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America with the evil empire

Before Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia my eyes were already preparing to start rolling. If there is one thing that brings Americans of all political stripes together, it is contempt for our alliance with Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the American ruling class reaffirms and reiterates our alliance with the passing of every administration like clockwork.

The Saudi alliance useful. It is financially lucrative for the small minority of Americans who are part of the international elite. It helps sustain some intellectuals and think tanks in Washington D.C. And in the bigger game of geopolitics the Saudis have been aligned thoroughly with the United States since after World War II.

But no one is under any great illusions about what the Saudi regime is. When Trump says “For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror” we have to laugh at the audacity of the lie. Starting in the late 1970s Iran did try to assert leadership of international Islam…but to do so it had to dampen sectarian consciousness, because 90% of the world’s Muslims are Sunni. Iran does support other Shia movements (though in general other Twelver Shias; the alliance with ghulat sects is opportunistic, as is that of the almost-Sunni-Zaydis of Yemen), and has had a very close relationship with Hezbollah for generations. But it has engage in this with a relatively soft touch with pretenses, because the Shia are outnumbered.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia does not need to pretend. The Saudi government and populace has been fomenting and exporting sectarian hatred for generations. Sectarian hatred even predates oil as an export of the peninsula. In 1802 the Wahhabis under the Saudis sacked Karbala. The Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia live under what is perhaps best analogized to Jim Crow for Americans.

After 9/11 many average Americans asked “why do they hate us?” This is a big question with many answers.

Here is one. For various reasons our government is allied  with a neo-medieval monarchy. Most Americans are not too aware of foreign policy, international affairs, and geography. But if you are a well informed citizen of Iran, you know exactly what Saudi Arabia is.

Many Muslims who are Sunni also know what Saudi Arabia is. Many Sunnis rue the day that oil enriched the monarchies of the Arabian peninsula, because they believe that it transformed the nature of modern Islam. This is overdone; the Wahhabis of the 18th century in Arabia can be paired up with the Deobandis of 18th century India, or the revivalism of the Sokoto caliphate in the 19th century in the Sahel. But on the margin and in quantitative degrees it is hard to deny that oil wealth has helped shape the ideological topography of modern day Sunni Islam.

The robust American alliance with one of the most extreme regimes in the world makes a farce of our rhetoric of freedom and democracy. But Americans being who we are, we continue to engage in that rhetoric despite the reality that we quickly compromise when the national interest demands it. The strength of the American-Saudi alliance from administration to administration suggests there is far more than what we see above the surface. The rumors that some Muslims spread that the House of Saud has some of the biggest wine cellars in the world illustrates the reality that that regime is very willing to violate the spirit and letter of the laws which it promotes in public.

But the alliance is always a black mark in our American self-perception that we’re a moral superpower. Most Americans don’t realize it, but in the Muslim world it something that people take note of.

20 thoughts on “America with the evil empire

  1. Historians of the 20th and 21st century US will not be kind when examining the US-Saudi Alliance, that’s for sure.

    I’m almost perversely impressed by the monarchy’s durability, though. I’ve read so many predictions that the Saudi monarchy would collapse or be overthrown in the near future, but it continues to persist with little sign that its hold on power has diminished (although its wealth certainly isn’t what it once was).

    The strength of the American-Saudi alliance from administration to administration suggests there is far more than what we see above the surface.

    The US foreign policy establishment has an extremely strong status quo bias, especially with the Middle East. Any sort of pullback is seen as “losing face”, being unwilling to continue backing the international order against chaos. I remember the best (unintentional) distillation of this was in a small book written by Michael O’Hanlon.

  2. I’m doing a piece on Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, and was wondering if you could recommend some books on how actual theocracies tend to arise historically? They don’t have to be specifically about that, just shed light on it.

    I assume Vali Nasr’s book is a good place to start for the Iranian Revolution. IIRC, Eric Kaufmann has some stuff on how demographics (high fertility among religious rural populations) helped bring about the IR.

  3. What so insidious about this is how easy it is to forget. I saw this Justice League comic mockup (combining Trump orb with old comic book cover), and thought it was pretty funny.
    https://twitter.com/MIKECOLLINS99/status/866608824899309568

    And it is sort of funny. But reading your post, now kicking myself for not seeing it as pure hypocrisy.

    Anyway, I guess this tweet with 3 presidents in a row getting their gold medal is more honest, if more disturbing.
    https://twitter.com/WeAIIWin/status/865950483210358785

    Maybe the meme we need is 1. how my friends see me, 2. how my mom sees me, 3. how society see me, 4. how I see myself, 5. what I’m really like.

    That comic is America as #4, and I guess saudi’s giving medals is #5. I’ll leave #1,2,3 as an exercise to the reader.

  4. True. But Americans also have the experience of the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi (and the continuing attempt to overthrow Bashir Assad). Moral monsters all three, but Iraq, Libya, and Syria are in pretty bad shape now.

  5. I often hear criticisms of the Saudi alliance, but I’m not exactly sure what the alternative is. (1)Saudi Arabia is a conservative society, and one with a convoluted and divided set of religious/political elites, I don’t see why it’s plausible that whatever comes after the house of Saud would be better. (2) The Saudis still have an incentive not to encourage radicalism too much as it is a greater threat to internal regime legitimacy than it is to any western country. The case still has to be made that, on the whole, the benefits that accrue In being able to influence Saudi behaviour are less than the costs of the alliance. (3) yes the US(or any country’s) foreign policy has a status quo bias, but that can’t be wished away. The US is tied into a network of regional alliances, and has a number of domestic institutional locks on changing policy, so any massive policy change is (imo) wishful thinking.
    What would the alternative be? An alliance with Iran isn’t possible for domestic and regional reasons, and I think it’s not entirely clear it would have better outcomes.(either judged by the standards of maintaining regional peace or more conventional aspirations ie protecting Israeli security or securing energy supplies.)
    Which is not too say I don’t have my issues with US policy in the region,particularly over the past few decades, I just don’t see what obvious alternatives there were.(apart from the Iraq war. The alternative there waS pretty obvious)

  6. Uber’s $3.5 billion of Saudi money shows one of those ties. Money really can buy almost everything.

  7. “The robust American alliance with one of the most extreme regimes in the world makes a farce of our rhetoric of freedom and democracy.”

    This used to be a standard left wing complaint. I suppose that since the left is not that big on actual freedom and democracy anymore, they have decided to drop it.

  8. I’m not sure how well its aged, but I remember liking Roy Mottahedeh’s ‘The Mantle of the Prophet’ on the Iranian Revolution.(If you’re looking for the religious aspects specifically.) Also Ian Lustick’s ‘The Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel’ is good(but old) People like Carl L Brown and Robert D Lee have written on the institutional and ideological foundations of political-religious rule in the Mid East (theyre more political science though, ie dry and a bit tedious)
    It might not necessarily get at what you’re looking at but there are a few decent books on sectarianism in the region out recently(for example by Geneive Abdo, Toby Matthiesen, Bernard Rougier, Frederic Wehrey, Hazem Kandil..they’re mostly political science though rather than historical narratives, so depends on what your reading preferences are) A lot of those tend to concentrate on how religious identities can be manipulated by political actors and how ethnic/religious elites mobilise people in support for their political positions.

    The Kauffman book you’re thinking off is about (very rough) projected demographic changes (specifically the potential growth of fundamentalist religious groups and what effect they could have on a country’s politics and values. Also worth getting)

  9. “It helps sustain some intellectuals and think tanks in Washington D.C.”

    It’s a common practice for many foreign governments to invest, usually indirectly, in American think-tanks to purchase influence in D.C. The Israelis do it. The Saudis do it. The Japanese do it. The Chinese do it. And the Russians do it too (though not as well as the other major powers, despite probably having the greatest amount of experience running fronts during the Cold War – it’s like some of that institutional knowledge just disappeared during the chaos of the “liberalization” years).

    For that matter, American politicians and other agents of influence in D.C., including young up-and-comers, are cultivated by most foreign embassies quite openly. Call it the price of an empire.

    And, beyond that, you are not anybody important unless you’ve been invited to a private party at a Saudi potentate’s personal residence in Great Falls, Virginia.

  10. “This used to be a standard left wing complaint. I suppose that since the left is not that big on actual freedom and democracy anymore, they have decided to drop it.”

    The left was not “that big on actual freedom and democracy” in the past either. The hyperbolic criticism against authoritarian allies of America during the Cold War was useful idiocy at best and active abetting of the Soviets and high treason at worst.

    The left wasn’t exactly critical of Mao or Ho Chi Minh or Castro… or, for that matter, Stalin for a very long time.

  11. “The left was not “that big on actual freedom and democracy” in the past either.”

    Good observation and I concede the point. The left did have a blind eye when looking at so-called peoples’ democracies.

    I would proffer expectations as a mitigating factor. Few expected a Somoza or Batista to be anything other than a right wing dictator while many had great hopes for Castro.

  12. For a first-person account from the upper-class, left-leaning elites: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

    (Yeah, it’s a comic.)

  13. The alternative is partition. I’m not arguing in favour of this, but the idea would be that the Hijaz has always tended toward moderate strains of Islam, so you would want to see a moderate republic of Hijaz or a Hashemite Kingdom of Hijaz. The oil-producing regions are mostly in Shiite areas, so you would break that off and have another anti-Sunni country with oil. What’s leftover, Najd plus whatever scraps, would be completely feckless, denied the religious prestige of the two holy cities and the wealth of oil revenues. How possible would a moderate Hijaz be? Probably less impossible than a moderate regime based in Riyadh, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to actually possible. How possible would a Shiite state in eastern Arabia be? Can’t see why it wouldn’t work if you set them up with control of the oil. Presumably it would ally itself with Iran. How that serves American interests is far from obvious.

  14. don’t see why it’s not possible, SA is not a nation-state, but the personal property of the saud clan. it’s constituent parts don’t hold together naturally. the hijaz was traditionally independent and distinct as you note.

  15. “The left did have a blind eye when looking at so-called peoples’ democracies.”

    The non-communist left (and even – or, perhaps, specially – the “heretical” communist left, like trotskyists, council communist, etc) was usually very critical about the “peoples’ democracies” (although, for some mysterious reason, Cuba, China and Vietnam usually had a free pass), much more than the mainstream conservatives about right-wing dictatorships (like Franco, Rhee or Pinochet, usually praised as strong anticommunists). Note that, during the Cold War, the centre-left was usually pro-Westerm, pro-NATO (in Europe, sometimes perhaps even more than the right-wing – I think that in a French election the Maoist supported De Gaulle because Mitterrand was “the candidate of american imperialism”, or something like that), etc., while the small-c-communist-but-not-big-c-Communist left spent perhaps more time attacking Moscow than Washington (and don’t forget that “Animal Farm” and “1984” were from a left-wing radical).

  16. I so cannot wait until we (the US) can get out of this whole empire business.

    Johan Galtung’s predictions of the fall of the US Empire by 2020 leave me hopeful, considering he was correct about the fall of the Soviet Empire.

  17. The non-communist left (and even – or, perhaps, specially – the “heretical” communist left, like trotskyists, council communist, etc) was usually very critical about the “peoples’ democracies”

    Yeah, all five of those guys were really principled.

  18. I would proffer expectations as a mitigating factor. Few expected a Somoza or Batista to be anything other than a right wing dictator while many had great hopes for Castro.

    There was no “mitigating factor.” They chose a side. That’s all.

    Mao didn’t say “When you see a peasant carrying a bag, help him,” because helping other people was the goal of the communists. He said to do that “to earn the support of the peasants [against our enemies].” Once the said enemies were defeated, however, that bag-carrying for peasant thing kinda went away, didn’t it?

  19. What would the alternative be? An alliance with Iran isn’t possible for domestic and regional reasons, and I think it’s not entirely clear it would have better outcomes.

    Well, the Vietnamese are today our friends (against the Chinese) in the South China Sea. I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t happen with Iran. A point in Iran’s favor would be that ordinary Iranians probably have a far better view of Americans than ordinary Saudis do.

  20. P.S. I really, really hope that the U.S. and our allies in the region have a plan in place for what will happen with Mecca and Medina if the predictions ever do come true and the Saudi regime starts to fall apart. That would create the obvious danger of an AQ or ISIS-oriented government emerging with control of the holy cities and oil.

    I suppose the simplest thing to do about the former would be for Egypt to invade and unofficially annex Hijaz in the name of safeguarding the holy sites on behalf of the Muslim world. Or Jordan invades, either way is fine. The U.S. connives to help them in whatever way can be done fairly quietly, so it doesn’t look like a Crusade for PR purposes, although of course the bad guys will say it regardless. While we’re at it, I assume we’d be trying to help the Arabian Shiites seize control of the oil, which might not be a really good thing but would definitely be better than crazed Sunni fundamentalists having it.

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