reserves, has also failed to convince the rest of the world that it is doing all it can to rein in record petroleum prices. High gas prices and burgeoning winter heating bills in the United States have increased the American public's frustration with U.S. reliance on foreign sources of energy. Anti-Saudi opprobrium is now so prevalent among Americans that it supports a cottage industry of television commercials, sensationalist cinema, and best-selling books smearing the kingdom.

Still, it is unthinkable that Washington will seek anything other than smooth relations with Riyadh, because Saudi Arabia will continue to be the world's most important source of oil for at least the next half century. After an April 2005 summit between then Crown Prince Abdullah and President George W. Bush, U.S. officials signaled that they would continue to tolerate the political status quo in Saudi Arabia, at least publicly, even though the achingly slow pace of reform there has frustrated the Bush administration's hopes for democratization in the Middle East. (The Saudi regime has clung to its authoritarian ways even since Abdullah, ostensibly a reformer, acceded to the Saudi throne last August.) The problem for Washington will be to balance its security concerns, energy needs, and aspirations for political reform abroad. Two new books, Thicker Than Oil and Saudi Arabia Exposed, consider the scope of the challenge by examining what U.S.-Saudi relations have been, where they stand now, and how changes within Saudi Arabia could shape them in the future.

BEYOND OIL

Rachel Bronson's Thicker Than Oil is a thoughtful history of U.S.-Saudi relations. It challenges the common characterization of the relationship as a bargain in which the Saudis provide easy access to oil in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. Bronson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that this simple generalization "ignores overlapping strategic interests that drove together successive Saudi kings and American administrations." Oil has been the principal reason for the United States' interest in Saudi Arabia since World War II, but it has not been the only one.

The fight against communism is among the interests Washington and Riyadh have shared, and it figures prominently in Bronson's book. Saudi Arabia became an important strategic partner for the United States during the Cold War, not only in the Middle East but also globally, partly, according to Bronson, because anticommunism often advanced Saudi security goals. During the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, Saudi leaders challenged Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who openly sought weapons and aid from the Soviet Union in pursuit of regional hegemony. "Saudi Arabia's anti-Communist activity was particularly helpful during the 1970s when the United States was licking its wounds from the fighting in Vietnam," Bronson notes. "Confronted by an inward-focused America, Saudi Arabia, France, and others built a coalition to challenge Soviet adventurism, independent of American efforts." Often acting on their own initiative, Saudi leaders funded anticommunist efforts in faraway places, including Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.

Geography, Bronson argues, has also been a critical factor in the relationship. Saudi Arabia was a key staging area for the U.S. military throughout the twentieth century. The United States maintained an airfield in the eastern Saudi town of Dhahran from 1952 to 1996. Located within a thousand miles of the Soviet Union, the airfield played a strategic role during the Cold War; in the 1980s, Bronson writes, it served "as a transit hub for American-procured weapons headed for Afghanistan." During the Persian Gulf War, the United States stationed over 500,000 troops in Saudi Arabia. It maintained a scaled-down but significant military presence in the kingdom as late as 2003, and it has been quietly using a handful of northern Saudi airfields for air support in the current war in Iraq.

Bronson's most novel argument is that religion has also been a key factor in U.S.-Saudi relations. "In addition to oil and geography," she argues, "America has since the dawn of the Cold War valued Saudi Arabia's religiosity." According to Bronson, "Oil by itself does not explain why, in the late 1950s, the United States sought to transform the Saudi king into a globally recognized Muslim leader. The Saudi leadership's claim to Mecca and Medina and the importance this had for America's anti-Communist agenda is a more powerful explanation."