The Search for New Allies
EIGHT DAYS AFTER 9/11, SAUDI oil minister Ali al-Naimi was in Shanghai attending the World Petroleum Congress and talking about Saudi Arabia’s desire to build a “strategic relationship and partnership” with China “at all levels.”1 Al-Naimi had already visited China five times before, first in 1992 when he was Saudi Aramco’s president. Crown Prince Abdullah had also visited, in 1998, but it was Prince Bandar who had opened the door to dealing with China back in the mid-1980s, when the kingdom had conducted secret negotiations for China’s medium-range, nuclear-capable CSS-2 missiles. The prince had developed through that experience a deep appreciation for Chinese hospitality and respect for the government’s ability to conduct secret diplomacy. The Saudis’ purchase of these missiles had come as a shock to Washington because of the enormity of the Saudi deception. The Chinese had worked perfectly with the Saudis to carry out the shipment of the missiles into the kingdom without the CIA’s discovering their presence until it was too late. At that point, Saudi Arabia did not even have diplomatic relations with China because of the kingdom’s deep aversion to communism and alignment with Washington in the Cold War. But China had proved its friendship by providing missiles the United States would not provide to protect the kingdom from Iranian threats during the Iran-Iraq War. Then in 1990, the Saudis had agreed to establish diplomatic relations in return for Chinese support at the United Nations for war resolutions against Saddam Hussein.
Within two years, al-Naimi had begun exploring what the two countries had most in common: oil. Asia, led by China and India, was fast becoming the world’s leading new consumer of oil, with overall demand there expected to grow from twenty million barrels a day in 2000 to thirty to thirty-five million in 2020—more than one third of worldwide consumption. Saudi Arabia wanted to be the foremost provider and quickly began reorienting its markets away from Europe and the United States; the share of Saudi oil exports going to Asia increased from 10 percent to 60 percent during the 1990s. Al-Naimi also disclosed in Shanghai that during the past decade he had been busy negotiating to invest in China’s refining sector, with the aim of securing an important market share for Saudi oil there.2
Clearly Saudi Arabia had begun looking for new strategic partners well before 9/11 to assure both its security and markets for its oil. There was a new Saudi attitude developing toward Washington. Whereas Bandar thought of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a “Catholic marriage”—one lasting forever with perhaps occasional dalliances—Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal suggested a strikingly different analogy: “It’s a Muslim marriage, not a Catholic marriage.” The Muslim man is allowed to take up to four wives so long as he treats them all equally well. According to Saud, Saudi Arabia was not seeking divorce from the United States; it was just seeking marriage with other countries.3
China rapidly began to emerge as Saudi Arabia’s second wife, with the prospect of displacing the United States as its favorite, at least in matters relating to oil. The two had a lot more in common. Both were authoritarian and secretive, and both were desperately seeking to control the modernization of their backward societies without losing central control. They also held a common disdain for U.S. efforts to promote democracy, human rights, and civil society. At the same time, they enjoyed the same potential complementary relationship as had the United States and the kingdom—oil in exchange for security. The biggest and most welcome difference from the Saudi perspective was that China eagerly sought Saudi oil; the United States by contrast had come to look upon all oil imports, particularly from the Arab Middle East, as a national security risk and actively sought to redress its “addiction,” as President Bush termed it in his 2006 State of the Union Address.
Abdullah wasted little time in making known his interest. The first trip he took abroad after becoming king was to China, in January 2006, and oil was at the center of his discussions there. By then, China had displaced Japan as the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States. The two sides laid plans for a $3.5 billion refinery in Quongang, Fujian Province, to handle high-sulfur Saudi oil; signed an agreement on energy cooperation; and discussed the provision of Saudi crude to fill a new Chinese 100-million-barrel strategic reserve. The kingdom had become China’s top supplier of crude oil by 2002, and it remained number one in 2006, providing nearly 470,000 barrels a day.4 The Chinese were talking to Pakistan about the building of a pipeline across that country from the port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea, to facilitate an ever-greater volume. China’s unquenchable thirst for oil not only guaranteed the Saudis a major new market for decades to come; it also meant that the price of oil was likely to remain at fifty dollars a barrel or higher, which would keep Saudi coffers full for decades.
In April 2006, Chinese president Hu Jintao returned Abdullah’s visit on his way back from the United States. There, his meeting with Bush had been marred by diplomatic faux pas such as the playing of the wrong national anthem (Taiwan’s rather than mainland China’s) and a heckler who had hassled Hu at his press conference. Bush and Hu hadn’t reached any agreements, either. No such incidents marred the Chinese leader’s visit to the kingdom. When Hu addressed the Saudi Consultative Council on April 23, he made a point of reminding the Saudis that China’s relationship to the kingdom went back a lot further than that of the United States. More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Silk Road had linked China to the Arabian Peninsula. He quoted an old Chinese proverb that seemed to reflect his view of the shifting balance of power between China and the United States: “Regarding history as a mirror, we can understand what will be rising and what will be falling.”5
In contrast to Bush’s incessant calls for confrontation with the “axis of evil” countries (Iran, North Korea, and Iraq) and joining the “war on terrorism,” Hu emphasized the need for dialogue, peace, and harmony among nations. Nations shouldn’t be invading one another (as the United States had done in Iraq), and they should all oppose “the use of force, or threatening each other with force at random.” They also had a right to choose their own social and political systems, and each should respect the choice of the other. Repeatedly, Hu spelled out a Chinese foreign policy that appeared to diametrically oppose that of the Bush administration. The United States, of course, was never mentioned by name.
The one issue left wrapped in secrecy was cooperation between the two countries on security matters. The official Saudi media said the two sides had signed a “contract on defense systems” but gave no details.6 Speculation centered, of course, on the fate of the fifty to sixty Chinese medium-range missiles from the 1980s deal, which were badly in need of modernization, if not replacement, if they were to have any credibility as a deterrent to Iran’s missiles and nuclear ambitions. The Chinese CSS-2s had never been armed with nuclear weapons, but they were capable of carrying them. Richard L. Russell, a National Defense University security analyst, noted in the summer of 2001 that these aging missiles “would serve as ideal delivery systems for Saudi nuclear weapons,” suggesting that the Saudis might well seek to develop a nuclear capability in secret, just as they had done so successfully in obtaining the missiles in the first place. Russell admitted there was no “smoking-gun evidence” that the Saudis were doing this. But he said there was “strong circumstantial evidence” they were “at least leaning toward—if not already working on—a nuclear-deterrent option.” But that assessment, he said, was based on the work of another scholar who claimed he had obtained “private information” in the United States to substantiate it.7
Another theory about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear intentions held that China and Pakistan together would establish a nuclear umbrella over the kingdom to protect it from would-be enemies like Iran. The Chinese would update or replace its old missiles, and the Pakistanis would make nuclear warheads available on a standby basis. The warheads wouldn’t be kept inside Saudi Arabia, but they could be quickly transferred if Iran ever threatened to use such weapons, if or when it developed any.8 Under this scheme, the Saudis could continue to deny they had nuclear weapons or even intended to develop their own capacity to build them. Another variation on this same theory was that Pakistan would make available a nuclear-armed missile brigade if ever the Saudis called for help.9
Foreign Minister Saud insisted in 2004 that the kingdom had a standing policy of not seeking to develop any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and would keep pursuing its efforts to make the whole Middle East a nuclear-free zone, which meant demanding that Israel give up its nuclear force. “An atomic weapon is dangerous whether in the hands of an Iranian or an Israeli,” he said. Even if Iran was becoming a nuclear power, Saudi Arabia had taken a decision not to enter this race. “We think it is stupidity incarnate because these weapons will not give security. All they will do is add to the insecurity of a country, because now it will be afraid of somebody attacking it with WMD,” he said. Saud insisted that there was “absolutely no truth” to reports that Saudi Arabia had opted for nuclear weapons.10
Yet the history of Saudi foreign policy has been to meet forcefully whatever challenge Iran presented to the kingdom, whether religious, political, or military in nature. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Saudis vastly expanded their efforts to export Wahhabi Islam in order to counter Iranian Shiite religious influence. When Iran threatened to attack Saudi Arabia with Scud missiles because of its support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the Saudis bought far-more-powerful Chinese missiles. The Saudis remain extremely sensitive to both the Persian Shiite challenge to their leadership of the Islamic world and the military threat emanating from Tehran. The Saudi view of the “Persian danger” was expressed in an unusually frank article that appeared in October 2003 in Asharq Alawsat, a London-based newspaper owned by Prince Faisal bin Salman, son of Riyadh’s governor. The editor, Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, dismissed the notion that Iran had any intention of ever attacking Israel or the United States with a nuclear weapon. The real target would be Iran’s immediate neighbors. “The Iranian nuclear danger threatens us in the first place before it frightens the Israelis or the Americans.”11
The Saudi turn to Muslim Pakistan to bolster its security in the post-9/11 era of U.S.-Saudi alienation would hardly be surprising. Saudi Arabia’s security and defense relationship with Pakistan dates back to the 1970s, when the Pakistanis helped the Saudis develop and maintain their infant air force, even providing pilots. They also sent two divisions—about sixteen thousand troops—as well as air force units to the kingdom in the early 1980s to help defend its oil fields in the Eastern Province and its border with Yemen. In return, the Saudis for years provided Pakistan with oil at a discounted price. They also paid most of the one-billion-dollar cost for Pakistan’s purchase from the United States of forty F-16 fighter bombers in the early 1980s.12 Throughout the decade-long war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the two countries cooperated closely in their assistance to the Afghan mujahideen. Then at the start of the first Gulf War, Pakistan rushed a contingent of ten thousand troops to help defend Saudi territory.
Despite Foreign Minister Saud’s disclaimers of Saudi interest in a nuclear deterrent, there were multiple indications starting in the late 1990s that Saudi-Pakistani cooperation was being extended to the nuclear field. The Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan, stirred much of the speculation about Saudi-Pakistani nuclear cooperation in May 1999 by visiting Pakistan’s uranium enrichment facility at Kahuta and its missile factory at Ghauri. His visit was publicly announced, and it was the first time the Pakistanis had allowed any foreign visitor into these sites. Sultan also met with A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist credited with designing that country’s first nuclear weapon and later with selling the technology to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Then Khan visited Riyadh in November 1999. If Pakistan helped Iran, the main rival of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, surely it could and would do the same for Pakistan’s closest Arab ally.
Those tracking Saudi nuclear intentions also point to the 1994 allegations of Mohammed al-Khilewi, one of the rare Saudi diplomats ever to have defected to seek asylum in the United States. He went public with what he said was information contained in documents he had taken from the Saudi U.N. mission in New York. Khilewi claimed the documents showed the Saudi government had provided five billion dollars to help Saddam Hussein develop a nuclear capacity. He also asserted that Pakistan had committed itself to the kingdom’s defense if Saudi Arabia was ever threatened with a nuclear attack.13 His claims were never corroborated. But he was not the only one fanning smoke about Saudi nuclear ambitions.
After a visit by Abdullah to Islamabad in November 2003, the Israeli Defense Forces’ senior intelligence officer, Major General
Aharon Zeevi Farkash, claimed the crown prince had gone there to acquire nuclear warheads that could be placed on the Saudis’
Chinese missiles. The State Department said it had no information to substantiate the general’s “bold assertions” and sought
to void them of credibility by noting that similar stories had been around for a decade.14 But there had been reports in September of that year that Saudi policy makers were debating options in light of what they
believed were Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Among the twenty-nine participants at a three-day symposium titled “Saudi
Arabia, Britain and the Wider World,” organized by the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, had been six Saudis, including Prince
Turki al-Faisal the former Saudi intelligence chief and then ambassador to London. The participants had discussed three options:
one, mirroring the Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb; two, seeking an alliance with an existing nuclear power that would
provide this deterrent; and three, pressing for an agreement on making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.15 The preponderant evidence to date suggests the Saudis have chosen option two, and that Pakistan has become the kingdom’s
nuclear protector with China’s help.
THE SAUDI SEARCH for new allies inevitably led to Moscow as well. Though the Soviet Union had been the first country to recognize the new Saudi kingdom in 1932, its communist diplomats had been frozen out, and relations had not been restored until 1990. After that, remarkably little happened to improve their long-distant relations. Saudi support for Muslim rebels in the breakaway Chechnya republic continued throughout the 1990s to sour a relationship in search of a meeting point. Russia’s involvement in building a nuclear reactor in Iran posed another obstacle. But the fundamental challenge was that Russia and Saudi Arabia found themselves to be competitors, rather than allies, in the post–Cold War era. They were both huge energy giants vying for markets abroad. Russia was counting on growing oil and gas exports to restore its clout in global affairs. In the last quarter of 2002, Russia managed to edge out the kingdom as the world’s largest oil producer (7.97 million barrels a day versus 7.86 million).16 Russia was a new challenge to Saudi dominance of the global oil market. The Russians even played on U.S. fears of reliance on Middle East oil to present themselves as an alternative, and more secure, source of supply. The two countries thus warmed up to each other slowly.
The war in Iraq and the failure of Abdullah’s U.S.-oriented gas initiative finally brought them together. Saddam was ousted in March 2003, and American oil companies were locked out of Saudi Arabia in June. The same month as Saddam’s downfall, Saudi oil minister al-Naimi was in Moscow inviting Russian energy companies to come invest in the gas initiative. He was also there to coordinate oil production with the Russians to offset any shortfall in supply because of the Iraq war. After that, the exchange of visits by high-level officials picked up noticeably, and in September Abdullah became the first Saudi king or crown prince ever to travel to Moscow.
Abdullah’s three-day visit held more symbolism than substance. The Saudi political commentator Abdulaziz Sager wrote that for seventy years it had been the U.S.-Saudi relationship that had occupied center stage, and the time had come for a change. Since Saudi Arabia and the United States were at serious odds, “it was only a matter of time before Saudi policymakers began looking for friends elsewhere.” Russia was a natural choice because the two countries together accounted for 64 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, so “cooperation between the two countries [held] the key to oil prices and world economic growth.”17 The Russian press also took note of Saudi Arabia’s faltering relationship with Washington and opined that this “could lead to a monstrous leap forward for Moscow” in the Saudi energy sector.18 As the first result of this budding Russian-Saudi relationship, the Russian private oil company Lukoil was chosen in January 2004 to replace Exxon Mobil and other U.S. oil companies in the opening of the Saudi energy sector to outsiders.
Three years later, Russian president Vladimir Putin formally opened the door to the House of Saud for Russia. The scene setter for his visit was a blistering attack on the United States that he made at a security conference in Munich on his way to Riyadh. Russia had had enough of a “unipolar world” dominated by America that had resulted in “new human tragedies,” local and regional conflicts, and “an almost uncontained hyper use of force” in international relations. The United States had “overstepped its national borders in every way” and sought to impose its economic, cultural, political, and educational policies on other nations. “Who is happy about this?”19 For Putin, this unbridled American use of force was causing countries to develop weapons of mass destruction to protect themselves. He didn’t mention Iran by name, but it was clear he was blaming the United States for the Iranian pursuit of a nuclear capability. Nor did he mention Iraq by name when he condemned countries for “airily participating in military operations” that were difficult to consider legitimate and resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians. There was a crying need for a new world order based on multiple centers of power, and these were emerging as nations like Brazil, Russia, India, and China converted their growing economic power into political clout.20
Two days later, Putin arrived in Riyadh seeking to dispel the notion that the two countries were energy rivals and offering Saudi Arabia an alternative to its traditional reliance on the United States. The steady growth in the world demand for energy meant that they were “not competitors but allies, not competitors but partners.”21 The embodiment of this was Luksar, the joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Lukoil in the development of Saudi gas fields. Lukoil planned to invest two billion dollars in the venture and announced just in time for Putin’s visit the discovery of its first oil and gas deposit. Before leaving, the Russian leader offered to help Saudi Arabia develop nuclear energy and to begin a military relationship with the purchase of 150 Russian T-90 battle tanks.*
The Saudis were delighted by Putin’s courtship. Abdullah called the Russian leader “a statesman, a man of peace, a man of
justice” and formally extended Saudi Arabia’s “hand of friendship to Russia.” The crown prince presented Putin with the kingdom’s
highest honor, the King Abdulaziz Medal, bestowed on only two other foreign leaders, France’s Jacques Chirac and China’s Hu
Jintao.22 Foreign Minister Saud declared there were “no barriers” to nuclear cooperation with Russia or to the Saudi purchase of Russian
arms. “Russia is a country with nuclear experience and cooperating with it in this field is similar to cooperating in other
areas.”23 An editorial in the Arab News, Jeddah’s English-language daily, said that Putin’s visit highlighted the kingdom’s “shift eastward” away from an almost
exclusive reliance on ties with the United States and Europe. “There is no doubt as to the popularity of diversification away
from economic links with the West. There is deep public resentment that the US, with its despised regional involvements and
policies, should still be Saudi Arabia’s principal economic partner.” Russia, on the other hand, had always supported the
Palestinian cause and opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Despite the Cold War and the decades of communism, the Russians
are seen as friends by ordinary Arabs.”24
PRINCE BANDAR, THE most pro-American of the Saudi royals, served as a weather vane of the changing Saudi attitude toward Washington. The year 2003 started on a personal high note with the downfall in March of his old enemy, Saddam. But it was all downhill from there on. Within three months, all the policies he had promoted over twenty-five years to bond the two countries lay in ashes. During 2004, the relationship worsened. The fall presidential campaign brought accusations from the Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, that Bandar and the Saudis were intent on manipulating oil prices to help Bush get reelected. It didn’t seem to matter that prices were actually more than forty dollars a barrel and at an all-time record. The Democrats were intent on exploiting Bush’s alleged close oil ties to the Saudis. “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family,” railed Kerry from the campaign trail.25 Florida senator Bob Graham, another Democratic hopeful, charged in a book released just before that year’s 9/11 commemoration ceremonies that the Bush administration had engaged in a cover-up of ties between the Saudi government and the hijackers. Graham called for Saudi Arabia to be held publicly accountable and for the twenty-eight pages about the Saudi role in the attacks redacted from The 9/11 Commission Report to be made public. “It was as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.”26 Almost until Election Day, ads appeared in major newspapers seeking to tar Bush with his Saudi connections. A Democratic group, the Media Fund, spent $6.5 million on ads across the country highlighting the Bush-Saudi theme.27 Bandar spent the entire fall answering these accusations, but not from Washington. He had decided to seek shelter back home in Saudi Arabia from the withering barrage of Democratic accusations against the kingdom.
In a sense, Bandar never really came back, not that he was spending much time in Washington by the fall of 2004. He had become
a rare visitor to his own embassy on New Hampshire Avenue, across from the Watergate complex in downtown Washington. When
his advisers urged him to speak out or do something to defend the kingdom, his standard refrain was “Why should I care?” He
relied more and more on his Texas-educated aide Adel al-Jubeir, who spoke American English with the same flare and agility,
to defend the kingdom. The young, energetic deputy replaced Bandar as the main Saudi talking head on TV and radio shows and
the chief briefer of the Washington press corps. The prince, meanwhile, was spending more and more time back home patching
up his shaky relationship with Crown Prince Abdullah and lobbying day and night for a new assignment at his court.
* By late 2007, Moscow was close to signing a contract with Riyadh for the sale of up to four billion dollars in arms, including not only the 150 tanks but one hundred attack and transport helicopters, twenty mobile air defense missile systems, and a large number of armored personnel carriers.