Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince visited Pakistan, India, China and South Korea in late February in an Asian trip which many Western media and analysts perceived as an effort to break his international isolation resulting from Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi's mysterious disappearance in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October. Salman and Saudi Arabia may have considered these political rifts, but the more important reason for the trip was economic cooperation with Asian countries.

Traditionally, the foundation of Saudi Arabia's foreign policy has been its ties with the United States. Although the modern Saudi Kingdom was established in the early 20th century based on the conservative Islamic Wahhabi belief, its formation and sustainability could not have been realized without the assistance of the United States and the United Kingdom. In the 1930s, it was the British that successfully helped the Saudi royal family defeat rebellions inside Saudi Arabia, and it was the U.S. that discovered the oil wells in the country in the 1940s and 50s and created Saudi Arabia's energy-dependent economic structure.

In the Cold War era, Saudi Arabia stood firmly with the U.S. to confront the Soviet Union. Although Saudi Arabia criticized U.S. support for Israel, the bilateral ties between Riyadh and Washington were not affected by the divergence.

After the Cold War, Saudi Arabia supported U.S. military operations against Iraq in 1991, allowing U.S. military forces to deploy in Saudi Arabia to defend possible military assaults by Iraqi forces. Meanwhile, the two countries established a very close cooperation mechanism to combat terrorism and extremism in the region, and many Saudi royal family members and elites chose U.S. universities to advance both their and their children's studies.

Declining U.S. influence

However, over the past decade, the bilateral ties between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have been challenged by several issues. Saudi nationals' involvement in the 9/11 attacks put a crack in the trust between the two countries. Growing voices within the U.S. called for further in-depth investigations into the role of the Saudi royal family in the 9/11 attacks. Given the sympathies held by some Saudi royal members in the 1990s toward some Islamic extremists, especially Al-Qaeda, the Saudi image inside the U.S. grew more negative.

Meanwhile, the United States' hesitant and neutral attitude toward the political upheavals in the Arab world since 2011 and the Syrian civil war weakened Saudi expectations of the U.S. role in the Middle East. Many analysts believed that Washington could and should have done more in early 2011 to help save the presidency of Muhammed Hosni Mubarak in Egypt rather than acting as an onlooker. The overthrow of Mubarak's regime decreased the political trust in the U.S. with many of its Arab allies, especially Saudi Arabia. After the unrest in Syria turned into a civil war in 2011, Riyadh was hoping that the U.S. would do more to help the Syrian rebels overthrow the Syrian Government led by Bashar al-Assad. But Washington disappointed Riyadh by providing only light arms to the rebels and carrying out very limited military strikes against the government in 2014, 2017 and 2018.

In addition, although the Donald Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which was signed with Iran during President Barak Obama's tenure in 2015, and re-imposed sanctions against Iran and even defined it as the most pressing threat in the Middle East, Riyadh still believes that Trump should do more. Although Riyadh spent tens of billions of dollars to purchase arms and weapons from U.S. companies to show generosity toward Trump, Washington still maintained restraint in Middle East affairs, even beginning to withdraw and decrease the U.S. military presence in Syria and Afghanistan.

The shifts between Riyadh and Washington reflect the new landscape of their bilateral ties. The transformation of the U.S. from an oil importing state into oil exporting one due to the development of shale oil has lowered U.S. willingness to directly intervene in regional affairs in the Middle East. Therefore, it is necessary for Saudi Arabia to seek connections with other world powers, especially with Russia and China, to extricate itself from overdependence on U.S. assistance.

New opportunities

The direct motivation behind Salman's visit to Asia is to facilitate and speed up the transformation of Saudi Arabia's own economic structure and to seek new economic cooperation and foreign investments to construct the Saudi Vision 2030, which was put forward by Salman in 2017 to diversify the Saudi economy and free Saudi Arabia from the overdependence of energy.

The economic foundation between Saudi Arabia and East Asian countries, especially China, Japan, India and the Republic of Korea, is oil. Asian countries have become the most important oil exporting destinations for Saudi Arabia, with 70 percent of Saudi oil going there. Saudi Arabia's imported goods mostly come from Asia. Among its Asian partners, China is Saudi Arabia's biggest trading partner. In 2018, the trade volume between China and Saudi Arabia was $60 billion, with China importing more than 1.6 million barrels of Saudi oil per day, accounting for 15 percent of China's total imported oil.

On the one hand, Riyadh hopes to encourage more profound energy cooperation with its Asian partners. Salman signed an agreement with Pakistan to construct an oil refinery in the coastal city of Gwadar, where China is building a port, to facilitate closer energy ties with Asian countries. Given that most of Saudi Arabia's oil—similar to its Arab neighbors such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar—goes to Asian countries, it is necessary for Riyadh to construct more refinery stations in different ports in both the eastern Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia to facilitate the transport of the oil.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia hopes to attract more investments from Asia. Recently, it announced an industrial plan to invest over $400 billion to encourage its logistics industry. Riyadh and other Arab countries see China and other Asian countries as the emerging economies with the greatest economic potentialities, thus Saudi Arabia hopes to attract more cooperation opportunities with these countries. Many planned industrial zones in Saudi Arabia need investment, and the major purpose of the Crown Prince's visit to Asia was to seek investments to advance Saudi Arabia's economic transformation.

Traditionally, the country's major investment destinations have been North America and Europe, while its foreign investments have mostly come from the West and have been concentrated in the energy sector. During the last years, both investments from Saudi Arabia to Asia and Asia to Saudi Arabia have increased significantly, and new cooperation sectors, such as technology, manufacturing, fishing and nuclear power, are planned and being implemented by Saudi Arabia and its Asian partners, especially China.

When Saudi Vision 2030 meets the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, there will be countless opportunities that will benefit both the Chinese and Saudi people. Asia and China are projected to become more important to Saudi Arabia, and closer ties between China and Saudi Arabia are expected.

The author is a research fellow at the Charhar Institute and the University of Haifa in Israel

Copyedited by Rebeca Toledo

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