Shifting Sands

Thicker Than Oil offers compelling evidence that U.S. policymakers sought to capitalize on Saudi Arabia's religious conservatism as early as the 1950s. Members of the Eisenhower administration championed King Saud, the kingdom's second monarch, as an "Islamic pope" and a potential rival to the Arab nationalist Nasser. Bronson rightly claims that subsequent U.S. administrations considered Saudi Arabia, "a deeply religious state," to be "the perfect prophylactic against the spread of Communism and a natural American partner." This belief intensified in the 1980s. The importance of Saudi religiosity to the U.S.-led struggle against the Soviet Union played out most obviously in Afghanistan, where the two governments supported the efforts of thousands of mujahideen. Saudi Arabia promoted the anti-Soviet jihad by mobilizing its mosques in the fight and encouraging thousands of its citizens to participate.

Although Bronson's effort to write religion into the U.S.-Saudi relationship is of considerable interest, she stretches the point too far. She does not really support her claim that "in a neat division of labor, Saudis attacked godlessness while Americans fought Communism." Likewise, she overreaches when she argues that "because Soviet-inspired Communism was based on a hostility toward religious belief, the more religious a country, the more likely it would be to rail against Communism and look toward the United States." The internal motivations that turn the wheels of policy inside the kingdom are too complicated to justify Bronson's simplification.

It is plausible that religion helps explain Saudi Arabia's foreign policy and its anticommunism, but the point is hardly obvious. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, Saudi monarchs were far from consistently pious, let alone openly concerned about the religiosity of those around them. King Saud barely concealed his disinterest in matters of faith during his reign, from 1953 to 1964. King Faisal, Saud's successor, was a deeply religious leader, but anticommunism probably did not inform his efforts to promote Muslim unity and spread Saudi religious influence abroad by founding international Islamic institutions. King Fahd, who ruled from 1982 until his death last summer, did emphasize religion, but like Saud, he was better known for his worldly excesses.

It was not until the 1980s, as Bronson notes, that the Saudi government married religion and foreign policy, and the move was more an effort to address pressing domestic threats than an expression of long-standing ideological convictions. The Saudi decision to embrace the jihad in Afghanistan was a response to the 1979 occupation of the mosque in Mecca by Sunni radicals, which threatened the regime's religious credentials. Fearful that radicalism might find popular support among the kingdom's disgruntled citizens, the royal family realized the expediency of co-opting the radicals' message. It was only then that the complete integration of religion and foreign policy took shape.

NOT SO SPECIAL

Although U.S.-Saudi relations were strong during the Cold War, it would be a mistake to conclude that the two countries' shared interests led to consistently smooth ties. As Bronson notes, despite an auspicious beginning, U.S.-Saudi ties have not always been harmonious. President Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia's founding monarch, established close official ties during their only meeting, in February 1945. But their special relationship died with Roosevelt six weeks later, and U.S.-Saudi ties quickly succumbed to competing political interests. Successive U.S. presidents and Saudi monarchs proved much less enamored of one another, particularly in the period between Ibn Saud's death, in 1953, and Fahd's accession to the throne, in 1982.

Even when Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan made clear that Saudi Arabia was the United States' most important strategic and security asset in the volatile Persian Gulf region, the relationship was hardly smooth. Tensions were partly the legacy of the oil embargo and the subsequent skyrocketing oil prices of the mid-1970s. But they were also the result of competing strategic visions on the part of various U.S. officials. The U.S. Congress often played the most adversarial role, going so far as attempting to block arms sales to the kingdom in the 1980s.

The end of the Cold War was a transformative moment for U.S.-Saudi relations. Even though the two countries cooperated closely in expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, the shared strategic interests that had shaped the relationship for five decades faded with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union. Official relations drifted during the 1990s, as did the American public's interest in the kingdom.

Then came 9/11. The revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens in the service of the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden raised deeply troubling questions about the goings-on inside the kingdom and the threat they posed to the United States. In many ways, the attacks established that Saudi Arabia had become more of a liability than an asset to U.S. security.

John Bradley's Saudi Arabia Exposed, based on the author's two and a half years of extensive travel as a journalist inside the country, shows how insecurity in Saudi Arabia challenges U.S.-Saudi relations today. Regional and ethnic tensions are potentially destabilizing for the ruling family. But more ominous in the long term for both Saudi and U.S. security interests are the pressures that result from the kingdom's high unemployment rates and large population of alienated and restless youth who, although attracted to U.S. technology and elements of U.S. culture, are also enamored of al Qaeda's anti-American ideology.