Crown prince shores up support with tour of Asia
Prince Mohammed bin Salman was presented with a gold-plated machine gun by his Pakistani hosts when he arrived in the country earlier this week. It was, perhaps, a gift in dubious taste considering that the heir to the Saudi throne has been accused of being involved in the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.
The kingdom has, of course, vociferously denied that the Crown Prince had anything to do with the murder and dismemberment at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, blaming, instead, close aides who had been overzealous.
Nevertheless MbS, as he is known, is unlikely to repeat his highly publicised visit to the west last summer – which included lavish receptions with Donald Trump, Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron – in the near future, with opprobrium and controversy still swirling over the Khashoggi affair.
The crown prince has, instead, turned east; publicly seeking to forge stronger ties with China and India, two economic and military powers whose leaders have said little about the journalist’s death and avoided pointing the finger at the Saudi royal family.
MBS’s pledge of $20bn (£15.3bn) investment to Pakistan, during a stop on his current tour, would be welcome to a country long dependent on Saudi largesse and seeking its 13th IMF bailout since independence after another economic meltdown.
Unlike many other leaders, Prime Minister Imran Khan did not stay away from an economic summit in Riyadh which took place soon after Khashoggi’s killing.
As he told me at the time in an interview in Islamabad: “The reason I have to take this opportunity is because we are a country of 210 million people and we have the worst debt crisis in our history.
“We are desperate for money,” he added. “Unless we get loans from friendly countries of IMF, we actually won’t have foreign exchange to either service our debts or to pay for our imports.”
The issue of violence remains as a backdrop to Prince Mohammed’s visit to the Indian subcontinent. Forty Indian soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing in Kashmir last week. The Pakistan-based separatist group Jaish-e-Mohammad has claimed credit for the attack.
The group is among those sponsored, it has been claimed, by the Pakistani military and the secret police, ISI, to carry out attacks in India and Afghanistan. The Indian government, which says there is evidence of Pakistani complicity in the lethal blast, has threatened military retaliation.
However, the options for Narendra Modi’s government are limited, with deep international concern that skirmishes between two nuclear armed powers could quickly escalate to a highly dangerous level.
The Trump administration has supported India’s right to take action. But, at the same time, it does not want an armed conflict in the region while it is in the process of holding talks with the Taliban, another group largely controlled by the Pakistani security establishment, over Afghanistan.
For Delhi, attempts to proscribe Jaish-e-Mohammed as a terrorist organisation at the UN and subject its leader Maulana Masood Azhar, currently in a Pakistani military hospital, to international sanctions have failed, blocked by Pakistan’s traditional ally China.
MbS did not receive a golden gun on his arrival in India. But the reception was sumptuous
Prince Mohammed was strong in his backing of India following the bombing, saying in Delhi: “The common concern is terrorism and extremism. We will cooperate with India and neighbouring states to ensure future generations are safe. We applaud India’s role in this matter.”
He said all necessary intelligence will be provided to India. Delhi claims that the Saudis are now much more sceptical of the Pakistani narrative over Kashmir.
But the kingdom is certainly not going to end its overall support for Pakistan, financial or otherwise. The Indian opposition Congress party pointed out that as well as the $20bn injection, the crown prince had praised the Pakistani government’s supposed “anti-terror” efforts.
MbS did not receive a golden gun on his arrival in India. But the reception was sumptuous. The crown prince described Modi as his “elder brother” and Saudi officials talked of an “even stronger relationship” in the future. This relationship looks to be mainly economic, with the kingdom committing to deals worth $100bn, $11bn of that on a massive petrochemical project.
Economic ties will also be at the centre of the next leg of his Asian tour – MbS is due to land in China on Thursday. Defence equipment is likely to be one of the important sectors under discussion. Germany has joined a number of European countries, including Denmark and Finland, in banning arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Yemen war.
Berlin’s move on this is particularly important because German parts are found in weapons manufactured with other European states, including Britain.
Last year the US Senate only very narrowly rejected an effort to stop the sale of $500m of American weaponry to the kingdom. A similar blocking move, with Republican members of the congress now more willing to challenge Donald Trump, may succeed in the future.
China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner with $42.4bn worth of bilateral trade last year. But Beijing exported only $20m of arms to the kingdom. Both countries are said to want to significantly increase that figure, with the kingdom keen to lessen its dependence on the west.
There is unlikely to be much purely political traction from MbS’s trips to China and India. Both countries maintain relatively strong relationship with Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia’s Shia arch-rival in the Middle East, and neither is willing to end that.
The Saudi crown prince’s visit to Beijing has been preceded by a high level delegation from Tehran, with the Chinese hierarchy praising, among other things, a combative speech made by the Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at last weekend’s annual Munich security conference. China emphasised it is determined to deepen “strategic trust” with Iran.
The visits to the east do not mean that a fundamental shift will take place in Saudi foreign policy – the US in particular will remain ultimately supportive due to economic and strategic imperatives. But the Saudi crown price’s journey is, however, a signal that the kingdom will not lack allies at times of future tension with the west.