The Saudi Ellipsis

Silence can say more than words. In President Barack Obama’s second speech on the USA’s new Arab policy, there was not a single mention of Saudi Arabia, a crucial country in the ever-changing face of this vast region that has been subjected to a geopolitical earthquake for the last five months.

The Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, was warned to lead the transition or to go. There were also warnings for Yemen and Bahrain, the small emirate where Saudi troops have acted like the Soviet army in satellite nations during the Cold War. One of the most solemn parts of the speech was for Palestinians and Israelis, who were warned to stop clashing heads instead of sitting down to negotiate peace and the mutual recognition of two sovereign states, viable and safe for both groups of people. But there wasn’t a single word for the Saudi autocracy, a regime as corrupt and cruel as they come, financer of the most reactionary and dangerous streams of Islam, and the homeland of Osama bin Laden, the emir of the mega-terrorism organized by al-Qaida in reaction to the close historic alliance between his country and the United States.

Saudi Arabia has every cause to become an enemy of Obama, and is even quietly organizing an alternative to Arab revolutions. Its extensive royal family was left traumatized by the fall of Mubarak, from which they deduced that they could no longer rely on support from Washington. The Saudis are very attached to the status quo, such as the Israeli right, so the message of Obama’s sympathy towards democratic revolutions and his idea that it is precisely this type of status quo that is unsustainable causes them to break out in hives.

Obama’s silence reflects what remains of the alliance between Washington and Riyadh, agreed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the founder of the kingdom, Abdelaziz Ibn Saud in 1945 in a famous meeting on board the cruiser USS Quincy, which was anchored in the Suez Canal. The agreement has given Saudi despots free reign in the Arab peninsula for the last 65 years in exchange for a guarantee on the supply and world price of petrol.

The empty space occupied by Saudi Arabia in Obama’s speech is the big innovation of this new foreign policy from the White House, which has not yet been unable to say anything about the main conservative wall and model for all the wrongdoings that Arab countries have suffered in the past 70 years. In some cases, silence is the most significant; it can also be threatening. But other silences only show the inability to formulate a single idea.