Saudi Arabia: A Friendship Strained

No other country in the Middle East is more important to U.S. economic and strategic interests than Saudi Arabia. Because of the immense oil wealth of the desert kingdom, its internal stability and its political moderation in Arab affairs, Washington has regarded Riyadh's support for the Camp David accords as vital to the success of any peace settlement. That support has not been forthcoming, despite pleas from Washington and Cairo. Saudi Arabia views any Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty as essentially bilateral and insists that only a comprehensive settlement involving all the confrontation states holds any real prospect for peace. In the meantime, Saudi economic and foreign policies remain a force for moderation in the area, a contribution that the Saudis believe goes unappreciated in Washington. As a result, the long, close friendship between the two countries has undergone a severe strain.

Last month Crown Prince Fahd, the de facto chief executive of Saudi Arabia's absolute monarchy, canceled a trip to Washington, ostensibly because of ill health. The Saudis had feared that the trip would coincide with U.S.-Egyptian-Israeli Foreign Minister talks at Camp David. Thus Fahd's arrival in Washington might have seemed to lend the Saudis' official sanction to the September accords, which Riyadh opposes as having been achieved at the expense of the rest of the Arab world. The continued upheaval in Iran and the growth of Soviet influence in South Yemen and the Horn of Africa have convinced many Saudis that the U.S. is no longer a trustworthy bulwark against radical change and Communist encroachment in the area. As the U.S. is perceived to waver, the Saudis are especially mindful that the Soviet Union must begin importing essential oil supplies by the early 1980s. And Saudi Arabia is acutely aware that the U.S.S.R. is not very far away, either in distance or influence. TIME Cairo Bureau Chief Dean Brelis, after a visit to Riyadh last week, assesses the Saudi mood:

When the news reached Riyadh that President Carter would soon arrive in the Middle East to nail down a peace treaty, there were no outbursts of relief or thanksgiving. In fact, there was much more excitement over the Arab Foreign Ministers' meeting in Kuwait, which had just arranged a second cease-fire in the border war between Marxist, Moscow-leaning South Yemen and moderate, pro-Saudi North Yemen. For the Saudis, the importance of the cease-fire was that it had been negotiated and resolved by the Arabs. The President's visit to Cairo and Jerusalem was only another chapter in what they sadly call Jimmy Carter's "hopeless Camp David mission."

Prince Saud al Faisal, 36, the Princeton-educated Foreign Minister, described his country's policy by saying, "It is the unwavering position of the kingdom that all the problems in our area should be solved by Arabs. We do not believe in individual solutions ... Our permanent and basic aim is to foster Islamic and Arabic interests."

Officials in Riyadh are adamant that Saudi Arabia will not accept a Camp David treaty, no matter how it is phrased or what its timetable may be, that does not firmly guarantee the return of all the Arab lands occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. They are unremitting in their desire to see East Jerusalem removed from Israeli sovereignty, and they insist that only the creation of an independent state on the West Bank and in Gaza can resolve the Palestinian issue. Autonomy for these occupied territories, they say, is simply not enough. According to high-ranking Saudi officials, any treaty that falls short of these conditions-and the Camp David accords fall far short of them-will result in a closer alliance among Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Iran, whose new anti-Israel attitude has gone down well in Riyadh. Together, these Muslim states would command an impressive control over much of the world's oil supply.

And what if Egypt signs a treaty that the rest of the Arab world considers inadequate? Answered one Saudi official: "If Sadat wants to liberate his own land, we cannot condemn him. But we will disagree completely with the strategy he used to get his land back. We believe that Arabs should use any means, peaceful or violent, to liberate lands that have been stolen from them. This is an Islamic concept, and it guides us in our thinking and behavior. But if Sadat signs a treaty that gives him back his own land and does nothing for his Arab brothers, it will be a grave mistake."

As for the Israelis, a Saudi foreign ministry official contends, "They are the rider holding the reins, and the U.S. Administration gallops, turns right or left, as the Israelis direct. We are not asking for an anti-Israeli treaty, [but] we would like to see proof that Jimmy Carter is not anti-Arab, especially anti-Palestinian. It will be a great relief in the Arab world if Jimmy Carter gets a treaty that doesn't, between the lines, give all the advantages to the Israelis and the dregs to the Arabs."

"We are confronted with enormous changes [in the Middle East]," adds one of Prince Saud's top deputies in the foreign ministry. "The President of the U.S. remains narrowly concerned about peace between Israel and Egypt. That kind of peace is bound to make things worse, not better. What happens to all the hungry people in Egypt? Are the Israelis going to feed them, or will Carter with his 'Marshall Plan'? Who is going to pay for it? He could have that kind of plan if he had the support of the entire Arab world. We're all in favor of peace. But not Carter's peace. Or Begin's peace. Or Sadat's. It's got to be peace that works for all the people who live and work and die in the area. It's cruel to say it, but the peace Carter is after is supposed to help him look like a better President. And that just won't work. It'll start to fail from the moment the ink begins to dry."

In some ways, the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has been a personal one, based upon the House of Saud and the President in the White House. The Saudis now feel threatened by the distance they see between themselves and the Carter Administration. There is a sense in Saudi Arabia that a time of decision is rapidly approaching, a decision that could dramatically alter the special friendship that has existed with the U.S. Until recently, the Saudis believed that their interests were almost identical with those of the U.S., whether they concerned oil, investments or defense. It went so far, sums up a Saudi official, reflecting a widely held attitude in his country, that "we sacrificed our own interests for the sake of the U.S. and didn't question it."

The Saudis are asking aloud why, in times of shortage, they should produce oil in excess of their plans so that America, with 6% of the world's population, can continue to consume 30% of the supply. If a treaty between Egypt and Israel is signed that does not meet Saudi expectations of fairness, relations with the U.S. are bound to get chillier.

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