Saudi was concerned over the role of the US in Egypt. Divisions, in that respect, between Saudi and other Gulf Monarchies, that have played an active role in backing jihadists, have also emerged, depending upon whether they lined up behind the Muslim Brotherhood or the Egyptian military. Saudi Arabia has also expressed its hostility to the fact that the “international community”, for which read the US and its allies, have failed to intervene more openly, in Syria, to topple Assad. They even turned down a seat on the UN Security Council – an offer that was ridiculous given that this is a country of only 25 million people, half of them migrant workers! - in protest, and have signalled that they are reconfiguring their relationship to the US. But, the real question is not whether it is Saudi Arabia that is reconfiguring that relation, but whether it is the US that is reconfiguring its relation with the Gulf Monarchies.
At the start of WWII, Trotsky wrote, opposing the position of the Palestinian Trotskyists, who believed that the war was one between fascism and “democracy”,
“Again, such reasoning over-simplifies the problem, for it depicts the case as if the fascist countries will necessarily be found on one side of the trenches while the democratic or semi-democratic are on the other. In point of fact, there is absolutely no guarantee for this “convenient” grouping. Italy and Germany may, in the coming war as in the last, be found in opposing camps. This is by no means excluded. What are we to do in that case? Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify countries in accordance with purely political features : Where would we assign Poland, Rumania, present-day Czechoslovakia, and a number of other second-rate and third-rate powers?”
He goes on,
“In time of war, the frontiers will be altered, military victories and defeats will alternate with each other, political regimes will shift. The workers will be able to profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy themselves not with acting as supervisors of the historical process but by engaging in the class struggle. Only the growth of their international offensive will put an end not alone to episodic “dangers” but also to their main source: the class society.”
US foreign policy has always been based not on any kind of principle, other than the principle of furthering the economic interests of US capital, and the strategic interests of the US state. In WWI, the US waited to see which side was winning (Germany), before coming in on the opposing side, thereby prolonging the war, and ensuring that the maximum economic damage was done to its main international competitors – Britain, Germany and France. In the process, it prevented the likely unification of Europe, by a similar process to that under which Prussia had unified Germany, a few decades earlier. By so doing it ensured that Europe would remain divided against it.
In the 1920's, the US, on the back of European, particularly British, weakness began to build up its navy, to challenge British supremacy of the seas. During the period, the expectation was that the next war would be between the two main economic powers – the United States and Britain. When WWII did break out, US companies, like GM and Ford, continued to operate their German factories, which were now turned over to producing tanks and other military equipment for the Third Reich. US banks continued to deal with German Banks, even as those German banks processed the plundered gold of Jewish communities. Once again, the US only entered the War at the point when Britain had essentially been defeated by Germany. The further incentive was also that the USSR had decisively defeated Japan, in 1939, at Khalkin Gol, causing Japan to shift its attention towards the Pacific, where it saw its potential for expansion, in the face of weakened opposition from European Colonialism. Having defeated Japan, the USSR, after initially losing massive amounts of ground, due to the criminal policies of Stalin, had mobilised its huge resources, and decisively turned the table on Germany, having turned them back from Moscow in December 1941. The danger for the US was that the USSR might continue its advance against Germany, linking up with Communist resistance forces, across Western Europe, bringing about a unified Europe by other means.
The international Popular Front, that US and British imperialism established with the USSR, acted to subordinate those forces in favour of the promise of peaceful co-existence with the USSR, for the purpose of building “Socialism in One Country”. As soon as the war was over, of course, that simply turned into the Cold War. The former ally of the USSR became overnight the embodiment of evil, and the main enemy. In order to restrict its global influence, the US and other imperialist powers, were happy to jump into bed with any vile dictator, and to overthrow even liberal democratic regimes, where they were not wholly subservient to US economic or strategic interests, for example, with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran. The principle has always been “He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard”, as the US has continued to promote the vilest dictators across the globe, including those today in Central Asia, who boil their opponents in oil. So, the fact that a country that bases its ideology on the notion that it is the paragon of democracy, sees no problem with forging an alliance with regimes that continue to reflect the principles of the Middle Ages, both in terms of their adherence to mediaeval religious mysticism, and their dogged determination to maintain their Absolute Monarchies in power, is nothing new.
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