Not much has changed from this fateful statement.
"I hereby find the defense of Saudi Arabia vital to the defense of the United States", declared President FDR on 18 Feb 1943, two days after he was warned that Britain had its eyes on Saudi oil.
So began the era we now find ourselves in.
Finally, after two days sailing, the Murphy docked with the Quincy, and the historic meeting between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud took place. The two leaders hit it off: the king noted that they were both ageing and walking badly, both liked farming and were heads of state with "grave responsibilities".
"You are luckier that I because you can still walk on your legs," Roosevelt told Ibn Saud, who replied, "No, my friend, you are the more fortunate. Your wheelchair will take you wherever you want to go and you know you will get there. My legs are less reliable every day and are getting weaker." At which Roosevelt presented the overjoyed king with a spare wheelchair, an identical copy of the one he was sitting in. That wheelchair is still in the possession of the Arab royal family today.
The connections continue to this very day. Roosevelt’s grandson Hall Delano Roosevelt works for the chief executive of the US-Saudi Arabian Business Council.
It’s easy to see how the king and the emperor would have got on.
I oftentimes wonder how history would have unfolded had Roosevelt lived. Would Roosevelt have kept his promise to the Arabs that America wouldn’t recognize Israel? We’ll never know. That fell to the mobbed up Missourian Harry S. Truman who seemingly backed the Jewish state under some sense of distress.
His daughter Margaret Daniel Truman said he feared assassination lest he fail to back the creation of the state of Israel. Here’s The New York Times reporting on it back in 1972.
“The so‐called Stern gang” of Zionist terrorists tried to assassinate President Truman by letter‐bomb in 1947, according to a new biography written by Mr. Truman's daughter.
Mrs. Margaret Truman Daniel writes that “a number of cream‐colored envelopes, about eight by six inches, arrived in the White House, addressed to the President and various members of the staff.” They were found to contain “powdered gelignite, a pencil battery and a detonator rigged to explode the gelignite when the envelope was opened.”
Every regime, if you take your Machiavelli seriously, is founded on force and fraud. And yet we hold the Saudis to a very high standard—one we exempt other countries from. Yes, the Khasshogi killing was atrocious but so, too, were the years of quiet, stealth assassinations by the Israel or her mob allies. New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman wrote an entire 750 page book — Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations — and still managed to leave a lot out.
More recently Palestinian-American Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head. The Arab street is right to note that this is disgusting.
And when you consider that Khashoggi’s uncle was a Saudi arms dealer and that these things tend to run in families, the picture gets a lot more complicated a lot more quickly. Do you really think he lived in that nice house writing $100 op-eds for the Washington Post?
We have a hard time talking about millennial leadership — or tolerating it when it comes up in democratic societies.
Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin was under fire for … dancing and lost election despite negotiating her country into NATO.
Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz was deeply corrupt with ties to Russian oligarchs. He later went to go work for Peter Thiel before being fired from that job and teaming up with the guys behind NSO Group and Jared Kushner.
President Nayib Bukele seems like he’s taking over MS-13 when he isn’t being Bibi’s proxy in Central America.
If we look at these anti-millennial politics it is more than a touch odd that Saudi Arabia — where the media age is 32.4 — should come up for opprobrium singularly. This is a kind of double standard and it needs to be called out.
I think there’s a case to be made that American millennials should build their own relationships with countries with similar median profiles. Turkey, which I have written about elsewhere, is similarly young. Maybe we should stop taking China and Japan, aging as they are, as serious countries with a future?
Seeing this way, one person’s shakedown of wealthy family members could be another person’s mandated generational wealth transfer. Are you really arguing that all the Saudis were paying their fair share of tax?
The problem with Mohammed bin Salman could well be that he doesn’t have his Getty or his FDR. He needs a dance partner and the cringe Gen Xers or Hillary Clinton foreign policy types aren’t going to get it done.
When you take it seriously an AUKUS and Gulf state alliance would be a very powerful network—potentially unrivaled.
And it seems to be a relatively undeveloped one—at least in the modern era. Was this lack of alliance kept this way by the Israelis, Russians and Chinese who knew that the Arabs would be better partners than they were?
Many of my friends might rightly note that there’s the pressing matter of September 11th. But do we really know how involved Saudi Arabia was in those terrorist attacks?
As time has gone on it’s becoming clearer and clearer that there was a Likud-Russian-Chinese involvement in September 11th. Qui bono from all those Middle East wars? The Arab powers were scapegoated by 9/11 and then there were all those wars justified against their weaker players.
Are we really not going to talk about the inconvenient irony that the Khashoggis had their own ties to Osama bin Laden?
****
There is a future where Saudi Arabia is one of the most important countries in the world, not because of its oil, but because of its investments, infrastructure and network.
The model to build this future already exists with Norway: export oil while going electric. But the Saudis can go further still: export oil, go electric, and invest the capital in AUKUS tech and infrastructure. This goal is a much more ambitious, and really the best future for the Saudis, the Middle East, and the world--especially when compared to the trajectory that they're currently upon.
Let's face it: by entertaining Silicon Valley, Xi's CCP, the Kushner family and Likud, and the rest of the assorted mobster networks, you will gradually transition out of an oil-centered economy—but it will be merely diversifying into more mob activities: from oil trafficking, into money laundering, arms trafficking, and surely drug trafficking as well. All with the ultimate effect of becoming yet another pariah mob state and China's export slave—just like Iran.
In fact I'm afraid the money laundering part has already been seeping in with the visiting Silicon Valley partners, especially Andreessen-Horowitz. They first wanted you to invest in crypto, then NFTs, now it's the AI grift. As they keep running out of options, maybe they'll tell you to buy some Florida (or Malibu) mansion, or maybe even another superyacht, or a shitty painting (not an NFT), or maybe Cristiano Ronaldo himself. To go along with these things is to be patsies for Chinese money launderers and Russian-Jewish oligarchs.
Is this really progress for Saudi Arabia?
The thing is, as it should be obvious, they need you far more than you need them. It's not just that you won't make any money with these guys--definitely not more than you'd make just from selling your oil--and it's not just because of their liquidity crunch. But because they're deathly afraid of your capital going to productive ends, such as developing the tech that would make all these money laundering frauds impossible.
Forget about "software eating the world." Much unlike SV, where there is no tech or power, and it's all deception, investing in AUKUS tech would be ultimate transparency, and all the tech actually works and as it takes over the world.
Imagine a future in which Saudi money built the satellite infrastructure to identify the very best resources all over the world. Imagine a future in which Saudi Arabia was a valuable security partner once again.
And make no mistake, these Silicon Valley frauds are deathly afraid of you leaving them behind and joining this effort. That's why the Chisraelis and Likudniks want to trap you, not least by banging on about the killing of Khashoggi. They want to make the world think there's no going back for MBS, and so you can precisely not do what we just described and you can only do business with the Chinese and Israelis or the Iranians.
That's what this is all really about. But they couldn't be more wrong about this. Let me tell you for whom there's no turning back: Bibi, Xi, Putin—these guys are dug in forever. They won’t have a happy ending. Age is cruel to the old, especially to the dictator with no succession plan. We all know this. Do you really think these guys know what they're doing? Does it look like they know what they're doing?
They want to take Saudi Arabia down with them, but here's their problem--MBS is not even Gen X, he's a Millennial.
He will, or at least can, be around for a long time after these guys die or fall from power. No, MBS's book has very much not been written--at most we have a few pages in the introduction. Far from the slow, tragic epilogue of the aforementioned septuagenarians.
The best part is that MBS really can't fit into this crowd even if he wanted to (and they very much want him to fit). He's just too Millennial, too forward-looking. Even Trump, who's the coolest of the Boomers, looks stale and weird next to him. It's doomed to always be closer to an awkward family reunion rather than a close-knit club. And at any point, you can decide to ditch them. You're not slaves of your past or your mistakes, nor are you defined by them.
If you realize that there is another future, which is possible if and only if you go with AUKUS, you will realize that you can fly past all of these losers very fast. You have all you need, all the cash, all the know how, you just need to renew the connections to the AUKUS network, and Saudi Arabia grows from there.
Once you go down the AUKUS road, which is after all how Saudi Arabia and Aramco got created in the first place, with the help of personal Anglo advisors like the elder Philby and eccentric Getty, of course—you must leave behind the old networks and realize that here we base our trust on shared visions of the future which together to achieve.
Of course, they will all try to stop you from going with AUKUS. But don't worry, as we said, they need you, and us, more than we need them. Here's where deterrence is important. They must let you do whatever you want with your capital—if they know what's good for them. Or else we will make their life very miserable.
And we have your back. We are at present rolling up these networks and their agents all over the world. Join us.
We can always say more about this, but first, it's time to make some decisions about the future we can and can't have together. You're not doomed to be another "junior partner" to China (to use less vulgar language). You don’t have to submit to the Israeli nonsense. You are in a perfect position be a key world player along with the AUKUS alliance—where we're equals, where we're a community. We might even need a new acronym. After all, Saudi Arabia was started as an Anglo-American project. You might even say there's a special relationship.