The US-Saudi relationship: too big to fail?

“Donald Trump may have cleared the high bar of uttering the most appalling remark of his presidency,” said Fred Kaplan on Slate. “Things happen,” he declared last week in response to a question about the murder of the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

This while sitting in the Oval Office next to the man whom the CIA believes ordered that killing, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. MbS, as he’s called, at least sought to “convey the impression that he knew the murder was contemptible”, describing it in the press conference as a “huge mistake”.

Not so Trump. He disparaged the dead Washington Post journalist – “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman” – and exonerated MbS: “He knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that.”

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‘Major non-Nato ally’

Trump’s “lies” about Khashoggi overshadowed a visit that benefitted Saudi Arabia more than the US, said The Washington Post. Trump agreed to sell it F-35 fighter jets and advanced AI chips, and give it “major non-Nato ally” status. In exchange, the Saudis committed to invest nearly $1 trillion in the US, although “they offered no time horizon for this far-fetched figure, which is roughly the size of their annual economic output”.

Still, it makes “cold-hearted” sense for the US to cultivate MbS, said David Ignatius in the same paper. He could rule for many decades, and his “continued success in modernising the kingdom is crucial for the future security of the Middle East”. Having neutered the religious police and "empowered” women, he’s working to export that liberalising agenda to other places, such as the West Bank and Syria.

‘Unpredictable’ US

Trump isn’t the first president to conclude that the US-Saudi relationship is “too important to let human rights get in the way”, said Joshua Keating on Vox. In 2020, Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a global “pariah”. Yet the spike in oil prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to Biden’s “infamous fist bump” with MbS in Riyadh in 2022.

Saudi Arabia, for its part, still regards America as its key defence partner, although it is forging increasingly close economic links with China and recently signed a defence pact with Pakistan. For now, the two nations feel that they need each other. In the future, though, the big question may not be whether “the US can stomach a relationship with Saudi Arabia – but whether Saudi Arabia still needs a relationship with a country as unpredictable as the US”.