On January 29th, 2017, US President Donald Trump spoke for the first time as Commander-in-Chief to King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the presently-ruling monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. According to the statement released by the White House Office of the Press Secretary on that same day, King Salman and President Trump affirmed their commitment to bilateral cooperation on a number of issues, from the Administration’s controversial and ambiguously-articulated plan to create and enforce “safe-zones” in Syria, to discussing their mutual commitment to containing “Iran’s destabilizing activities” in the region. Also noted within this release is Trump’s apparent commitment to strengthening “bilateral economic and energy cooperation”, as well as Trump’s support for a Saudi economic program called the “Kingdom’s Vision 2030.”
The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program, also referred to by the Saudi state as the National Transformation Program, is an effort to implement a massive national transformation of Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure, economy, defense industry, and to a lesser degree, the structure and norms of Saudi society itself. This program is also the policy flagship for Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, son of King Salman. Prince Salman holds multiple positions of authority within the Saudi State; presiding as the Minister of Defense, Chief of the Royal Court, and chairman of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs. At 31 years old, Prince Salman is currently the youngest minister of defense of the world, and wields a distinct measure of political power for his age in addition to being third-in-line to the Saudi throne, a position that grants him the ability to act in the name of the King of Saudi Arabia.
Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Chip Somodevilla – Getty Images)
Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s largest oil economy, and one whose oil reserves also provide the resource-backing for the international value of the US Dollar (or “petrodollar”), making their impact on global finance particularly influential. The stated central objective of the 2030 program is to transform the Saudi energy economy into one that is heavily supported by renewable energy and natural gas, which in theory would detach Saudi Arabia from exclusive dependence on oil production for their national revenue. Considering that Saudi citizens are largely supported by subsidized dividends from their national oil revenue, this project stands out as a particularly ambitious economic transformation of a society that is heavily dependent on a single source of wealth, which also happens to be a limited and non-renewable resource.
The price tag for the energy infrastructure project alone is estimated to be between 30 and 50 billion USD, and these funds will be directed into the construction of wind and solar farms as well as a pair of nuclear power plants. To fund this enormous undertaking, Prince Salman has opted to sell shares of Saudi Aramco, the Kingdom’s nationalized oil company principle source of its wealth, to foreign investors. Aramco has long existed as the largest energy corporation in the world, one whose assets are reportedly ten-times the size of ExxonMobile. The Kingdom’s Vision project will then use this to create a two-trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund (which will also be the largest fund of its kind in the world) to finance the project, which will include the expansion of the nation’s tourism industry and will create a national armaments production complex. Saudi Arabia is presently the world’s third-largest military spender, but one who has a nearly non-existent national arms industry, relying almost entirely on imports largely purchased from the United States. The creation of this industry alongside the renewable resource sector is also intended to create employment opportunities throughout the Kingdom, and to meet those demands the Prince has stated that the austere and religiously-conservative laws that restrict women from working will be gradually eased.
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt meets with King Ibn Saud for the first time aboard a US warship in Egypt, February 20th 1945.
This is not the first time that a major social and economic change directed by a monarch’s decree has occurred in the Arabian peninsula. King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the first ruler and founder of the modern-day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who both stewarded and coerced the Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Desert out of their traditionally nomadic way of life and into a sedentary and urban lifestyle that continues to be heavily subsidized by the Saudi oil industry. The parallels between the respective ambitions of King Saud and Prince Salman are not lost on the Prince’s public relations team, who have written about this comparison on Prince Salman’s official website. This planned shift in national infrastructure has foreign backing, and numerous foreign investors have bought into the program.
Aftermath of Saudi bombing in Yemen, 2016
There is an element of urgency that is embedded within the Vision 2030 program that is recognizable in the swiftness of its implementation. The Kingdom’s absolute economic dependency on national oil exports has been tested recently by the shale natural gas boom in the United States which has undercut the price-per-barrel of exports of oil. Coinciding with this is the effect on the energy market precipitated by the lifting of US-led sanctions on Iran that accompanied the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal) which freed up Iranian oil exports and forced the Kingdom to begin pursuing economic reforms to adapt to the sudden damage to national revenue as a consequence of these changes. The Kingdom’s involvement in regional conflicts have made this situation more dire, with Saudi backing of opposition forces in the Syrian conflict yielding no definitive strategic results in what is becoming a long proxy war of attrition, as well as a devastating conflict raging right on Saudi borders in the neighboring nation of Yemen. In his role as Defense Minister, Prince Salman has presided over Saudi intervention in the Yemeni conflict in an aggressively interventionist manner, one that has been heavily criticized for its brutality and for allegedly worsening the stability and horrific humanitarian crises that have swept through the region.
President Trump signing the Presidential Memorandum Regarding Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, January 24th 2017
On January 24th, five days before his phone conservation with King Salman, President Trump signed a memorandum authorizing the President to grant “Presidential Permits” to transnational oil corporations, which would give them permission to continue to facilitated transportation and refinement of fossil fuels across national US national borders. This, coupled with the stated intention to dramatically scale-back the oversight of the US Environmental Protection Agency and expand US domestic energy production, amounts to a policy shift by the Executive Branch of the United States away from energy infrastructure transformation in the United States, while simultaneously affirming support for this same kind of project in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to the point of also committing military and diplomatic support to Saudi Arabia to assist in achieving these ends. And although the present US administration may be issuing gag orders on the EPA to censure data on climate change, no such censorship can be found in the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 program, where the environmental impact of climate change is cited as a central concern for the future of the peninsula.
