MBS’s Vanity Projects Are Bleeding Saudi Arabia Dry
My latest column in World Politics Review
Two words stood out last week when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman triumphantly visited Washington, where he was feted by President Donald Trump at the White House: “Things happen.” That was how Trump dismissed a question from a reporter about the crown prince’s involvement in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi seven years ago, despite U.S. intelligence reports that MBS—as the crown prince is widely known—not only approved the assassination but dispatched the operatives who strangled and dismembered Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Still, Trump probably hopes that the White House visit, which included a black-tie dinner with tech and business barons, is remembered instead for a number, however inflated and illusory: $1 trillion. That was how much money Trump boasted the crown prince would invest in America under his watch.
Never mind that MBS mentioned that improbable figure somewhat cagily, practically goaded by Trump. Or that it was meant to top up an already exaggerated $600 billion in Saudi investment commitments announced during Trump’s visit to Riyadh in May, which included “non-binding memoranda of understanding or previously announced and seemingly repurposed investment plans,” as Kristian Coates Ulrichsen has noted. Or that MBS didn’t specify over what time period a sum nearly equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s annual GDP would be invested.
What matters for Trump is that he can repeat the figure, adding to his ever-growing tally of imaginary trillions in foreign investment in the United States he keeps trumpeting, despite the numbers being a fictitious collection of vague pledges, plus bilateral trade figures he claims as new “investment.”
But for MBS, even if the $1 trillion number is mostly a public relations stunt for an audience of one, the promise of spending anything close to that amount on investments in the U.S. comes at an awkward time back home in Saudi Arabia. For all of the kingdom’s vast oil wealth, the crown prince’s feverish spending spree over the past few years has not exactly paid off. Under his watch, staggering sums have been sunk into a long list of vanity megaprojects so big they are now called “giga-projects,” but which already look like boondoggles before they have even been fully built. They reflect a failed political economy in Saudi Arabia built on one development fiasco after another, all of them only enabled by the gift of oil revenue. They also put the lie to an emerging consensus that MBS has already “won” his bet to liberalize and modernize the kingdom.
Read the rest at World Politics Review. (The gift link here will get around the paywall for seven days; subscribe to WPR’s free newsletter to read free two articles each month.)