Why Saudis Don‘t Want to Pivot to China
For Saudis like me, nothing could be more disheartening than a divorce from the United States.
By Mohammed Alyahya, a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative.
Mohammed Alyahya is a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, and a former editor in chief of Al Arabiya English.
In addition to going to college and graduate school in the United States, I was lucky enough to spend part of my childhood in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington. There, I was introduced to American pastimes like playing baseball, eating turkey on Thanksgiving, and watching A Christmas Carol come December. (My siblings and I preferred the Muppets version, of course.) These days, I use the Charles Dickens story as a metaphor to describe the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Imagine the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showing us our region without U.S. technology, innovation, defense cooperation, and security relations. Imagine a region where the benefits and limits of personal freedom are not subjects to be debated by the people and their rulers—as Saudis are increasingly doing as our country reforms—but things dictated by a centralized one-party state that sees God as its enemy.
Conflating U.S. miscalculation with U.S. incapability is foolish. The world order created and long sustained by the United States can’t be destroyed by any global actor, including China. It can only be destroyed by the United States itself. For good and for ill, our two countries’ fates remain inescapably intertwined—the ultimate lesson of Dickens’s story. Hopefully, a hard look at the future the United States is creating might help dispel the ghosts that are haunting the Middle East.
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