Who trusts Saudi Arabia?

Imagine you’re MbS, newly installed as Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian ruler thanks to cunning and ruthlessness. You arrest a few of the most obvious thieves at court and hang them by their thumbs to find out where they hid the loot. You order your henchmen to grab critics of the royal family who fled abroad and bring them home to shut them up. But one of those critics is cut into pieces with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the Turks go public. No one wants to come to your glitzy investment conference; no one wants their photo taken next to you. It’s a long road back. It takes a lot of oil and a lot of cash. But finally, you host talks between the US and Russia on Ukraine — and now Saudi Arabia is the Norway of the Middle East.

This is what Saudi Arabia gets out of inviting the US and Russia to Jeddah, the first meeting between those two nations in three years. Mohammed bin Salman sits down with American dignitaries amid the strobe of photographers’ flashbulbs, the US and Saudi flags next to each other in every shot. He welcomes President Zelensky with a white-gloved Saudi honor guard, and the two men walk down an endless red carpet while a TV camera sweeps in. These perfect visuals are priceless to a leader who has been slowly working his way back from pariah status. Zelensky knew what the Saudis expected from him. A statement from his account on X said: “I had a good meeting with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. I am grateful for his wise perspective on global affairs…”

The US State Department spokesperson, a former radio host named Tammy Bruce, was even more breathless about her Saudi hosts. She filmed herself at one of the palaces in Jeddah used to welcome important visitors, which, like many Saudi palaces, looks like an especially luxurious shopping mall. “Look at this magnificent lobby,” she says. “See the ceilings…” Her phone tilts up to a huge chandelier and a lot of stucco. “Very exciting day, a day that could mean a lot for a lot of people around the world when it comes to what’s important because—look at this pillar…” Her phone swivels to a pillar with an elaborate gold pattern vaguely representing foliage. “…isn’t that fantastic? So, other fantastic news for humanity might emerge, so we are very optimistic.” Bruce looked like a realtor on Million Dollar Listing — except the Saudi version would be Billion Dollar Listing.

Saudi diplomacy is, above all, about leveraging their billions. Zelensky got a $400 million aid package and oil and gas worth $300 million when a Saudi delegation visited Ukraine last month. Playing both sides, the Saudis have bought $2.2 billion worth of arms from the Russians, according to leaked emails obtained by the Kyiv Independent. The paper said that these contracts were not canceled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite the fact that the Russian companies are now under sanctions. But the really big score has been for Donald Trump, who secured the promise of a trillion dollars in investment (though it may turn out to be a mere $600 billion). His son-in-law, Jared Kushner — responsible for policy on Saudi Arabia in the last Trump administration — has already received $2 billion for his private investment fund, with the promise of more to come.

So, after his reelection, the first call that Trump made to a foreign leader as the 47th US president was to MbS. Saudi Arabia will be his first foreign trip as president, too — just as it was in his last administration. Trump was never really that bothered about the man cut up into pieces in the consulate in 2018, Jamal Khashoggi. While the CIA was telling him MbS was behind the murder, Trump tweeted: “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” He went on: “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder… In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” At least this was less hypocritical than Joe Biden’s response, which was to call MbS a pariah while on the campaign trail—then reluctantly fist-bump him as president while begging the Saudis to open the oil spigot.

The Saudis did release a couple of political prisoners in the lead-up to the Jeddah media circus (following the Soviet playbook before any big summit). A mother of two young children, Salma al-Shehab, was freed from a 34-year sentence for posting tweets about women’s rights. A man named Asaad Al-Ghamdi, a teacher, was released from a 20-year sentence for tweets criticizing MbS’s Vision 2030 program for Saudi Arabia. Posting to X, however moderate and restrained, is a very dangerous pastime in Saudi Arabia. As is the case with most peaceful dissidents, both had been jailed by the country’s special security court that deals with terrorism. Freeing these two was the extent of MbS’s mercy before the summit. There was no general amnesty.

Those still in jail for criticizing the regime include the following: Nourah al-Qahtani, a professor of literature at King Saud University, serving a 45-year sentence for “using the internet to damage the social fabric”; Mohammed al-Ghamdi, a cartoonist sentenced sent to prison for 23 years for “insulting Saudi Arabia” and opposing the blockade of Qatar; Mohammed al-Sadiq, a journalist detained without trial for the past five years for writing articles about women’s rights and objecting to diplomatic relations with Israel; the reformist Islamic scholar Salman Alodah, imprisoned since 2018, often held in solitary confinement, and facing the death penalty in a secret trial; and Manahel al-Otaibi, a 29-year-old fitness instructor, given 11 years in prison after calling for an end to the system of male guardianship and filming herself shopping in dungarees instead of an abaya.

That is only a partial list. As Sarah Leah Whitson told me: “There are dozens of Saudis unjustly jailed in the country.” She is director of the organisation founded by Jamal Khashoggi, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). They continue to campaign to free the House of Saud’s political prisoners, none of whom seemed to get a mention at the Jeddah talks. Leah Whitson said: “There’s a terrible irony of Saudi Arabia leading Ukraine negotiations, despite its belligerent record of war and destruction in Yemen, resulting in nothing more than the deaths of 350,000 Yemenis. If Zelensky is a dictator, as Trump has declared, then what’s an accurate description of the sociopathic, unelected authoritarian leader in charge of Saudi Arabia?”

This high-level diplomacy — taking the role of mediators in other people’s wars, just as Norway has done in the Middle East — is only one part of Saudi Arabia’s soft power strategy. “Sportswashing” — as it’s called — is another key piece of the plan. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has bought the US PGA Tour golf tournament, at a cost the Financial Times estimated at $3 billion; they are spending an estimated $2 billion to host the first-ever Boxing World Cup; and individual soccer stars are reportedly being paid $200 million a year to join the Saudi league. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent just on sports — Zelensky should have held out for more than a paltry few hundred million for his suffering people. More widely, the PIF is the largest shareholder in Nintendo, gave $3.5 billion to Uber when it was a startup, and holds large stakes in Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

All of which goes to show that you really can buy forgiveness. Money talks. And Saudi petrodollars talk loudest of all.