Reflecting back is a crude reminder of the exhausting pace at which the world totters from one crisis to another, but also, perhaps, an indicator of the direction in which it is heading.‎

On March 16th, 2022, a significant but largely unreported event took place in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Barely a week after its Crown Prince and de facto leader, Mohammed Bin Salman, refused to take a call from the President of the United States, he received a visit from then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson.

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The motivation for both attempts at courting MBS, as he is widely known, was clear: Saudi largely controls the global supply, and therefore the price, of oil, and the United States wanted MBS to increase output and calm the inflationary impact of the war in Ukraine. Johnson was doing Biden’s bidding. Under the old world order, a simple phone call between leaders and some back-room peddling may have settled the affair. Not so this time. 

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Upon his arrival in Saudi, Johnson was greeted by the Deputy Governor of Riyadh, a snub marginally more subtle than refusing to receive Biden’s phone call. Particularly when just a week earlier, on a similar State visit, this time by the President of Egypt, MBS himself received el-Sisi warmly on the tarmac. Strangely, or perhaps conveniently, this event was ignored by most of the Western media. 

Soon after Biden took office in 2021, in response to the assassination of Khashoggi in Istanbul, he declared MBS a pariah. He was, however, quickly made to swallow his words following Putin’s unexpected invasion of Ukraine. These were just amongst the first in a series of events that signalled tectonic shifts taking place in the politics of the Middle East and the World. 

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Saudi Arabia has long been a loyal ally of the US in the region. The rise of MBS has led to a recalibration of that relationship. Under his leadership, Saudi has become increasingly assertive. Over the period of these events, the price of oil hovered around the hundred dollar a barrel level, allowing Saudi’s state-owned Aramco, to pump out hundreds of billions of dollars in crude oil annually and making it the most valuable company in the world. It’s within this context, and under an ambitious 2030 vision to diversify its economy away from a dependence on oil, that MBS’ Saudi Arabia is taking its place at the helm of the Middle East’s political table. 

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Naturally, the unfolding of these events drew the attention of the other world power, China. It sniffed an opportunity. As Saudi unshackled itself from the US, it drew closer to China. Tellingly, one of the earliest post-Covid overseas trips of Xi Jinping, President of China, was to Saudi Arabia. During that visit, the two seemed to outline their ambitions and solidify their relationship. Barely two months later, China, an unlikely interlocutor, brokered a peace deal between two states that for years had been each other’s arch-nemesis: Saudi and Iran. Another statement to the world, and a clear indicator of shifting allegiances