Satellite image of the bombed Saudi oil facilities

Many have recently accused Trump of acting as a pawn for Saudi Arabia’s interests, after Trump said the US was “locked and loaded” waiting on “confirmation” that a drone attack on an oil facility on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia was launched by Iran. The bombing caused Saudi Arabia to shut down “about half of its oil outputs.” But, as with so many US government claims, there’s very little merit to prove Iran was behind the attack: the Houthis, engaged in a brutal Yemeni civil war while simultaneously fighting off Saudi aggression, have the capability, have claimed responsibility, and have been attacking many Saudi oil pipelines recently. So it would certainly fit a plausible pattern.

At first glance, it may seem reasonable to accuse Trump of peddling Saudi interests. Tulsi Gabbard said Trump is acting as “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” which appears to be a common sentiment on the left. After all, why would he say we are “locked and loaded” ready to fight on behalf of the Saudis? It’s not like the U.S. was attacked, and there were no casualties in Buqayq, where the oil facilities were located.

But there is reason to believe this view is misguided: instead, Saudi Arabia acts as a US client state, and has since its inception, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out. In order to establish this fact, we need to lay out some basic guidelines as to what makes a state a US client. A list of qualifications from Chomsky and Ed Herman’s work The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism proves sufficient:

The parent-client relationship is one of superiority-inferiority, dominance-subordination, and control-dependency. It arises commonly from sheer economic-military strength and interest by one power relative to its neighbors, and the relationship often emerges without the overt use of force. Among the 26 planets, for a substantial number the governments were installed by direct or indirect action of the sun [the US]; and for all of them the sun is recognized to be the friendly superpower within whose orbit the planets move, protected from external or internal threats by the military and economic might of the sun.. (pg. 411)

Further, the authors present more factors which qualify a client state: military aid, “client military trained” by the United States, and “police aid or training to clients.” Notice these qualifications do not say that the country has to be entirely reliant upon the US aid to stay afloat. So, while it is true that Saudi Arabia could stand on its own two feet without US aid, this does not mean they do not operate as a client or that they don’t operate under the US sphere of influence. Likewise, being a client does not mean being directly controlled through force by the US either, as quoted above.

Now, let us go through the provisions. Much of the modern Saudi state was largely established through American development, as outlined by Lawrence Wright in his work The Looming Tower:

Americans built the Saudi petroleum industry; American construction companies, such as Bechtel, built much of the country’s infrastructure; Howard Hughes’s company, Trans World Airlines, built the Saudi passenger air service; the Ford Foundation modernized Saudi government; the U.S. Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry. Meantime, Saudi Arabia sent its top students to American universities — more than thirty thousand per year during the 1970s and 1980s. In return, more than 200,000 Americans have lived and worked in the Kingdom since the discovery of oil. Saudi Arabia needed American investment, management, technology, and education to guide it into the modern world. America, for its part, became increasingly reliant on Saudi oil to sustain its economic and military supremacy. (pg.187)

In fact, the (formerly) US-controlled Arab-American Oil Company (Aramco), now under official Saudi control, played a huge role in the development of the nation. While the US has become much less reliant on Saudi oil in the past decade, more than doubling its domestic oil production in the past 15 years, a relationship as significant as this does not disappear overnight, and also does not occur out of a good American heart. The US still shells out millions of dollars in bi- and multilateral grants to Saudi Arabia each year for purposes such as “administrative and programmatic support for international law enforcement training and prosecutorial assistance training activities,” according to official government documents.

The foreign training of Saudi law enforcement has largely been shifted to the UK in recent years, but the domestic training of police still has nontrivial US funding. Indeed, just this year the US has recently started sending troops to Saudi Arabia again while the Saudis opened up one of their military bases for joint US-Saudi control, after the US decided to pull troops from the country following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

As for the function of the US being “recognized to be the friendly superpower within whose orbit [Saudi Arabia] move[s], protected from external or internal threats by the military and economic might of the [US],” we saw examples of this during the Iraq-Kuwait war in 1990; the US intelligence support and in-air re-fueling of Saudi jets in its war on Yemen, the worst humanitarian catastrophe on earth; the selling of billions of dollars of arms to the Saudis; and now with the US threatening to attack Iran after the most recent Houthi-bombing of Saudi oil fields.

It is worthwhile to examine the media coverage of such a so-called client state, which employs torture and spreads Salfi-jihadi fundamentalism throughout the region, and of which 15 of the 19 plane hijackers on 9/11 were citizens. Chomsky and Herman put forth that “client fascist tokenism is often a collaborative effort of dictator and U.S. sponsor, both concerned with improving an image without changing anything fundamental. The Free Press can be counted on to accept these tokens at face value and without analysis or protest.” Recently, the Free Press had a moral outrage after the state-sanctioned Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, largely because Khashoggi was part of Western elite society, and that the circumstances in which he was murdered were so insolent, that it would be hard to ignore. Yet, the Saudis have not changed anything fundamental: they still imprison dissident journalists, are still waging a war and famine on Yemen, and still use torture.

The American government is already engaging brutal economic warfare against Iran, with Trump enacting “the strongest sanctions ever put on a country” on Iran, which will continue to kill thousands of Iranians every year, as U.S. economic sanctions are designed to do. Iran has committed the crime of expanding its influence throughout the region, and this is simply unacceptable. If the U.S. engages Iran militarily, it will not be because Trump is Saudi Arabia’s bitch — nor will it be because Saudi Arabia dictates American foreign policy, as Ilhan Omar implied — it will be because the U.S. national security state has a geopolitical interest in attacking Iran.