In the early hours of November 4th, 2017, Saudi Arabia changed forever.
Across the country, princes, bureaucrats and businessmen who had long believed themselves above the law discovered that their immunity had evaporated.
Charged with corruption, some were pulled from their beds,
while others were summoned to non-existent meetings or detained as soon as their international flights touched down in the kingdom.
Amongst them were Air Force generals, Navy admirals and three sons of former King Abdullah,
including the commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
A former minister of finance and a governor of the central bank found themselves confined together with former ministers of commerce,
planning and communications, along with three brothers of Osama bin Laden.
Some three hundred prominent individuals were taken to Riyadh's Ritz Carlton Hotel,
which was converted for the occasion into the world's first five star prison.
These events marked the end of an order that had governed Saudi Arabia for 65 years.
Welcome to Middle East Dederer book Talk.
The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East is the sum of the books written by members of our community.
Well, the books are community you're talking about. My name is Eugene Rogan and I teach the modern history of the Middle East.
My guest is David Rundell. David came to Oxford in 1976 to read for the NFL in modern Middle Eastern studies.
He was a student developer who Rani's and a direct contemporary of New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.
After completing the MFL in 1978, David entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1981.
He was posted as a political officer to the US embassy in Riyadh, marking the beginning of a 30 year career in diplomacy.
16 of those spent in Saudi Arabia alone. He retired in 2010 as chief of mission at the American Embassy in Riyadh.
As America's most experienced Saudi hand friends and colleagues have long anticipated,
his book on Saudi Arabia, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.
The book was published tonight in 2020 by Bloomsbury is I.B. Tourists Imprint to critical acclaim.
The Wall Street Journal declared it a book of staggering breadth,
the depth and The New York Times claimed Rundell covers the kingdom from top to bottom with vast wisdom, depth and understanding.
Given the pace of change witnessed in the once conservative Saudi kingdom over the past five years, this is a timely book.
David, welcome to Book Talk. Thank you very much.
It is a real pleasure to be back at Oxford, although I have to say in many ways I never left.
It's always with me and certainly in spirit and in the intellectual training that I received there.
Well, we're delighted to have you back to the Middle East Seder community, where presumably your engagement with the Middle East really took off.
Did you out to studies in any way prepare you, prepare you for the professional challenges that you faced once you got to the region?
Most definitely they did. I often felt that my training was the key in many ways to my success, not only the Arabic which I had learnt,
but the kind of Arabic that I had learnt and the history and politics that I'd also gathered.
And I'll just be very quick about that. But, you know, I'll tell you a story.
When I was I was walking into the hall, I was at Queens and I was going into hall one afternoon and did my moral tutor was with me.
And he said, well, how are things going? And I said, well, things are going okay.
But, you know, I want to join the foreign service, not want to go to the Middle East.
And they're teaching me to read the Koran. And I want to say, you know, how do I get to a hotel?
And he looked he was a very tall and I'm not very tall.
I looked down at me contemptuously. He said, well, if that's what you wish to learn, you should have gone to a trade school.
So I thought, yeah, I guess so. Well, eventually I did go to that trade school.
Eventually I went to the Foreign Service Institute, which is the State Department's trade school for teaching Arabic.
So I learnt to talk to people about climate change and how to read the newspaper.
But those people never learnt to read the Koran.
And that was I saw that repeatedly, that I was at a big advantage when talking to Saudis because I had read the Koran and I could quote parts of it.
And my other friends were completely unable to do that because they had only been to the Foreign Service Institute.
So, yes, it was a big help to me. Well, tell us something about the writing of your book.
When did you actually start to write the book and what were your sources,
what were you working from as you tried to convert so much life experience into the text we had before us?
Well, I think there were a couple of. Sources.
In a sense, you know, for the 30 years that I worked on Saudi Arabia and there were several years that I worked on it in Washington as well.
I simply gathered information from my daily from my daily work.
However, I did also take notes on things that I observed on my travels and in Saudi Arabia and these when I left,
I probably had a thousand pages of notes. None of this was classified.
None of this was secretive.
This is just, you know, the Logemann tribe lives in this village and most of the people in that town belong to this bay or something,
something along those lines, things that the average Saudi would know, but that the average Westerner did not.
So I had that source. But I also had a couple of one time I had a dinner at my residence when I was chief of mission and.
And two former bosses of my two former ambassadors, Walt Cutler and Richard Murphy, were both there that night and there they said,
you know, you really have an obligation to write a book because you're the guy who knows most about this place.
And it would be helpful to your colleagues. And I kind of didn't pay much attention for a while, but eventually I had that sort of resonated with me.
So I did sit down and write the book primarily originally for my colleagues at the embassy.
But Bloomsbury said, I'll tell you the story that I just said.
You know, I would I told Bloomsbury, look, I'm writing this book for one person.
That's the next ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the American embassy. And they said, that's great.
What we would like to sell more than one book. So, yeah.
So they they did help me and we made it a little bit less encyclopaedic and a little bit more readable.
So that's kind of the story of how it was written.
Well, as you note in your preface, when you were sent on your first posting to Saudi Arabia in 1981,
America was still coming to terms with the 1979 Islamic revolution, the fall of the shore, and how America, quote unquote,
lost Iran to avoid repeating that mistake in Saudi Arabia,
your bosses in the U.S. embassy in Riyadh tasked you with spending 10 days of the month
travelling small towns and back roads to take the pulse of the kingdom for two years.
How did that experience shape your understanding of Saudi Arabia and the social contract between the rulers and their subjects?
Well, it shaped my whole approach to Saudi Arabia, really for the rest of my career.
It was a unique experience. I think one more person did it after I was done.
But then they don't do that anymore. And so it was a it was a unique opportunity that I had.
The first point was, in the short run, I became convinced that there was not going to be a revolution in sight in Saudi Arabia.
And I came back and I rode along report about that, which many people dismissed the same, well, who is this kid?
You know, he's just as his first job. And what does he know?
And he's gonna tell us there's no revolution and then we're going to all be left looking dumb.
So they didn't really want to believe me, but I was convinced that there would not be a revolution in Saudi Arabia for several reasons.
And one of them you just alluded to, which was the relationship between the Saudi people and the monarchy,
was distinctly different than that which existed in Iran.
I'd just give you an example. In Iran, they had the what they called the white revolution, which was to say the Shah consolidated villages.
He would say, look, your village is too far out in the middle of nowhere. I can't run power lines to you.
I can't run water lines to you. So I'm going to forcibly reconsolidate you or consolidate you in a town.
And I'm going to give you electricity and I'm going to have a clinic and I'm going to have a school and you'll all be happy.
But in fact, that people were not happy because they had to move from their village. So the Saudis did that entirely differently.
The Saudis said, you want to stay in your village. That's OK. We don't we can't bring you electricity, but we'll bring you a generator.
We can't bring you a water line, but we'll have a water truck come there twice a week.
We'll send a bus to get your kids so that they can go to school in the town.
They were completely 180 degrees different than the way the shah did it.
In other words, rather than force the people to do something that he thought was a good idea, like the Shah,
the king of Saudi Arabia said, fine, we'll let you do let you stay with what's comfortable for you.
So that was just one example of many that I saw about a sensitivity that the Saudis had.
Schools were another one. You know that. Even until very recently, many Saudi schools were essentially one room schoolhouse is very small.
And this doesn't make much sense. We got rid of those.
And then in the United States one hundred years ago, we consolidated into school districts of this Saudi people.
They every tribe wanted to have a school for themselves. And so they would keep these small schools.
So they were very sensitive to that.
Finally, the other thing that they did, which and again, this is a result of the fact that they had a lot of oil money was that.
But they did distribute that money. There's a village that and I continued to visit many of these places over the next 30 years.
And so there's a village south. The first time I went there, I said, what do you people need?
And they said, oh, we need a paved road. That was in the 80s.
I came back in the 90s, talked to pretty much the same people, said, well, what do you need?
And they said, well, we got our road and now we need a clinic. And I swear this is true.
I went back and saw them, you know, another 10 years later. And I said, So you've got your clinic, what do you need now?
And they said, we need I'm not making this up. They said we need a community college.
So these are people who went from not having a paved road to wanting to community college.
So clearly, life was getting better for them. So I concluded that there probably was not going to be a revolution anytime in the near future.
And I think that's been borne out, borne out by the fact that the Saudis did not support the al-Qaida insurrection that took place in 2003 to 2007,
which they had a chance to violently overthrow their government and they did not support in any significant way the Arab Spring in 2011,
which was, if you will, a more peaceful protest movement.
So that's the macro picture are sort of the political picture, I think, in the personal relationship that I developed with Saudi Arabia.
I got to like the place. I got to like the people.
I got to improve my Arabic and I the hospitality of the Saudis was something that, you know, they're well-known for.
I and I think I would tell you two, two little stories that.
That illustrate things that I learnt about Saudi Arabia. One was about hospitality.
I was having I stopped at a place with a guy called.
He was the Amir of Wadi Glosser. And I stopped and saw him in the morning and I was just chatting with him, having coffee.
And then I had to go on to another meeting in another town. And he said, we'll stay for lunch.
And I said, well, I can't stay for lunch. I have to go on to this other meeting.
And he was quite upset that I was leaving without having had lunch.
And he said, OK, well, we'll go out.
And he lived in sort of it looked like a mediaeval castle, really a sort of a courtyard in his little port that he'd had.
And he said, just wait here for a minute.
He said something which I didn't understand or didn't hear.
And then a minute later, somebody comes back carrying a big sheet, a big sheet, and he says,
no one will say that you left my house without being fed and you would take this sheep with you.
So I had a jeep and they put this sheep in the back of my jeep.
And off I went to my next meeting where when I arrived there, I thought, oh, this is great.
They're going to say, why do you have this sheep in your car? And if oh, you got it from the Ameera of what you do also.
Well, if he gave you one, we'll have to give you two. So you'll have to have a flock by the time you get home.
So I said I said, what am I going to tell these people?
So I said, well, you know, we in the American embassy, we'd like to be prepared.
And so I always carry water. I always carry a spare fan belt.
I always have a spare tire. And I usually carry a spare sheep as well.
And they said, wow, you guys are really on the ball. That's impressive. You know, even we didn't think of that, you know, going sheep.
So. So they took my sheep in their flock. And, you know, I wasn't I didn't get back to Riyadh for several days.
So I repeated this episode several times. So anyway, that that was a story about the hospitality.
But I think on a more serious note. The first time I went down the Hejaz Railway, which I think a lot of people wanted to do,
you know, you want to see the wrecks of the trains that Lawrence had blown up.
What? This is in the middle of nowhere. This is in the desert. And. In those days, it was and probably still is to some extent, a ferret.
It's not dangerous. But there's a potential for for being robbed, if you will, and not an event you don't want to go there alone.
And so I I had a the Saudis sent a couple of Bedouin with me in particular, one to be my guide.
And he was he was well armed. And we stopped one night and we were camped out.
And I woke up at four o'clock in the morning to hear this voice. And it was just the two of us.
And it was four o'clock in the morning. And I hear this noise.
What's going on? And I look over and this guy is praying. And I was pretty new to Saudi Arabia.
And I thought, why is this guy getting up at 4:00 in the morning to do this? You know, it's no social pressure on him to do this.
I mean, the only person here is me, and I'm asleep. So what's going on?
And then it kind of dawned on me that this was not some kind of social pressure.
This is something that he took very seriously himself.
And that religion was very much alive in Saudi Arabia, perhaps more so than it was in the United States or Britain at that time.
So I think those are two little vignettes that help to give you some idea of how I began to understand Saudi Arabia.
It's just such a privilege, exposure to the country.
And it's the kind of exposure that diplomats today because of security concerns or other restrictions simply don't get put.
The spare sheep of diplomacy is the best antidote I've heard in your introduction.
You say the first question to ask about Saudi Arabia is not when will its government collapse, but why is it still here?
You develop at length the history of the emergence of three distinct Saudi states and the principles
that guided the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia for king of the disease down to the present.
How do you account for the survival of the Saudi state against all the challenges of the 20th century imperialism,
secular nationalism, the rise of political Islam and both its Shiite and Sunni variations.
This is something that I developed over. Really a whole career to try and answer that very question.
And in the end, I believe that there are four legs that Saudi stability principally stands upon.
The first is the. His dark legitimacy that the LSD family has because they created the country,
the they unified what were a collection of small city states and wandering tribes and so much in the sense that Bismarck
unified Germany or cavorts unified Italy created something that didn't exist before the Saudi family did that.
And that gives them some legitimacy, quite a bit of legitimacy. The second thing that they did was they managed a system of succession, which again,
was somewhat unusual, certainly in the Arabian Peninsula, one of their rival families.
You know, the Al-Rashid had murdered the last eight emirs of of their dynasty and exiled themselves, had had problems with that in the past.
So they can. They created a method that peacefully and quickly transferred power.
And that, again, was unusual in many of the Middle Eastern states and that also provide legitimacy.
The third leg of their stool, if you will, or table of stability was elite cohesion and balancing stakeholders.
There are stakeholder groups in Saudi Arabia. Each of them has an elite that is recognised.
Some are more formal than others. And the monarchy has a symbiotic relationship with them in that the.
Elite bring their followers to support the monarchy and the monarchy supports those elite so that they remain the leaders of their community.
So this is a relationship that has functioned effectively for a long time with the tribes, with the religious establishment, with the merchant class,
with the new modern technocratic class, and amongst the royal family itself,
which I view as basically a hereditary political party and in a one party state.
Then the final issue was, what did they provide the average person, the average individual?
And here again, they have provided by Middle Eastern standards, a competent government for a long time.
And what does that mean? Number one, that means security. Saudi Arabia has not had civil wars, invasions, revolutions, coups,
all of these things which plague many Middle Eastern countries have really not happened to any great extent in Saudi Arabia.
So they provided security. They provided economic development, which we've talked a bit about.
And they have. And again, economic development, I should point out, is not automatic.
It's not just because you have oil that you're going to have economic development.
That's I think is is it's a gross some underestimation of what they actually achieved.
You look at Venezuela. You look at Libya. I mean, Libya is hardly even a country anymore.
You look at what happened in Iran or Iraq or Nigeria.
Just because you have oil doesn't mean you're going to be economically able to develop your country.
And then the final thing that they did was they provided gradual social change at a pace that most people would find acceptable.
And it's again, it's a miss.
It's a misunderstanding to believe that the Saudi people are chafing for nightclubs and mini skirts and that the Elci would are holding them back.
Actually, in many cases, the people have been more conservative than the than the monarchy.
And the monarchy is actually push them forward. But by and large, they've gone at the pace that the people wanted.
But I just would mention that, you know, when they introduced girls education and some of your listeners would know this,
but they had to use the military to actually, if you will,
integrate schools the same way they did in the American South when they desegregated those schools.
People were killed in riots that affected the first television station,
which people were protesting against that TV because I thought that was against Islam.
So the government has actually been reasonably progressive in that point.
And I would really say that they've gone at a pace that was acceptable to most people.
So those are the those are the four still of the four legs of stability in terms of the specific points you mentioned.
I think that's kind of interesting to comment on that. Saudis have a very different relationship with imperialism than most Middle Eastern countries.
They were never colonised. They have basically a positive relationship with the American oil men who came there and developed it.
And the British government never dominated them in the same way that it dominated Iraq or Egypt.
And in fact, the British were very influential in helping them to get rid of the Ottomans.
So something you would know a great deal about. And so where is an Egypt or Iraq the.
Origin of the state is from an anti imperialist,
let's get rid of the Westerner's because they're not helping us in Saudi Arabia is quite the opposite in Saudi Arabia.
The British are helping us get rid of the Ottomans and the Americans are helping us find oil.
So they had a very different relationship to imperialism than much of the Arab world.
Nationalism was, until recently, not a very important issue in Saudi Arabia.
They were ideology. Their ideological ideology was really more religion.
And then again, this is quite similar to the one one way I look at Saudi Arabia is to study European history and just to see how it evolved.
And you can often see very similar parallels.
And there was a time in European history when religion was really the primary ideological force and slowly after the French Revolution,
that was replaced by nationalism. And that's beginning to happen in Saudi Arabia today.
But nationalism up until fairly recently was not what it was.
They didn't even have a national day. Just for example. They have National Day was considered against Islam because you only only have eight.
And so now that that's changed, now they actually have a national day.
So, again, that's an indication of that change. And then the final thing I would say about religion is that the Saudi interpretation of Hanbali Islam,
which often goes by the name of Wahhabism in the West.
Basically rasas allegiance to the rule or to a religious responsibility.
In other words, they believe that stability is a little bit of a chain here.
But what they really believe is that in order to be saved on Judgement Day,
you need to live in an Islamic league governed state to have an Islamic law governed state need to have stability, to have stability.
You need to have one ruler who nobody revolts against. And therefore, this supporting of the existing government becomes a religious duty.
And what that means is that they don't really worry.
That is to say to religious scholars, don't worry about how you got to power.
We in the West are very concerned about whether or not you were elected.
They don't really care how you got to be the king, whether you murdered your brother or got elected.
Doesn't really matter. What matters is how you do your job.
Once you are the king and that's what determines your continued legitimacy.
So their attitude toward religion has been a little bit different than many actually in the Westerns and even some Arab countries.
And therefore, that also has contributed to their stability. So hopefully that answered your question.
You've identified key stakeholders in the Saudi system as the tribes, the religious clerics,
the merchants, the technocrats and the members of the royal family itself.
So how is the balance of power between the stakeholders changed since you first went to the kingdom nearly 40 years ago?
Some stakeholders have seen their influence decline.
I would say that the tribes and the religious establishment have they are certainly still important,
but they are less important than they were 40 years ago,
particularly the religious establishment, which at one point had a had a role in selecting the monarch.
They don't anymore. So at least let's put it.
Let's be clear. They had a role in the application of King King Sout.
So the tribes and the religious community have lost influence.
I think the technocrats,
the modern secularly educated technocrats and the business community have seen their influence and importance to society grow.
The royal family itself has seen its its remains important.
But the number of members of that family that are important has declined.
So it has become more concentrated. And then I would add that there are a couple of new stakeholder groups,
which I would say are youth and women who are didn't they were they were totally non-existent
stakeholder groups before and they are not organised and they're not politically active in the same.
The exact sense that these other groups are with they don't have an organised elite that deals with the monarchy,
but they are stakeholder groups that the government now pays attention to.
So I would say that's how the stakeholder groups have changed.
Your book is really about domestic Saudi politics and not so much about its foreign relations.
You're particularly discreet about Saudi US relations, which I think is a real strength of the book.
You didn't make this into a study of Saudi American relations.
You don't tend to view the kingdom through American lenses, but America could be added to your list of stakeholders in the Saudi system.
So let's bring America into the discussion. In your experience as a diplomat, how have U.S. Saudi relations evolved over the past 40 years?
Well, that's again. That's a good question. I think you're right. You could consider the United States a stakeholder in the in the Saudi government.
Over the past 40 years. Some things have changed and some things have remained constant.
What has remained constant is that Saudi Arabia, at the end of the day, depends upon the United States for its security.
And Saudi Arabia remains, at the end of the day, very important to the global economy.
Those things existed 40 years ago and they still exist.
Those issues or those facts? What is changed is the Cold War has ended.
The first part of my career. Every day I got up and looked in the mirror and said, what am I going to do to beat the Soviet Union today?
And I just tell you another interesting story that was very clear, because they see this is a sidelight.
But, you know, when I was a very junior officer in Washington, Ronald Reagan came and gave us a speech and.
He said, my plan for dealing with the Soviet Union is.
Simple. Some of you will think it simplistic, and I remember thinking that's a big word.
I thought this guy was, you know, is this is sort of a dumb actor, you know, he says and some of you will think, my plan's simplistic.
And in that he just looked out at a store and he said, we're going to win.
They're going to lose. And you're going to do it. And I thought, wow.
Now you can go play golf for the rest of the day because he he did his job.
I mean, he told everybody very clearly what was going to happen and how it was going to happen and what we're supposed to do.
So for the first part of my career, that is pretty much what we tried to do.
And the Saudis helped us. The Saudis were one country that never shirked, never.
Whether whatever we asked him to do, they were they were willing to help, whether it was, you know,
funding contras in Nicaragua, which some people didn't like, or supporting the Mujahideen or helping in Africa in many ways.
They were they were a very strong ally in in the in the Cold War.
Cold War went away. And then we had what we would call, I guess, the war on terror.
And again, that the Saudis became strong allies in that.
So one conflict was replaced by support in another.
I think something else which changed really were the economic factors.
The United States is not Saudi Arabia's biggest trading partner anymore. We were for a long time.
Now, Europe and Europe is really and China are their biggest trading partners.
And also Russia has become their partner in energy markets.
So China and Russia are much more important to Saudi Arabia commercially than they were in the past.
And then the final thing I would say is that what has remained constant in the relationship is its volatility.
It's always volatile. I mean, this is these are these are countries that have shared interest and not a lot of shared values,
at least in most of the history that I've been involved with.
And the relationship is always up and down, up and down, but within within a certain set of parameters.
And the other thing about it is that it has remained a very personalised relationship.
There is a king and there is a president. And the relationship really does revolve a lot about the relationship between those two.
Who is the prime minister of Great Britain and the president?
United States matters to some extent, but those relationships are largely institutionalised and not going to change overnight.
That's not true with the relationship with Saudi Arabia. The king could decide tomorrow.
He doesn't like Saudi or doesn't like America. And he decides he wants to be the friend of China or something.
The president has, you know, a Congress that he's got to bring along and that cost him politically often.
I've seen that many times that president has to spend political capital to maintain this relationship and sometimes he might not want to do that.
So. So the relationship we need remains more personal than than most other major relationships that we have.
That would have. I see to my next question. OK.
The way that the Saudi U.S. relationship has been transformed over the past four years since Donald Trump
became president in January 2017 and Mohammed bin Salman became crown prince in June of that same year.
These two men have pursued policies that have fundamentally altered the Saudi system.
Some might say broken the system. Certainly weaken the position of the traditional stakeholders and concentrated power in the crown prince's hands.
Will these changes pave the way to necessary reforms that set out in the much touted Vision 2030?
Or does disregard for the rules that held the game together put the Saudi project in jeopardy?
Well, that is the key question, isn't it? That is the meat of the whole book.
The first comment I would make is that. I don't think that King someone broke the system so much as recognise that the system was coming to an end.
The system that had existed for the past sixty five years with one brother handing power over to another brother over to another brother,
was coming to a natural end because they were running out of brothers.
And so they were going to have to make this transition to the third generation of princes at some point.
And that was never going to be easy. So when I look at what the king has achieved and I think he's achieved quite a lot, it's not, in my view,
the fact that women are driving or he's balancing the budget or he was at least until covered.
Those are significant. But what really is the most important achievement, in my view, is that he avoided a Game of Thrones or a family feud.
That's sort of what he avoided. That is, in fact, his biggest achievement.
And the. Five hundred plus grandsons who all thought they should have become the king could have been very destabilising.
And as anyone who's been to the Middle East centre knows, they all know who had been doing this and they all know that it's been held down,
says that dynasties will last for 100 years or at the most three generations, and then they will collapse.
And I can assure you, King Salman is read, I've been called Doom. And he didn't want that to happen in his watch.
So so he's engineered the rise of Mohammed bin Salman.
No question about it. Mohammed bin Salman was the anointed, chosen person.
And he did consolidate power. And that is a dramatic change in that the way the country used to use to operate and whether or not it now becomes.
A police state or whether it becomes a more accountable monarchy is a very open question.
I would have to say that at the moment the odds looks like it's becoming more of a police state.
Power is being concentrated. This may well have been necessary to make the changes, to make the transition.
And we can only hope that when you look at the models of how European monarchies evolved, some of them evolved peacefully and some of them did not.
And we can hope that the Saudi monarchy evolves peacefully.
The one thing that would lead me to believe that that might happen or two things.
Number one, the monarchy is legitimate and the people most of the people support the idea of the monarchy today, in part because they don't.
The different stakeholders trust the monarchy more than they trust each other.
But so they have a strong base to start from.
And the second factor is that the. Ultimate goal of the monarchy is to remain influential and powerful, and if they saw that,
the best way to do that was to slowly relinquish some of their authority,
they might be willing to do that rather than face some sort of violent backlash.
So there's a chance that they can evolve and there's a chance that they won't.
I would argue. That this is really where we have a choice to make.
We in the West and I mean Britain and the United States have a choice to make.
We need friends and allies in order to defend our own security and prosperity.
And that when it during my diplomatic career, that I was always taught that the role of American foreign policy or British foreign
policy is to protect the prosperity and security of the British or American people.
So to do that, we need we need friends and allies.
And I've gone through some of the things that the Saudis have done,
whether it's in oil markets or counterterrorism or promoting the peace process, or, as I say, just in general, being a status quo power.
These are these are things which are helpful to us. But at the other on the other hand.
Support for human rights is also a strength of Britain and the United States.
And here the Saudis have quite a bit to answer for, whether it's the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the war in Yemen, the detention of dissidents.
These are these are problems. And we have to decide how do we.
Protect our interests. Continue to promote the reforms that are going on this this quite significant economic and social
reforms that are taking place in Saudi Arabia and also get them to improve their human rights record.
And I think it's pretty clear that trying to sanction them or antagonise them in some way,
isolate them is probably not going to work with a group of people who know that they're important
to the global economy and believe that they are important in creating a global religion.
So they are in many ways. They have a unique culture and a unique history and a unique situation.
And I don't think isolating them is likely to help us obtain our goals.
And so what I would argue is that we need to figure out how to constructively engage them to to work on the problems that we have,
but also to continue with the positive, if you will, elements of our relationship.
So I think that's what I would do, what I would say about that.
Well, I think you're giving good advice for the incoming Biden administration as it looks to a post tromped relationship with Saudi Arabia.
David, thank you very much. I have been speaking with author David Rundell about his book, Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads.
And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening.
Goodbye from Oxford.