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What does Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia mean?

By Kostas Raptis

February 14, 1945 is a day that sealed the face of our world to this day. This is the day on which in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal the then US President Franklin Roosevelt (who was to die two weeks later) aboard the battleship USS Quincy met with the monarch of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz bin Saud. Roosevelt had just left Yalta, Crimea, where a summit with Churchill and Stalin had drawn the contours of the world as the era dawned on the looming end of World War II. The day before, the American president had met in Quincy with the King of Egypt, Farouk, and the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, in a practical demonstration of the enormous importance that the US attached to the control of the wider Middle East from now on. But the most productive meeting was with Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who just 13 years earlier had conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula, with discreet British support, establishing the state that bore his family’s name.

The American president and the leader of the House of Saud could not agree on the then highly topical issue of facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, where the state of Israel was soon to be established. But they agreed on something much more important: the formation of a strategic relationship, in the context of which the American side assumed the role of security guarantor of the kingdom, in return for ensuring stable oil flows.

The Great Bitter Lake Accord was to deepen further in the decades that followed, when the two sides worked together to repel the spread of nationalist, anti-imperialist and leftist ideas in the Arab-Muslim world, while the exit from the Bretton Woods system in 1971 marked the arrival of “petrodollar”, where the real reflection of the US currency as an international reserve was now its exclusive use in oil trading, with the recycling of Arab surpluses in US securities.

This historical period is probably ending before our eyes.

Saudi Arabia is multiplying the messages that it intends to move in a spirit of strategic autonomy, no longer being a “given” for Washington.

Contributing to this is that the powerful man of the kingdom has been for eight years Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was not shaped by the studies established for other members of the royal family in the West and turned directly against his relatives, like the previous Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, with particularly cultivated ties to Washington. The impulsive and uninhibited Mohammed bin Salman knows that he has no sympathy in the US (only the case of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is typical) and does not trust it in view of the final leap to absolute power.

However, the “big picture” contributes to mutual alienation even more: the decline of American power is objective, while ongoing Eurasian integration offers new opportunities to the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, which even express an interest in joining the Russo-Chinese-inspired Shanghai Pact. typical that, despite Joe Biden’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, the kingdom remained outside the anti-Russian sanctions and adheres to the oil export quotas resulting from its cooperation with Russia in the framework of OPEC+.

And symbolic validation of the attempted shift toward strategic autonomy comes with Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s just-announced visit to Saudi Arabia next week.

The reception accorded to the Beijing strongman is said to be as glowing as that given to Donald Trump as US president in May 2017.

For two decades now, Sino-Saudi relations, mainly economic, have been constantly developing. China is the kingdom’s number one trading partner and the largest buyer of Saudi oil. And Mohammed bin Salman’s futuristic plan for the creation of the new city of Neom, near the border with Jordan, needs investment, while the Red Sea is an area of ​​particular Chinese interest, judging by the fact that at its exit, in Djibouti, is the only China’s military base outside the border.

And most importantly: transactions are not marked by political “asterisks”. China has remained silent on the Khashoggi affair, on Mohammed bin Salman’s war against Yemen and on the blockade of Qatar by its neighbors. Accordingly, the Riyadh has refrained from denouncing Beijing for its treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in western China.

The eastern end of Asia, where the world’s manufacturing center is located, talks to the western end of the continent, where the world’s oil production center is, in the absence of any third parties. All that remains is for them to expand their transactions outside of the dollar in order to destabilize the world order that emerged in the Great Bitter Lake.

Source: Capital

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