No one serious considers the Saudi monarchy to be a model of anything positive.
Although Ibn Abdul-Wahhab is considered to be the father of Wahhabism, it was actually the British who initially impregnated him with the ideas of Wahhabism and made him its leader for their own sinister purposes to destroy Islam and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The intricate details of this intriguing British conspiracy, are to be found in the memoirs of its master spy, titled “Confessions of a British Spy”.
How do you explain the potential inclusion of Saudi Arabia in the BRICS and the Global South-led drive toward de-dollarization?
Isn’t that bad?
No one serious considers the Saudi monarchy to be a model of anything positive.
But if there is ever going to be systemic change in the Gulf (which I think is inevitable at some point), it is much more likely to come about through integration with the Global South, not the imperial core.
It was the British and US empires that created the Saudi regime in the first place, protected it, and prevented any systemic change for the past century.
Moreover, it has arguably been the United States that has historically pressured and/or forced the Saudi regime to implement its most reactionary foreign policies, such as Riyadh’s support for Salafi-jihadist contras (in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc.), or its collaboration with Israeli colonialism, bombing of Yemen, sectarian anti-Shia propaganda campaign, and war drive against Iran.
If Saudi Arabia maintains a more independent, non-aligned foreign policy, that helps strengthen the resurgent Non-Aligned Movement, and is certainly good for West Asia.
That doesn’t make the reactionary monarchy desirable in any way — or directly help the largely South Asian migrant workers who keep the country running through brutal slave-like exploitation — but it does mean the possibility for potential peace in the region after decades of US-led neocolonial wars, a weakening of the US-led campaign to normalize Israeli colonialism, and a likely end to the wars on Yemen and Iran.
The fact of the matter is simply that, as one of the world’s leading oil producers, and the de facto leader of OPEC, Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in the Global South-led drive toward de-dollarization is very important.
The petrodollar is absolutely fundamental in undergirding the US-led imperial system of economic domination, which is built around the dollar as the global reserve currency.
An end to Saudi petrodollar backing, even if only partially, would be a major blow to US economic hegemony.
If that imperial system does eventually collapse, whether or not the Saudi regime (or the UAE, Qatar, or any other Gulf monarchy) survives is up in the air as well — given how crucial US military support has been historically for protecting the Gulf monarchies.
But as long as the US empire was propping up the Saudi regime, it was not going anywhere.