American foreign policy has been largely entangled with its energy and monetary goals. Writes Uriel Araujo
OPEC’s largely Saudi-driven recent decision to reduce oil production is bad news for the West amid the current energy crisis and was not met well in Washington. It was seen as a kind of insult to President Joe Biden after his July visit to the kingdom. In response, three members of the House of Representatives went so far as to introduce a bill that would remove all US weapons, forces and missile defense systems from the country.
According to American journalist Karen Elliott House, the US Central Intelligence Agency’s director William Burns’ visit to Saudi Arabia in May was largely to convince Prince Mohammed to cooperate on a new oil strategy focused on increasing production to “save European nations from energy shortages”, a proposal M. K. Bhadrakumar, former Indian diplomat, interprets as a kind of a new “oil-for-security”. Moreover, the US political elite sees this “betrayal” as a sign that the Saudi authorities in Riyadh actually chose to side with Moscow. Thus, this new development has angered Washington’s lawmakers to the point of making some of them call into question the whole US-Saudi relationship. For decades, such a relationship has been based on the concept of oil for security.
In fact, since the final days of World War II, when US President Roosevelt met with King Abdulaziz bin Saud in the Suez Canal, Washington’s policy for the Middle East has been focused on guaranteeing the free flow of hydrocarbons as Saudi-American bilateral relations have been based on this very premise. Ironically, the United State’s pursuit of energy security in the Middle East region by militarization ended up causing the very opposite of it: Middle Eastern insecurity. In any case, Riyadh for decades granted US companies oil extraction and exploration priority in return for American protection.
The late American sociologist Charles Tilly, back in his 1985 essay (“War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”), famously described modern Western nation-states as quintessentially “protection rackets”, which, so the analogy goes, offer a “double-edged protection”, by producing both the “shield” against danger and the very danger they claim to fight. Jacob Mundy, a Colgate University associate professor, argues that by “posing as the protector of the global economy’s most essential energy resource”, Washington was thus able to “extract geopolitical power from Middle Eastern oil”, as the resulting Middle Eastern insecurity has allowed Western oil industries “to derive economic power from this politically manufactured scarcity.”
There are signs this state of affairs could change soon. The Middle East’s geopolitics is transforming – and it turns out Biden’s foreign policy has largely been a disaster. While Washington perceives a Saudi “siding” with Russia (and/or with a Chinese-Russian “bloc”), the reality is that we are now potentially entering a more complex and nuanced age of a non-alignment and multi-alignment, as exemplified by Cairo’s nuclear cooperation with Moscow for Egypt has managed to balance its relationship with both Russia and the US.
From an American perspective, however, the very fact that Iran has joined the Eurasian Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the Saudi kingdom and other Gulf states have become dialogue partners too is worrisome. In addition, the Saudi-Iranian dialogue, albeit slowly, continues. Riyadh’s nuclear program also is progressing and is clearly a sign of an emerging Saudi-Sino-Pakistan alliance. Moreover, amid a rise in commodities which is increasingly seen as a product of the West’s sanctions policies, emerging powers are looking for alternatives and parallel mechanisms. In this context, Saudi Arabia (as well as Turkey and Egypt) are considering joining the BRICS group.
All such developments, which include a new de-dollarization trend, as seen in the recent Beijing-Riyadh cooperation, can impact petrodollar as foreseen by Putin back in 2016, on the sidelines of the G20 Hangzhou summit, notes Bhadrakumar. The petrodollar has been, he writes, “a robust pillar of the Western financial system”, and an understanding between Moscow and Riyadh “holds the potential to completely transform the geopolitical alignments in the Middle East.” In other words, as Bhadrakumar writes, more than merely “a blow to Biden’s presidency”, the recent events, including OPEC’s cuts, are a potential blow to the US-Saudi relationship and to the Western global system itself.
The United States is losing the economic war it wages against Russia and it cannot win the energy war. Since the 1970s, the price of oil has been determined in dollars and the US has largely weaponized this currency. Thus, as we can see both in Europe and in Africa, American aggressive foreign policies have been intensely entangled with energy and economic/monetary goals, and the Atlantic superpower for long has advanced such policies to its best interests in detriment of its own allies. However, as the new OPEC decision goes to show, the times are changing.
Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
