For more than two years, the United States has had no ambassador in Saudi Arabia. During that hiatus, a once robust and cooperative Saudi-American relationship withered. Calls to increase oil production that had previously been answered fell on deaf ears. Beijing, not Washington, brokered the recent Saudi-Iranian detente. American efforts to topple the Assad regime collapsed when Saudi Arabia engineered Syria's return to the Arab League.
Fortunately, a new American ambassador has just arrived in Riyadh. Michael Ratney is a highly respected professional with years of diplomatic experience in the Middle East and Washington. To advance American interests in Riyadh he will need to deal with a diminished Saudi-American relationship and a greatly changed Saudi society.
Saudi Arabia's "Vision 2030" reform program has been far more successful than the Arab Spring uprisings in transforming the positions of women and religion. Aggressive affirmative action programs have doubled the female labor force participation rate in only five years. Saudi Arabia now has its first female newspaper editors, diplomats, TV anchors and public prosecutors. Women now head the Saudi stock exchange and sit on the board of Saudi Aramco. In a nation where women were previously banned from becoming lawyers, engineers, or geologists this is a noteworthy change.
Nothing handicapped Saudi women more than the guardianship system under which a woman needed written permission from her father or husband to travel abroad, open a bank account, attend university, or even have a caesarean delivery. King Salman has largely dismantled this system.
The king and his son Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman have sharply curtailed the authority of the religious police who no longer enforce gender segregation in restaurants or impose conservative dress codes. Valentine's Day is no longer banned as a pagan holiday and the amount of religious material in school curricula has been reduced.
Those who argue that these changes are long overdue have a valid point, but those who say they are insignificant are ill-informed, especially when Saudi reforms are compared to what went on in Egypt under its Muslim Brotherhood government or is now happening in Afghanistan under the Taliban. These changes are consistent with the policies long promoted by successive American administrations and should make it easier to deal with Saudi Arabia.
But, should dealing with Saudi Arabia still matter to an America transitioning away from fossil fuels? The short answer is yes. Contrary to popular perceptions, global oil demand continues to rise, perhaps not in Europe and North America, but very definitely in the rest of the world. While the United States may not depend on imported oil, the economies of our major trading partners including China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan certainly do.
Saudi Arabia accounts for roughly 20 percent of global oil reserves and 10 percent of global oil production. It is the only nation that can quickly bring large volumes of oil into the market by government fiat. How it chooses to deploy this spare capacity affects inflation and economic growth globally, even in the United States.
In addition to energy security, Washington and Riyadh share many other policy objectives including ending Yemen's civil war, containing Iran's nuclear ambitions, and maintaining political stability in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan. America benefits from Saudi Arabia linking its currency to the dollar and selling its oil largely in dollars. The Saudis recognize that most of their sophisticated military equipment continues to come from the United States.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict is yet another shared Saudi-American goal. The Saudis value political stability and would like to see this chronic source of regional instability eliminated. In the past kings Fahd and Abdullah used their influence to shift the Arab consensus toward peace with Israel.
More recently, King Salman ended a 70-year-old ban on Israeli aircraft transiting Saudi airspace and quietly supported the Abraham Accords. When the American Embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, there were louder protests in the European press than in Saudi Arabia. Only last week the Jewish News Service reported that the Saudi Government deserved kudos for its "multiyear, systematic removal of nearly all anti-Semitic content from school textbooks."
Finally, the United States has a very clear interest in the political stability of Saudi Arabia. Should the Saudi monarchy collapse, it would not be replaced by a secular, democratic government, but by something resembling Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Iran's Ayatollahs, Iraq's ISIS or Afghanistan's Taliban. These are the actors with the muscle and organization to topple Arab governments. Moreover, the collapse of the Saudi monarchy would probably precipitate similar events in all of the other Arab Gulf monarchies.
Despite these shared interests, Saudi Arabia has begun to adopt a much more assertive and independent foreign policy. The young generation of leaders emerging in Riyadh do not share their fathers' commitment to the Saudi-American relationship. They recognize that China, not the United States, is now their largest trading partner. They appreciate that co-operation with Russia, not the United States, renewed OPEC's ability to move oil markets. They have come to doubt America's commitment to Saudi security and to recognize that Moscow and Beijing have more influence in Tehran than Washington.
The long era during which Saudi Arabia had no diplomatic relations with either China or Russia is over and not coming back. Both Moscow and Beijing now have their own special relationships with Riyadh. Washington will have to compete with them for influence.
That is not an insurmountable challenge. The United States still possesses deep reservoirs of good will in Saudi Arabia. Many of the economic, educational, security, and personal relationships built over three generations of cooperation remain solid. Clearly acknowledging the progress Saudi society has made, avoiding an excessive focus on imposing our own cultural values and concentrating on future cooperation rather than past mistakes is a good way to start rebuilding a relationship that served us well in the past and will probably be needed in the future.
David H. Rundell is the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads and a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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