U.S. Remains Tight with Saudis In Spite of Support for Terrorism — Sharmini Peries interviews Toby C. Jones

But the German foreign ministry, much like the U.S. State Department or another, or the British government, David Cameron in the UK, for example, all see Saudi Arabia as an ally, as a partner in a series of, in a series of important or critical strategic interests. The first and most obvious of which is they claim, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, that Saudi Arabia is committed to anti-terrorism. But there are other things at work here, including oil, as well as Saudi Arabia's ability to generate massive amounts of wealth and then to redistribute that wealth into Western economies.

It's important to remember Tim Mitchell and Bob Vitalis and other scholars have written about this, that the easiest way for Western powers to get a hold of some of the oil wealth that gets generated in the Middle East is to sell very expensive weapons systems to those places. There's nothing that returns as much on oil revenue as buying Western weapons. You can't sell enough cars, you can't sell enough milk or eggs, or even nuclear technology or desalination technology. So keeping the pipeline open, an economic pipeline, between Saudi Arabia and the other oil producers and Western arms-producing countries, is critical for those places. They see these as engines of wealth and as sources of revenue for themselves.

So on balance, trying to criticize or taking a step to criticize Saudi Arabia on its human rights record, or even possibly in its role in funding terrorism, pales in comparison to these places who think that getting some money back from the region is more important…

So there you have it. Again, follow the munnie. The rest is "collateral damage."

So you've got a convergence of a lot of things here, some of which you've mentioned. That PR money flows through Congress, so Congressional representatives are unlikely and unwilling to criticize the Saudis, because it's materially beneficial for them not to do so. The White House is stuck in the middle between various forces in the U.S. policymaking establishment. It's really probably a weak partner when it comes to maintaining relationships like the one with Saudi. The Pentagon is entirely insulated. And it both benefits materially from the sale of weapons and strategically from having access to important military networks in the region.

So the forces against a reasonable American policy are deeply entrenched, and they're difficult to break through.

And democracy is only in the interest of the US when it results in a government that is friendly to the US and compliant with US interests.

I think what's most interesting, and most problematic, particularly now in the wake of not 9/11, but in the wake of the Arab uprisings, is that Saudi Arabia was viewed by American policymakers as a pillar in the region against the forces of rogue states like Iran, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and even Syria under Assad in a previous iteration. That is to say that the Saudis were viewed as precisely the kind of stabilizing force that was necessary to strengthen other friendly regimes that just happened to be autocratic in the Middle East. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and others who were hardly democratic but were useful to the United States for precisely those reasons. Historically democratic open systems, from the perspective of American power, is problematic.

Saudi Arabia emerged from the 2011 uprisings as the last-standing strong regional autocratic power. And the United States sees them as important for precisely that reason, not in spite of it. So that means this. That it's Saudi Arabia's stable, autocratic presence, and its willingness to promote a reorientation towards the old autocratic order after the failed revolutions, that I think many American strategic policymakers and thinkers see as desirable. They prefer stability, in spite of Saudi Arabia's dalliances with terrorism, and the threat that ISIS may play in places like Syria. They see Saudi Arabia as more of a stabilizing force than it is a destabilizing one.

Now, we can debate whether that's true or not. But that's widely believed to be the case.

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U.S. Remains Tight with Saudis In Spite of Support for Terrorism

Sharmini Peries interviews Toby C. Jones, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University