The Gulf security bargain is the arrangement John Kiriakou describes between the U.S. and the Gulf Arab monarchies: they host American bases — the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Al Udeid in Qatar, tens of thousands of troops in Kuwait and the UAE — and sell their oil in dollars, in exchange for American protection. He traces it to a deal between FDR and the Saudi king, built atop an earlier British framework in which London ran the sheikhdoms’ defense and foreign policy.[1][2] Having visited Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE weeks before the war on Iran, Kiriakou says the bargain collapsed when those installations failed to protect their hosts — airports destroyed, Dubai hotels hit — prompting figures like the billionaire Al Habtoor to demand a reconsidered relationship, possibly asking the U.S. to leave and looking to Iran for protection instead.[3][4]
”We are not friends”
Kiriakou dates the bargain’s terms to a story from his own posting: on an early morning walk to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, a Saudi guard ignored his Arabic greeting three days running before finally snapping, “You Americans are hired help. We brought you here to protect us and we pay you for it. We’re not friends.” Kiriakou says that set the tone for the whole relationship: “we are not friends, we buy their oil, they buy our weapons, and we just have to get along.”[5] He adds that Saudi Arabia was not a unified country until the 1930s — before that it was nomadic tribal territory, and the Al Saud family was not even the region’s most powerful, a distinction that belonged to the Al Rashid family until Abdulaziz Ibn Saud took power and later struck the oil-for-protection deal with Roosevelt that gave the “special relationship” its name.[6]
Kiriakou traces the same formula to two ambassadors he served under: Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told him the relationship is “actually very very simple — we buy oil and they buy weapons, that’s as simple as that,” adding that the U.S. no longer strictly needs Saudi oil once fracking is cost-effective above roughly $60 a barrel, but still wants the Saudis buying American weapons systems.[7] A U.S. ambassador to Bahrain he also worked for put it “in even more stark terms: oil flows out of the Gulf and weapons flow into the Gulf, and that’s the way everybody likes it.”[8] Kiriakou says oil-wealthy Gulf states buy huge quantities of weapons they never use — purely for influence and to maintain good relations with the powerful nations selling them — leaving much of the equipment to rot in warehouses still in its crates.[9]
A changed kingdom
Kiriakou describes Saudi Arabia as transformed by the time of a 2022 visit compared with when he lived in Riyadh and, later, Bahrain in the early-to-mid 1990s: he saw unveiled women, women driving cars, and an open movie theater in Jeddah, a stark contrast with the religious conservatism he remembered.[10] Saudi Arabia did not permit television until 1972, having refused it as a corrupting influence until a member of the Council of religious scholars argued it could instead broadcast readings of the Quran 24 hours a day.[11] He says the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh became one of the world’s foremost ENT hospitals because of the country’s high rate of intermarriage-linked eye diseases.[12] Living in Bahrain from 1994 to 1996, he recalls Saudi authorities installing double-wide escalators at Dhahran airport because Saudis were, in his words, too heavy to fit on standard ones.[12]
Despite the kingdom’s official ban on alcohol, Kiriakou says oil-company workers historically circulated a homemade moonshine recipe called “the Blue Flame,” complete with exact alcohol content and sugar quantities.[13] He traces the moonshine tradition, known as sadiqi, to 1952 — a code word adopted once alcohol was outlawed across the Middle East — and describes a bottle from a still that once belonged to Marlon Townsend, captain of the USS Kitty Hawk and founder of the Top Gun Naval Flight Academy.[14] On a darker note, he recounts religious enforcers (the mutaween) striking his wife with a cane in public because her face was uncovered; he says he confronted the men, identified himself and his wife as diplomats, and shoved one of them back.[15] He also says Saudi Arabia historically bulldozed ancient pre-Islamic sites when they were discovered, and after UN complaints began covering them with sand instead — so that, officially, no history exists in Saudi Arabia before the advent of Islam — and that the kingdom began issuing tourist visas for the first time in its history only in the year before this account.[16][17]
Cracks in the bargain
Kiriakou argues Saudi Arabia cannot be relied on as a permanent counterweight to Iran, especially under Mohammed bin Salman, whom he calls more pragmatic than earlier generations of Saudi leaders and unwilling to keep bankrolling a permanent war footing against Tehran.[18] He traces part of the underlying strain to the first Gulf War, when anti-American fundamentalist propaganda — falsely claiming American female soldiers drove cars, had sex in public, walked around U.S. bases naked, and had sex in Mecca in front of the Kaaba — inflamed sentiment against the U.S. military presence.[19] After the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, Kiriakou says U.S. planners concluded the military presence needed to leave Saudi Arabia entirely, but had nowhere large enough to relocate all of it except Iraq — a calculation he says foreshadowed the basing rationale later used to justify the 2003 invasion.[20]
He also points to the U.S. offer, under the Abraham Accords, to broker Saudi normalization with Israel — which he calls “a terrible idea” of Donald Trump’s — noting the Saudis conditioned any deal on the U.S. building them a nuclear reactor, raising proliferation concerns since Saudi Arabia has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.[21] Saudi Arabia’s generosity toward Pakistan over the decades — the city of Faisalabad, Pakistan’s fourth-largest, is named for King Faisal — feeds into longstanding rumors that Pakistan assisted Saudi Arabia’s own nascent nuclear ambitions.[22] Kiriakou also cites the erosion of U.S. leverage from oil sanctions more broadly: Venezuela’s heavy, high-sulfur crude could until roughly two years before one account only be refined in Texas, but China responded to U.S. sanctions by building a refinery in the Caribbean, shifting that refining business — and the associated leverage — away from the United States.[23]
Kiriakou also recalls a moment that illustrates how far Gulf state offers have gone unanswered: while posted to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh in 1991, he says the Saudis asked Washington to relay an offer to Israel — that Saudi Arabia would spend billions of dollars to build a port, an airport, and an electrical grid in Gaza. Israel’s answer, he says, was “absolutely never.”[24]