A token of Saudi resentment was on display last week when Mr. Obama was received by the governor of Riyadh rather than by the king — a rare snub for a sitting American president. As the visit concluded, American officials asserted that the meeting had “cleared the air,” but the signs of a rift that predates the Obama presidency were fully apparent.
.. Yet there is truth to the Saudis’ sense that the Obama administration has attenuated the alliance. The Saudis were shocked when America withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2010 and left Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a pro-Iranian Shiite, in charge as prime minister. This abandoned Iraq’s Sunnis to the sectarian Mr. Maliki’s mercy, which indirectly abetted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq.
.. King Salman and his son Mohammed, who is deputy crown prince and minister of defense, are the most hawkish and ambitious rulers in modern Saudi history.
.. Saudi Arabia will not be able to militarily dominate Iran: It has neither the manpower and the expertise nor the broad network of proxy forces that the Iranians have.
Major Oil Exporters Fail to Agree on Production Freeze
Analysts thought that a way could be found to allow for the Iranian increases, but Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who has become the crucial power broker in the country, appears to have reduced the room to maneuver with statements making Saudi participation contingent on full compliance.
What puzzles analysts is how Saudi Arabia and other countries could have scheduled this meeting if they knew it was doomed to failure. After all, the idea was to calm the markets, not roil them.
.. The Saudis, analysts say, increasingly seem to accept that oil prices are no longer something they can control. Prince Mohammed, who has authority over the Saudi oil industry, warned that the kingdom could increase production by a million barrels per day in the coming months if it chose.
.. With low production costs, estimated at $3.50 to $5 per barrel, Saudi Arabia can compete on price with any producer. So can Russia, which can produce oil for about $4 per barrel, according to IHS.
.. For instance, he has said he plans a public listing of the national oil company, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil-producing company. A public listing might require the company to pay more attention to the requirements of outside investors than to other OPEC members.
.. Russia has plenty of reason to go along with a freeze. Russia’s economy, which depends heavily on oil revenues, is in recession. The Kremlin’s desperation for higher prices is palpable, with the country committed to two wars, in Ukraine and Syria. At home, wages are being cut, bringing early signs of social unrest ahead of a parliamentary election in September.
.. Since the Soviet period, OPEC has looked on Russia as a freeloader on price-boosting production cuts: Russia benefited but never joined in, citing technical problems of closing wells bored into permafrost and high capital outlays for pipelines in Eurasia. But Russia may not have to make any sacrifice to go along with a freeze. Oil production is at a post-Soviet high and is not expected to go much higher in the short term.
Willful Blindness and Our Saudi ‘Friends’
When 9/11 finally happened, killing nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans, al-Qaeda credited none other than the Blind Sheikh with issuing the fatwa — the sharia edict — that authorized the attack. We had imprisoned him, but we had not stopped him.
.. American counterterrorism, even seven years after 9/11 (and fully 15 years after the jihadists declared war by bombing the World Trade Center), had bored its head ever deeper in the sand. It consciously avoided the central truths driving the terrorist threat against the United States. The most significant of these is that violent jihadism is the inexorable result of the vibrance in Islam of sharia supremacism — a scripturally-rooted summons to Muslims to strive for conquest over infidels until Allah’s law (sharia) is established everywhere on earth.
.. Since 1993, the bipartisan American ruling class, throughout administrations of both parties, has refused to acknowledge, much less grapple with, this central truth of the threat we face. It has insisted, against fact and reason, that Islam is a monolithic “religion of peace,” and therefore that there can be no causal connection between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims. It has fraudulently maintained that jihadist violence is not jihadist at all — after all, we are to understand jihad (notwithstanding its roots as a belligerent concept, as holy war to establish sharia) to be a noble internal struggle to become a better person, to vanquish corruption
.. This deceit at the core of American counterterrorism efforts has led seamlessly to other frauds. Among the most grievous is this one: Saudi Arabia is a key counterterrorism ally of the United States.
.. The government must disclose the 28 pages of the 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks that it has shamefully withheld from the public for 14 years. Those pages outline Saudi complicity in the jihad.
.. The Saudis are the world’s chief propagator of sharia supremacism, sharia being the law of the Sunni kingdom. In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, a literalist interpretation of Islam rooted in scripture dating back 1,400 years, is the dominant belief system.
.. In Sarasota, Fla., Abdulazziz al-Hijji, a well-connected Saudi oil executive, abandoned his home with his wife, Arnoud, and their small children in August 2001, just weeks before the attacks. They fled to Saudi Arabia. The departure was obviously abrupt: The family left behind three cars, furniture, jewelry, food, etc. The al-Hijji home on Escondito Circle was owned by Arnoud’s father, an adviser to Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, a nephew of then-King Fahd.
.. A 2002 report pried from the FBI indicates that a member of the al-Hijji family attended Huffman Aviation, the same Venice, Fla., flight school as the 9/11 hijacker-pilots who attacked the Twin Towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi.
.. As I’ve outlined here, Awlaki was thus placed under arrest when he arrived at JFK International Airport in New York on October 10, 2002, on a flight from Riyadh. Remarkably, the Justice Department intervened to direct that he be un-arrested and allowed to enter freely . . . in the company of the Saudi government representative who was conveniently on hand to assist him.
.. In 1972, in cooperation with the Saudi government, the Muslim Brotherhood established the World Assembly of Muslim Youth in Riyadh. WAMY’s stated purpose was to “arm the Muslim youth with full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other systems.”
.. Washington’s bipartisan insistence that the Saudi regime is a vital counterterrorism ally of the United States is a delusional byproduct of its willful blindness to sharia supremacism — the ideological driver of violent jihadism and the oil-rich kingdom’s most consequential export. The point of the post-9/11 investigations was to hold every culpable actor and negligent government agency accountable. No American citizen or government official, not even the sitting president, was spared. It is time for Washington to stop running interference for the Saudis while the Saudis run interference for the jihadists. At long last, let’s see the 28 pages.
Global Trump
But it’s hard to support a case that the U.S. is spending too much to defend the global order that it built after the Second World War. The U.S., Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Australia—the rich inner circle of what used to be called the Free World—today constitute almost sixty per cent of the world’s economy. According to the World Bank, in 2014 the U.S. spent about three and a half per cent of its G.D.P. on the military. That’s down from more than five per cent during the late Cold War. As an investment in shared prosperity (or, if you prefer, global hegemony), the running cost of American military power may be one of history’s better bargains.
.. It would be better if those allies spent a little more, but it’s not obvious that America’s forthcoming global challenges—such as managing China’s rise and Russia’s revanchism—would be advanced by more German and Japanese militarism. Because the U.S. military is so much larger and more effective than any other, and because militaries are so hierarchical, it is more efficient to defend the core alliances disproportionately, from Washington. In any event, defense treaties among democratic societies are really compacts among peoples, through their elected governments, to sacrifice and even die for one another if circumstances require it. Demeaning those commitments as if they were transactional protection rackets is corrosive and self-defeating.
.. Saudi Arabia already devotes about a tenth of its G.D.P. to defense, one of the highest rates in the world.
.. As Pericles reportedly said of an Athenian empire, “It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.”
.. We do need to rebuild bridges, airports, railways, and telecommunications. But defense spending isn’t stopping us from doing so; the problem is the Republican anti-tax extremists in Congress, who refuse to either raise revenues or take advantage of historically low long-term interest rates.