Twenty years have passed, but the legacy of 9/11 continues to cast a shadow over US-Saudi bilateral relationship. The fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals and the mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, was a member of one of the most successful business families in Saudi Arabia threatened to create the greatest rupture in US-Saudi ties since full diplomatic relations began in the 1930s.
After 9/11, Washington and Riyadh worked closely, as the former pursued Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan and later extended its “war on terror” to Iraq in 2003. The many connections between the attackers and US partner states, including Pakistan and the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia, were addressed in other far less intrusive or invasive ways, by diplomacy rather than force.
In the US-Saudi relationship core, 9/11 has not fully disappeared as an issue, despite the passage of 20 years and the removal of the “old guard” of senior princes in Riyadh who were in positions of power at the time, with only King Salman remaining from that generation. As un example, US continued to be concerned about charity fundraising in Saudi Arabia, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claiming as late as 2009 that private donors in the country continued to constitute “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”.
The 2016 passage of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress indicated how 9/11 still cast a powerful, and at times populist, political legacy.
Two issues threaten to take US-Saudi ties into largely unknown new territory. The first is the personalisation of the relationship during the Trump era in part due to the unhealthily close ties that were seen to develop between principal figures, such as Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The second issue is the growing uncertainty in Riyadh about the future of the security guarantee that Saudi and other regional leaders believed was the backbone of their security and defence partnerships with the US. To an extent, this is a repeat of the perceived abandonment of their interests by the Obama administration but with greater substance this time around, especially after Trump not only did not respond to the Iranian-linked attacks on Saudi oil facilities in 2019 but also made a point of distinguishing between Saudi and US interests. This came as a shock to the leadership in Riyadh (and Abu Dhabi) which had long assumed that their and US interests in regional security were one and the same, especially on any issue that had to do with Iran.
Soon Mohammed Bin Salman, who was just a teenager when the 9/11 attacks took place, will rule Saudi Arabia and attempt to guide the kingdom well into the midcentury. One of his likely responses to the uncertainties in US-Saudi relations – and his own political difficulties in Washington – has been to diversify Saudi Arabia’s defence and security partnerships. Such measures are deemed necessary in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the widespread assumption in Riyadh, and elsewhere in the region, that the US is in retreat from the Middle East. Sure enough, the crown prince’s brother and deputy defence minister, Khalid Bin Salman, signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia within days of the fall of Kabul.
The dilemma for the Saudis, however, remains the fact that no other country is likely to come close to matching the breadth and depth of the partnership with the US, leaving Riyadh vulnerable to political and economic drift.
US-Saudi relationship 20 years after 9/11
