Dividend Cripples Saudi Aramco
oilprice.com
oilprice.com
I lived there for four years (at KAUST), I am deeply familiar with the country and its people. The Saudis are nice and well-intended, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch.
I left after my 4yo daughter was kidnapped(!) when I refused to sign some papers regarding my work situation. I am not making this up. The kidnapping was carried away by an Australian professor and a couple American guys working there, but when I tried to look for help I was horrified that this seemed to be business as usual and no one even batted an eye, no jurisdiction. Fortunately, we are safe now and doing better than ever, but, what a story.
Until they fix many of these things it will be very hard for them to establish a thriving economy.
How did you recover your daughter if the state doesn't care?
When things started to blow out, they realized it was not worth the trouble and they sent us back home. I have to say that we were never injured or anything like that, but still, ... wtf.
Moral of the story: ALWAYS call your embassy first.
Did charges ever get filed against the kidnappers? Like back in the US?
And was the professor reported to their university?
* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1203
* https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
This seems to fit American-citizens holding your daughter, with threat to continue doing so, in order to compel you to do something (like sign a contract).
Send me an email (check profile) and we can chat for sure.
I'm actually collecting stories about academic abuse from all around the world. The plan is to launch a website with all stories together to get more exposure.
This sort of abuse (not to the degree of what I suffered, but) is quite common within academy, this needs to stop, and the people who perform it/enable it need to be ousted from their positions.
https://www.amazon.com/Kidnap-Inside-Business-Anja-Shortland...
TLDR: Its basically an efficient market in some countries, most people have kidnap insurance even though they dont know it (as their employer isnt allowed to diclose this insurance), the insurers know the criminals going rate, and can cut off their entire business if they break the "rules"
I meant to allude to the abusive work/life relationships that develop in a place like that, where people are isolated and there's no real supervision from competent authorities.
It was like living in a big replica of a Stanford prison experiment, I plan to write about it sometime as it showed me plenty of things about how humans could behave when certain circumstances are met.
“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,”
“More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources.”
It's fertile ground for raising money to support terrorism not because a few bad apples support but because it enjoys broad support. Although data is somewhat scarce a survey in 2003 found that 53% supported Bin Laden for example.
https://icct.nl/app/uploads/2017/02/ICCT-Schmid-Muslim-Opini... Page 18
Which is probably why for example US made weapons have found their way via Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda and ISIS linked groups.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/2/5/saudi-arabia-uae-gav...
Basically the bad apples are in fact somewhere between a majority and a near majority and they control the country.
To be fair. The US does a whole lot of that itself. The US even helped to transport al-Qaeda troupes from Lybia to Syria.
The DoD and CIA both had massive programs to push weapons into Syria, much of them ended up in Al Nusra and ISIS hands.
This is also not new, the US used extremist groups in the 90s under Clinton in the balkan and to support the Chechens.
Saudi Arabia could become a well-functioning oligarchy like Singapore. Unfortunately, the Saudi government has only offered investment and cheap office space and done little else.
They should invest in:
1. Education for Saudi people: scholarships to study abroad, funding to open branches of foreign universities in Saudi Arabia, funding for many new international primary & secondary schools.
2. Brain drain: Education & scholarships for foreigners, good immigration processes with paths to citizenship, and equal rights for immigrants.
3. Healthy environment for business: Effective & fair legal system, good work visa processes, and effective worker protections.
USA (my country) protects and supports the corrupt Saudi government. Therefore, USA bears some of the blame for the squandering of Saudi Arabia's natural resources. Many Saudi people, including the late Osama bin Laden, hate USA for this.
[0] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/country-data/sa...
Aramco's dividend basically entirely goes to the Saudi government, which owns 98.5% of the company. It is still comfortably the largest oil company in the world, and is investing hundreds of billions in operations over the next few years. Here's a much more objective status report on the company – https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-07/saudi-ara....
Bloomberg one seems more based in facts on the ground.
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That being said: the opinionated writing style of "oilprice.com" is still helpful at possibly explaining why these assets are being sold. But facts matter and should come first: the news event (Armaco deciding to sell more assets) should be presented objectively at some point before introducing an opinion about it.
Notice the convenient change of units between billions and millions there which makes this seem much worse than it actually is. I also didn't realize Oilprice's bias, but seeing that change of units certainly warned me.
Nothing. The KSA is an absolute monarchy. L’etat, c’est il.
Sure, they could reduce government spending, or they could reduce the dividend, and reduce spending more, but in any case, the size of the dividend relative to cash flow or profits still says something about sustainability of the present course.
The KSA, after all, can't issue debt in its own currency, can it?
If you pay money "to yourself" for groceries, sure, you can always take it back, but you still have to feed your family.
Writing down that your budget for groceries is $0 (or less than whatever is needed) doesn't give you additional freedom.
French pronouns have four possible cases: as the subject, direct object, or indirect object of a verb, or not an argument of a verb at all. The declensions are:
je/me/me/moi
nous (colloquial: “on”)/nous/nous/nous
tu/te/te/toi
vous/vous/vous/vous
il/le/lui/lui
elle/la/lui/elle
ils/les/leur/eux
elles/les/leur/elles
In this example, the pronoun is not the argument of a verb, so the fourth case is used (moi, lui, etc.)
Always best to have both sides presented…thanks for the link.
Good catch too on your point that Saudi themselves are receiving the bulk of the dividends....
I did look at aramco share price the other day and it's been very flat after recovering from last march. Strange considering in the meantime oil has double/tripled in price and equity markets have roofed.
It's like saying: "Hey, I've got an ice cream stand that I make 50$ of a week and has capital assets worth 200$. I wonder if I contractually agreed to donate 75$ worth of value every week - would that work well for me?"
In 5 years time when the company is bankrupt they can just come out and say the IPO was a bad idea, while the main stakeholders are sitting nicely in their gold plated Lamborghini's [0].
[0] I made that up, but turns out it is actually a thing: https://m.economictimes.com/nation-world/strange-things-saud...
This seems like it cuts out a lot of the middle men and just leaves MBS and the recipient...
Also, as in understand it, a lot of people were basically forced to buy shares whether they wanted to or not (or lose favour). A big dividend semi reverses that. It's like forcing someone to pay a big fine then, majestically giving half back to show you're a beneficent and merciful king.
Well, sure, they don't have to write down the dividend they pay to themselves, but that doesn't change the spending that presumably is allocated from the dividend.
One motivation for formalizing things that you don't have to is that then you have better excuses for not doing certain things.
While they made up the dividend, it wouldn't make "looting the place" more sustainable to get rid of it.
Formalizing the "looting" does highlight its unsustainability and seems like a reasonable reason to write an article to me.
"Saudi Aramco profit of $49 billion in 2020 is down from $88.2 billion in 2019 and $111.1 billion in 2018."
https://apnews.com/article/dubai-saudi-arabia-united-arab-em...
...so if 2020 was an off year due to the pandemic, then the $75 billion/yr dividend probably isn't going to bankrupt them in the short term.
You're right about the latter part though. An Aramco failure is going to be a significant dent on MBS' domestic perception.
In many ways this is what is bankrupting the country, much more than the rampant corruption (which is still enormous, but pales into comparison with public spending).
The population of Saudi is absolutely exploding - nearly doubling every 20 years. It has a very young population with poor job opportunities, in a very energy intensive place to house people (AC demands and lack of fresh water).
This had led to completely unsustainable public spending. The revenue from oil is enormous but it's not growing in line with population and welfare spending. And the Saudi royal family know the people will turn quickly against them if the welfare tap is turned off.
They are in a really tricky position. While the royal family is outrageously wealthy, the country itself over the past decade is getting pretty broke. And with such population growth every year it becomes harder and harder to keep up.
I imagine this is why MBS is trying to push economic reform so much, almost at all costs, because he knows the game is up. But it is going to be very difficult to turn this quite literal oil tanker around.
They only added a 5% VAT in 2018 and just this year bumped it to 15% on a "temporary" basis.
Both fuel and electricity costs have increased and new payments exist for government services.
Saudi is trying to regear the economy and social safety nets away from oil dependency while they still have the income from oil dependency and that is the mission statement of Saudi Aramco today. Looking at actions of the company or the country any other way will cause distortions.
Sure, but even the average Saudi has a substantially higher QOL due to Aramco than their peers in most other nations. Nowhere else in the region has a comparable HDI.
Looking at the list of countries in the Middle East, it looks like Oman, Bahrain, Cyprus, Kuwait, UAE, Israel and Qatar have a similar or greater HDI than the KSA. (Though combined, they have about a similar population as KSA alone.)
Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait are whole different problems altogether. Bahrain is Sunni-ruled with Shia majority population, so once KSA weakens, expect to see some revolts soon. On the other hand, the UAE will step up its game and intervene in Bahrain should such a situation arise (ironically, Bahrain was going to join the UAE back in 1971, but backed away because they were richer and wanted to be the capital).
Kuwait and Oman are already falling to xenophobic pressure. They have begun expelling expats from jobs and looking for inward hiring, but this has had a net negative effect on their economies.
Perusing wiki, it looks like Saudi Arabia is a G20 economy with a population of 34 million people, yet only 3.1 million native Saudis are members of the labor force, the private sector labor force is 90% non-Saudi, and still only 12% of Saudis live below the local poverty line.
If I'm reading that right, 88% being above the threshold for poverty with only 9% workforce participation for native Saudis seems pretty noteworthy.
Difficulty their population has also grown 5X in 50 years. Which is not good considering they have little else going on economic other than oil.
> My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel
The US and fracking have been the major competitor to the Saudis lately.
Domestic heating?
I've never encountered that, and it's pretty important in Canada where I live.
I've only ever seen gas or electric here.
Oil-fired boiler was pretty common heating in UK when I was a kid. Not sure if it is still.
Russia also achieved its major goal in Syria - maintaining Assad [Shia] regime (part of the Shia belt from Lebanon to Iran) thus preventing [Sunni] SA from building pipeline toward Europe which would have been a significant hit for Russian interests. Without such pipeline - if i remember correctly SA was recently trying to bring some stuff to Poland by sea at cheap prices, yet with no big success so far while Russia is nearing the completion of the Baltic sea floor pipeline directly to Germany. And at the same time US - SA's large market - is running a large fracking of its own and even explores the options of exporting that natural gas, and thus SA seems to start feeling a bit of squeeze, at least when it comes to natural gas. With "greenification" and electrification of economy the natural gas is the near- and mid-term future of our civilization when it comes to fossil fuels, and SA hasn't yet been as successful as they would like in securing the desired top spot in that future.
His objective achievements in that area are more than most people could claim. You think it's easy winning a power struggle?
In 'Designing a fighter' to win a power struggle, I'd take: ruthlessness, sudden betrayal, and a willingness to use violence.
Yet economies and cultures that tend to succeed value investment, rule of law, cooperation, learning, property rights, and finding win-win arrangement.
The original article was about how a forced dividend is cutting necessary investment, which does not seem wise, but very much seems like the act of a powerful monarch who doesn't understand what underlies long-term success.
The article starts off with an especially history-ignorant premise. Of course Saudi Arabia has an alternative. The Middle East has a long history of nationalization as it pertains to oil resources.
This is the House of Saud we're talking about. MBS is unwilling to nationalize the small private ownership of Aramco? Ha I say. I say, ha ha. Double ha. Ha ha ha ha. It's almost guaranteed that at some point in the future Saudi Arabia will re-nationalize Aramco in one manner or another.
You see, Saudi Arabia is in a demographic death spiral. Not due to de-population as in some countries, rather, the exact opposite problem. Their population is exploding higher, without an economy to match. The single most important number as it pertains to Saudi Arabia, is barrels of oil produced per capita (however you want to formulate that, whether daily or annually). That overwhelmingly determines the standard of living of the people of Saudi Arabia, and ultimately dictates the stability of the House of Saud. So how is that number looking? In 1980 Saudi oil production was up near 10m barrels per day, with a population of 9.7 million - so almost one person per barrel of oil per day. A remarkable ratio for sure. Circa year 2000 oil production was 9.x million barrels per day, with a population then up to 20.7 million, so by that point it's down to less than half a barrel of oil per day per person; a halving in 20 years. During the pandemic time frame (ie another 20 years later)? 8 to 9 million barrels per day, and now their population is up to 35 million, so now it's down to ~1/4 of a barrel of oil produced per day per person, another halving in roughly 20 years. (Even if you pop that up to 10m barrels per day again in the next few years, their population is heading to 40m regardless, so 1/4 one way or another.)
Implosion. It's very obvious what's going to happen to Saudi Arabia.
They're adding 500k-700k people per year, with no economy to support any of those people. For the average citizen of Saudi Arabia, every person added to the population tally reduces the standard of living of the rest. At this point every ten years they're adding a population equal to 2/3 of where they were at in 1980, with zero additional oil production to match.
Chaos and violent instability is coming for Saudi Arabia, you can bet Aramco is eventually getting nationalized again, whatever the reputation consequences.
Wouldn't the important number be the barrels of oil exported per capita rather than produced?
Which actually makes things even worse, because the exploding population means an increasing amount of the oil production is consumed internally - this page suggests less than 60% of production is now exported (2016 data):
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/saudi-arabia-oil/
and the graph here (when switched to max date range) shows the dramatic increase in consumption over time, albeit with some slight falloff more recently:
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/saudi-arabia/oil-consu...
It's interesting that they keep finding™ more® oil* but have never increased their output.
> The most desperate of these was the pledge to guarantee a dividend payment to shareholders in Aramco of US$18.75 billion every single quarter of every single year – a total of US$75 billion every single year.
I've never heard of a contractually binding agreement to drive yourself into bankruptcy via an overly generous dividend. From this FT article[1] it does sound like it's pretty voluntary though
> Mr Nasser told reporters that “our intention is to pay $75bn, subject to board approval and depending on market conditions”. Minority shareholders, who own 1.5 per cent of the company, will be “protected” for the next five years and given priority payments, he said.
1. https://www.ft.com/content/3c2c576c-51c6-4ced-b1c2-586c4b2f4...
Nothing. Argentina defaults on its debt every Christmas, and its bonds still get bought. Aramco’s are a non-sovereign corporate’s equity dividends, where most of the shares are owned by the Saudi government and royal family.
wtf? Every christmas every year?
Why Christmas? That just seems mean.
Debt write off could be seen as a gift to the country.
You might want to research this point more deeply.
The real quick spark notes are:
Iran tried to socialize their Oil Production as they believed that Irani's deserved more than 10% of the profit generated instead of just paying Britain forever. In response the CIA did a coup d'état and there's been instability ever since.
Naturally the US aligned itself with it's own oil company in the region (California-Arabian Standard Oil, which is now the Aramco) given that it had just made an enemy of Iran. I think a pretty weird quirk of history is that if you squint hard enough Aramco is technically a Silicon Valley startup, with beginnings in San Francisco that was one of the largest IPOs of 2020.
Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat? Or did Boris commit the coup and try to become a dictator by not stepping down when legally required to?
That is exactly what happened in Iran, if you replace "Queen" with "Shah" and "Boris" with "Mossadegh".
This seem disingenuous as you completely remove the motivations of the actors. You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum. That's a HUGE detail that you are handwaving away.
So yes, if the US bribed the queen to dissolve parliament because the people of UK democratically decided to nationalize BP, that would be a very bad thing even though the queen "has the absolute right to do" so.
Also the part where the CIA pays for and stages a coup attempt just so that it can use it as a pretext to use other forces that it is also paying to suppress the armed uprising on behalf of the Queen, with the resulting security situation being the public pretext used for the disillusion of parliament.
No, she doesn't, at least by what appears to be the dominant constitutional theory (not having a simple written Constitution makes this...less clear than one might want it to be.) The Crown does, sure, but the particular category of Crown powers this falls into is that it is validly exercised by the Queen/King-in-Council; that is, by and with the advice and consent of the Privy Council, not unilaterally.
> Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat?
Yes.
It looks like the company that became Aramco was Chevron, which was a result of Standard Oil's break up. So not sure I'd call it a startup. But if I squint even harder, and I consider their investment to simply be VC money, then it sorta makes sense, but if I squinted any harder my eyes would be fully closed. Am I missing something?
Nope you aren't, it's already a pretty wild stretch of the imagination; it's just a fun anecdote.
Absolutely not. Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America.
Never been to Saudi but I doubt their people hate America as well.
(I agree with the rest of your comment though)
Source: Iranian
So, as a generalization for most of the country, his statement is correct. Unless you dismiss the lower classes as disposable riffraff as the Shah did.
First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable and they _dont_ hate America.
Second, the working class doesn't hate America. I was born and grown up in Iran and I've never seen _anyone_ actually having strong negative feelings towards the US. I don't think Iranian working class thinks about US as much as Americans are lead to believe.
Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world (though, note, sophisticated and sophism share the same root ;). I think the Ayatollahs have, in many ways, perverted Iranian society (in others ways ensured it's independence). But your statement is too simple, too lacking in nuance. It is, frankly, dangerous (but I'll defend your right to share them with my life!) in the same way that statements about Iraqi's perception of America were 20 years ago.
Long Version:
"I was born and grown up in Iran "
I figured, but I didn't want to bring it up; if you're going to talk about "lived experiences" then it's fair that I ask you what your social class you belong to in Iran. Were you the son/daughter of an engineer? Or were you the child of a manual laborer? Did you grow up in Tehran, or Shiraz? Or did you grow up in a small village in the middle of nowhere? Did you have foreign DVDs when you grew up?
More succinctly, did your class make or was it depicted in "Children of Heaven"? (deserved the Oscar, btw. It was brilliant)
"First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable"
Well, doesn't that implies that the Ayatollahs did well by Iran? In the times of the Shah the middle class was proportionally small, certainly not large enough to make OP's comment wrong. (The answer is no, the Ayatollahs were a disaster and Iran's middle class, even if it numbers in the millions, is still a small fraction of the total population)
" and they _dont_ hate America."
OK, here I'll concede you're probably partially right but only because "America" is very ill defined. How can someone "hate" Akron OH? You can despise them, but hate? Ohioans are the nicest people I've met in the world (lived experience from growing up in four continents)! But, typically, when ppl talk about hating "America" they are referring to DC and DC's policies.
> Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world
Thank you. I don't have such high opinion we're quite average, but thanks.
You are absolutely right that my observations are only a tiny fraction and quite subjective. But that doesn't mean they can be fully dismissed.
Go to youtube and search for Americans or European's impressions of Iran when they visited. Some of them are at very rural parts [0], and yet, they are so warmly welcomed. And don't be fooled. Iranians can be horrible people. Just see how we treat Afghans. It's pretty damn embarrassing. But to Americans, I've never heard a single bad experience from a European/American in Iran.
From reading your posts, I'm pretty much sure we're on the same page. Except that it implies that you think Iranian working class do hate america, whatever that means, and that doesn't seem aligned from what I experienced or from what I've heard from other people's experiences.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2LEgowbzSc This is a great example of a visitor going through "children of heaven" class of Iran. There are countless examples of this.
Iran is in the doghouse because they nationalized their oil, same as Venezuela. Cuba under the US-backed Batista dictatorship makes the current communist regime there look like a country run by Mister Rogers, but Batista played ball so it was an ally.
International relations in general are characterized by an amoral state of anarchy, there is no right and wrong, only suzerains and clients.
But yes, it's entirely historical reasons. America used to actually be allied with Iran back when it was a monarchy; and this in particular is a good chunk of the reason why the two countries hate each other. The CIA in particular tried to fuck over the country and it backfired, hard. So Iran decided, instead of allying itself with the first (America) or second (USSR) world, they'd become a theocratic democracy. Once we successfully pissed off Iran; our backup solution was to ally with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that had just embargoed the US for being too pro-Israel a few years prior. Geopolitics is weird.
(One thing I do want to point out is that you may be measuring the gender equality of an entire country by the gender equality of it's computer programming staff. This is a mistake: those properties are inversely proportional. Iran sends more women computer programmers abroad because it's so gender unequal. In contrast, very gender-equal countries tend to produce fewer women computer programmers. Iran isn't a bastion of feminism, it's just not as bad as it's neighboring countries. In terms of gender equality, Iran is more of an Alabama than a Sweden.)
The grandparent asked for "Why does America support Saudi Arabia when Iran is more in line with American values", and in that particular case the answer is almost entirely "CIA Bad", possibly with a dash of "right wingers use other countries' right wingers as an excuse to hate those countries".
A big problem point for US with Iran : the latter's issue with Israel.
It is really only once Iraq was defeated, that Israel turned hard against Iran. Israel is simply always against the biggest potential power in the middle east.
Iran has multiple times put these things up for negotiation but the US has systematically refused such attempts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-pre...
What happens if they just decide to stop paying international debt/bond holders? Is that even an option?
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
So perhaps somewhat conversely:
"If the Saudis owe you $1 billion and decide not to pay you, that's your problem."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_debt_restructuring
And it went IPO in Dec 2019.
But actually, 95% of this dividend goes back to the Saudi government, right? So the real figure above is 0.15 times the entire amount that it received for the entire IPO.
Tearing up a budget doesn't create more to spend. Making a budget doesn't result in less to spend.
1. https://www.ft.com/content/3c2c576c-51c6-4ced-b1c2-586c4b2f4...
Anyway.
I know comments like this are frowned upon on HN, but I must:
lol
I get what you're saying, and I agree with your points. This bit just got me. The Khashoggi murder alone tells us all we need to know about MBS.
From what I pieced together on Wikipedia it seems like a number of Saudi princes were kidnapped a few years back and forced to pay billions but I don't know all the details or what happened exactly.
The company is mostly owned by the Saudi government but I guess that means, really, the Crown Prince and it seems he's very active in management despite not being on the board or listed as an executive.
We haven't yet seen if the new administration will view MBS the same way, but I doubt it. We've had two populist presidents in a row lose European control because they thought they knew better than their advisors about the Middle East. (Obama's version was surrendering Crimea to Putin so that Putin would give him an out for his Syrian "red line" blunder).
This administration seems more boring and professional, like the staff have taken over the government for 4 years. So I don't think they have any misunderstanding of who MBS is and what value he does and doesn't provide.
I would like to paint Trump as the only bad apple, but the Saudis have likely paid off every American President in the last 40 years with a flood of shadow money. He was accepted by the previous administration because Trump got a healthy dose of that shadow money (there's a half-dozen on the front page of google search results alone).
There's a half dozen stories about this for Trump. Here's one for Obama:
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/29/middleman-helped-saudi...
We now know the inauguration fund is a big shadow slush fund for presidents. So is the presidential library, and the usual post-term speech circuit and "consulting".
These people and power structures exist because of concentrated oil wealth, and we should move towards alternative energy and BEVs to bankrupt these corrupt regimes and the corruption they exert on our country.
What approach would you have taken to prevent Vladimir Putin from taking back Crimea? It’s a majority Russian area where they hold a long term naval base lease. The peninsula in question was gifted to Ukraine by the USSR in 1954.
Also keep in mind the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons, and any direct military conflict with Russia has the potential to go nuclear.
How do you proceed to prevent Russia from annexing Crimea?
It's not by accident. After some increased scrutiny after 9/11, the Gulf oil states, Saudi being the most prominent, largely left the general public's awareness.
Meanwhile, they started heavily investing in and marketing themselves as a technologically forward societies.
They paid for many academics worldwide handsomely to move their research to satellite universities in the region, getting a foothold among intellectual elites.
They created world class luxury airlines promoted by the most expensive western celebrity endorsements, gaining a foothold among upwardly mobile international travelers.
This re-branding culminated with the much publicized, elaborate and warm Saudi reception of the previous US administration in the country, and the 2018 publishing of "The New Kingdom" magazine by the publisher of the National Enquirer (https://www.insider.com/inside-the-american-media-magazine-t...), which was Saudi-royal-family propaganda targeted at common Americans in the grocery checkout aisle.
This had the effect of normalizing the image of these regimes among the general public while papering over their history of repression of human rights at home and financing of religious and ethnic conflicts abroad.
Secretary of State visit
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/09/saud-j09.html
Brother of MBS visits and meets with Secretary of Defense
https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/07/saudi-arabias-p...
Biden, Schumer, Clinton
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...
Why just list those three Senators when 29 Democrats voted YEA? Sly injection indeed.
Absolutely. It's required that any US administration be at the table with the gulf oil states - that's just realpolitik. Better to be there than not.
However the Republican party has been far more closely wedded to petroleum interests, especially those that provide oil infrastructure services to the Gulf states, in both policy and rhetoric. Don't you remember "drill baby drill", which while marketed as being about energy independence was anything but, because the price of oil is a global commodity, not something that the US has the capacity to change.
Democrats were at one time too, but then they lost most of their political power in petroleum industry focused parts of the US. Perhaps Rep. Charlie Wilson of Texas was among the last of such Democrats.
Most Democrats have now cast their lot with post petroleum aligned policies, technologies, and industries - look no further than the politically clearly aligned battle around fuel economy standards or the Keystone XL pipeline.
My impression is that MBS wants to take Saudi into the 21 century. That seems very overdue and a good thing. He probably wants it because it will make his country richer and stronger, and perhaps be able to beat back his strategic enemy Iran. But it should also make life in The Kingdom saner and more humane for the people.