Xi and Saudi crown prince look to leave the West in their dust

Amid closer ties with Beijing, Mohammed bin Salman is lining up Saudi Arabia not only to be the undisputed leader of the Arab world, but also part of a disturbing global tilt.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during the China-Arab Summit in 2022. Picture: AFP

The year 2030 is shaping up to be a bumper one for Mohammed bin Salman and a pretty miserable one for the rest of us. The 37-year-old Saudi crown prince is in Paris at the moment lobbying hard for Riyadh to be host of Expo that year. He’s already jostling to stage the World Cup. The ultimate aim: to amplify his Vision 2030, the scheme to plant a new solar-powered space-age city in the desert and usher in what could be the beginning of the reign of King MBS.

So if you’re wondering why a man with such a grim human rights record is being wooed in Europe, the answer is geopolitics. MBS, as he is known, is lining up Saudi Arabia not only to be the undisputed leader of the Arab world but also to be part of a disturbing global tilt.

The original sin was the Chinese-brokered reconciliation between Riyadh and Tehran. Supposedly a giant leap towards peace in the Middle East, it provides in fact a cash lifeline to the struggling clerical regime in Iran and acknowledges rather grimly that America’s sole remaining role in the region is limited to supplying high-tech weapons.

When Xi Jinping visits Riyadh he gets a much grander reception than Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

The main beneficiaries of the deal, it is now clear, are Saudi Arabia and China. When Xi Jinping visits Riyadh he gets a much grander reception than Joe Biden. A recent Arab-China business conference in Riyadh showed how the relationship is unfolding. About $US10 billion worth of contracts were signed: a new copper mine in the kingdom, chemical plants, construction engineering, the joint development and manufacture of Chinese electrical vehicles. Huawei, with its 5G expertise, will play a big role in the digital design of MBS’s smart city. At the conference earlier this month were Chinese companies, blacklisted by the United States, that use AI in facial recognition. The new terminals at Riyadh airport have signs in Chinese as well as Arabic and English.

This is not only about speeding up the modernisation of Saudi Arabia. It is about restructuring a relationship to exploit the perceived American decline. Saudi Arabia has become a “dialogue partner” with the Chinese-led Shanghai Co-operation Organisation; MBS is interested in joining the so-called Brics club (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which plans to price oil sales to China in yuan rather than the US dollar. Together, an old China hand tells me, “Xi and MBS have the potential to rewrite the rules of the global energy market”.

Seen through the prism of MBS’s ambition, the Saudi-Iran rapprochement seems more like a temporary political ceasefire. MBS wants 2030 to be a success. His plan is not only for a new city but a whole new space – the size of Belgium – that would reinvent Saudi Arabia as an ecologically sensitive tourist destination, a tech hub, even a global leader in the gaming and e-sports sector.

To make this plausible he needs a placid Red Sea, no maritime disruption by Iranian proxies, no Iranian cruise missiles hurtling from Yemen towards Saudi oil refineries. Why would Iran agree to restrain itself? Simply this: the regime is feeling the strain of financial siege, which is feeding public unrest. It wants the US to unfreeze billions of dollars, to stop seizing oil-bearing foreign tankers.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

According to people familiar with back-channel talks in Oman, the US might ease some sanctions if Iran agreed to restrict uranium enrichment to 60 per cent purity, some way short of the 90 per cent needed to reach weapons grade, if it promised to use the billions for humanitarian purposes and if it freed three Iranian-American prisoners.

That’s still not a return to the original Iran nuclear deal, merely an attempt to sedate the Middle East while the US and its western allies focus on the war in Ukraine. The Saudis consider the talks to be naive and have not lost their deep suspicion of the Iranian regime and its subversive power.

Israel, too, thinks – with good reason – that America is being sold a pup; that if it abandons financial leverage over the ayatollahs they will engage in even wilder flights of brinkmanship.

For MBS, though, this brief calm in relations with Iran buys him time. By 2030 he will still be only 44, at the helm of what he calculates will be a modern, thrusting kingdom with a single trusted big-power ally in China. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered about Xi locking up Uighur Muslims and Xi doesn’t seem to have been particularly moved, unlike American politicians, by the hacking-up of the Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi.

It is difficult, of course, to predict the trajectory of the relationship and how it might embolden or restrain a future King MBS. He might, with Chinese help, dabble with a civil nuclear programme in the hope that this would prod the US into being tougher with Iran. Or Chinese surveillance tech could reinforce the paranoia of MBS and turn the country into an unhappy, over-policed fortress.

Like the rest of his court, MBS will be aware that one of his predecessors on the throne, the moderniser King Faisal bin Abdulaziz, was assassinated in 1975. Faisal was moving too quickly.

MBS admires China not because it can threaten Taiwan and cause global jitters. Rather, he respects Xi’s determination to be the winner of the fourth industrial revolution and leave the West trailing in his dust cloud. War might not be on MBS’s immediate agenda - his Yemen war shows he has no talent for it - but as long as he is in harness with Xi we can expect him to be a ruthless global disruptor.

The Times