Saudi Arabia's changing foreign policy

David Ignatius brings an important point to his important audience:

Over this year of Arab Spring revolt, Saudi Arabia has increasingly replaced the United States as the key status-quo power in the Middle East — a role that seems likely to expand even more in coming years as the Saudis boost their military and economic spending.

Saudis describe the kingdom’s growing role as a reaction, in part, to the diminished clout of the United States. They still regard the U.S.- Saudi relationship as valuable, but it’s no longer seen as a guarantor of their security. For that, the Saudis have decided they must rely more on themselves — and, down the road, on a wider set of friends that includes their military partner, Pakistan, and their largest oil customer, China.

I wrote about this trend a few months ago, when the received wisdom still tended to be (outside of specialist circles) that Saudi Arabia was just sulking petulantly about the Arab Spring:

They may be spearheading the counter-revolution, but the Saudis are not just a status-quo force anymore. Like other states, they are restructuring to the new reality — preventing change in Bahrain, but backing it in Libya and, perhaps soon, in Syria. Having moved on from their anger at the Obama administration's abandonment of Ben Ali and Mubarak, they realise that for things to remain the same (for them), everything must change.

Two weeks ago, at a meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Geneva that I attended, Prince Turki outlined his proposal to deal with the region's most urgent issues through two broad arcs: reviving the Arab Peace Initiative (ie a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace rather than a separate Israeli-Palestinian one) and the decades-old idea of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (ie tackling the Israeli and Iranian nuclear issues together, rather than ignoring the former and focusing on the latter.) The proposal was interesting not so much on its details as what it implied: a much more multilaterally-driven agenda for Middle East diplomacy. No more waiting for Washington to act first.

I would add that the now official rise of Prince Nayef accelerates this trend of a more pro-active Saudi Arabia, as the Arab League's decision on Syria suggests. This also means Saudi Arabia may be moving away from its role in lowering oil prices over the last year, particularly after its dramatic increase in spending. From the FT:

Khalid al-Falih, chief executive of state-owned Saudi Aramco, said on Monday that pressure on Riyadh to raise its output capacity had “substantially reduced”, the clearest indication yet that the world’s top oil producer is not pushing ahead with an assumed expansion plan to 15m b/d by the end of 2020. Including the oil fields in the neutral zone between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Riyadh can produce up to 12.5m b/d.

The comments put a cap at least temporarily on a $100bn expansion program that started in the early 2000s when Saudi was able to produce about 8.5m b/d. The halt comes in spite of tightness in the oil market due to ongoing production disruptions in Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Comments

[Non-Arab Arab]

Some good comments, but I think your comment that Saudi Arabia a policy or "role in lowering oil prices over the last year" is wrong, and along with it the implied notion that the capacity expansion program's freeze is about wanting to see prices higher. It is true the Saudis were not on board with the price hawks (particularly Iran and Venezuela) at the June OPEC meeting, as they didn't want to spike oil prices further and send the global economy into a commodity-price-induced double dip recession. But they are far from wanting a substantially lower price. They began rapidly expanding their domestic spending in 2004 I believe it was once they felt comfortable that higher prices would be around. While late 2008 gave them and many others a price scare, the rapid rebound in 2009 showed that global oil supply challenges would keep the price at a substantially higher price than the history of the past few decades and they were perfectly happy with that so long as it was not seen as the key driver wrecking the global economy. At the same time, global oil demand has bifurcated between declining OECD demand (from the economic slowdown, increasing energy efficiency, and the rise of biofuels) and still-rising Non-OECD demand. But the net effect has still been lower demand growth. With long-term supply challenges now apparent, price has essentially rationed demand. And that is why the Saudis have put their expansion plans on hold. In 2004 I sat in on the key debate in Washington between Matt Simmons (whose book "Twilight in the Desert" is essentially a compilation of errors masked by lots of technical jargon) and key Aramco officials where Aramco's leading technical people were quite clear that they could go to max 15 million b/d capacity in the long run if they were to keep their fields healthy. The IEA and others had suggested the Saudis would have to produce numbers like 30 million b/d by 2030. Aramco was telling the world back then already that they just couldn't do those kind of numbers, so don't ask. At present global demand is only growing in the Non-OECD and even there only enough to make total global demand numbers modest, so the Saudis have decided to tail back their expansion plans for the moment. When demand requires it again, they'll turn those plans back on. But since there's no demand crisis, there's no point in spending the billions required on that investment when there's plenty of mollifying of clerics and interior ministries and co-opted oppositions at home and across the region to do.

To summarize: Saudis were never price doves this year, and they're not uber-hawks now. They've actually been quite steady in wanting as high a price as they feel like they can get away with without tanking the global economy. They're trying to thread the needle.

And even there, the instruments they have to use (production adjustments) are very slow moving behemoths that take a long time to turn the price in the face of global financial flows that in the short term overwhelm supply-demand economics.