Elon Musk’s brain chip implant company is reportedly under federal investigation for violating the Animal Welfare Act.
Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: alleged animal cruelty.
Neuralink, a startup co-founded by Musk in 2016, aims to develop a brain chip implant that it claims could one day help paralyzed people walk and blind people see. But to do that, the company has first been testing its technology on animals, killing some 1,500 since 2018 — and employee whistleblowers recently told Reuters the experiments are going horribly wrong.
Reuters reported this week that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General has opened a probe into potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act at Neuralink. It’s a rare corrective for an agency that is generally hands-off when it comes to animal research.
Congressional Democrats are weighing in too. As reported by Reuters, US House Representatives Earl Blumenauer and Adam Schiff wrote in a draft letter to the USDA that they are “very concerned that this may be another example of high-profile cases of animal cruelty involving USDA-inspected facilities.”
Questions around Neuralink’s treatment of animals date back to 2017, when Neuralink conducted experiments on monkeys at the University of California Davis. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that campaigns for alternatives to animal testing, obtained public records detailing the experiments. The findings were gruesome: One rhesus macaque monkey’s nausea was “so severe that the animal vomited and had open sores in her esophagus before she was finally killed,” according to Ryan Merkley, PCRM’s director of research advocacy.
Surgeons used an unapproved adhesive to fill open spaces in an animal’s skull, created from implanting the Neuralink device, “which then caused the animal to suffer greatly due to brain hemorrhaging,” Merkley said.
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Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media
He also pointed to “instances of animals suffering from chronic infections, like staph infections where the implant was in their head. There were animals pulling out their hair and self-mutilating, which are signs of really poor psychological health in laboratory animals and are very common in rhesus macaques” and other primates. (Disclosure: My partner worked at PCRM six years ago and was colleagues with Merkley.)
A few years later, Neuralink moved its experiments in-house. Current and former employees told Reuters that Musk put staff under immense pressure to speed up animal trials in order to begin human trials, telling them that they had to imagine a bomb was strapped to their head as motivation to work harder and faster. That may have contributed to botched experiments: Through documents and interviews with Neuralink staff, Reuters identified four experiments with 86 pigs and two monkeys that went awry due to employee mistakes. As a result, the experiments had to be repeated. “One employee,” Reuters reported, “wrote an angry missive earlier this year to colleagues about the need to overhaul how the company organizes animal surgeries to prevent ‘hack jobs.’”
The breakneck speed at Neuralink likely caused researchers to test and kill more animals than a slower, more conventional approach would call for. Since 2018, the company has tested on and killed at least 1,500 animals — over 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, as well as mice and rats.
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Roger Kingbird / We Animals Media
“There’s this incredible pressure by these Silicon Valley dudes who want their devices on the market, they want to push things forward, but they don’t understand that these things take time,” said Merkley. “That leads to — as we’ve seen — botched experiments and animals suffering.”
Neuralink did not respond to an interview request for this story. UC Davis declined an interview request and pointed me to its media statement on the issue.
“The research protocols were thoroughly reviewed and approved by the campus’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC),” one part of it reads. “When an incident occurred, it was reported to the IACUC, which mandated training and protocol changes as needed.” The university also said it “follows all applicable laws and regulations,” including those of the USDA and the National Institutes of Health.
In February, PCRM filed a complaint with the USDA alleging violations of the Animal Welfare Act stemming from the earlier Neuralink experiments at UC Davis. In March, the USDA posted inspection reports of both UC Davis and Neuralink facilities and found zero violations. But a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California sent PCRM’s complaint to the USDA Inspector General (OIG), a federal office charged with investigating and auditing USDA programs, which then opened a formal probe, according to Reuters. When contacted, the USDA OIG responded “USDA OIG can neither confirm or deny any investigation.”
That the USDA found no violations at UC Davis or Neuralink “just shows you how weak the Animal Welfare Act is, and even more so how weak the enforcement of that law is,” Merkley said.
The USDA declined an interview request for this story but said in an emailed statement, “USDA takes its charge to enforce the AWA seriously, and works diligently every day to protect the welfare of regulated animals.”
The “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley can be dangerous enough when a company is building a new social network, but the stakes are far higher when the life and death of hundreds or thousands of animals is in question, let alone the human patients whom Neuralink hopes will be the ultimate recipients of its technology. But it would be a mistake to think of Musk and Neuralink as a mere bad apple. Cruel animal experiments are taking place not just at private medical companies, but also at universities, commercial research facilities, and government agencies across the country — and regulators are lagging behind.
The Animal Welfare Act, explained
As federal laws go, the 1966 Animal Welfare Act may have one of the weirder and darker origin stories. Starting in the 1940s, the demand for animal experimentation by federally funded scientists exploded, to the point where stray dogs were seized from animal shelters to serve as test subjects, while even pet dogs would sometimes be snatched up and sold to experimenters. The most high-profile case involved Pepper, a 5-year-old Dalmatian in Pennsylvania who went missing in the summer of 1964 and turned up nine days later at a New York City hospital, where she was used in a medical experiment and then cremated. Pepper’s fate — and a Life magazine exposé into dog experiments — caused an uproar. Two years later, Congress passed the Animal Welfare Act.
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Bonnie Jo Mount/Washington Post via Getty Images
Despite its exhaustive-sounding name, the law excludes most animals kept in human captivity: the billions of animals we raise for food. It primarily covers the treatment and living conditions of companion animals bred in puppy mills, animals used for entertainment at zoos and circuses, and animals used in research for everything from vaccines to makeup. Even for these covered use cases, there are some big loopholes. Birds, reptiles, fish, and virtually all mice and rats — which make up the vast majority of animals used in vivisection — aren’t protected by the law, nor are animals used in agricultural research.
The Animal Welfare Act also doesn’t say much about what can and can’t be done to animals in experiments. Rather, it sets minimum standards for basic conditions such as food, water, space, and lighting.
The law leaves much of how experiments are conducted to bodies called Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, or IACUCs. Most research facilities — private or public — must set up an IACUC, which means the research is essentially self-governed. IACUCs are usually composed of employees, in the case of private companies like Neuralink, or faculty at universities.
IACUCs do have some checks and balances — they must have at least one external member, inspect facilities every six months, and follow some record-keeping requirements, like submitting annual reports to the USDA and conducting literature reviews to minimize duplicative research. They’re also charged with minimizing pain in animals during procedures, among other requirements.
Those checks and balances still give scientists wide latitude to conduct research how they see fit, critics say, leading to many cruel and unnecessary experiments.
In 2014, the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General said some IACUCs “did not adequately approve, monitor, or report on experimental procedures on animals.”
One study that looked at a group of IACUCs found a 98 percent approval rate for experiment protocols, and other papers have found similarly high rates.
“There’s a tremendous problem if these IACUCs are populated just with the colleagues of the same institution,” said Thomas Hartung, a biochemist and the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University. “In Europe, there’s a very different approach where there’s a separation of these bodies that are linked to competent authorities, where conflicts of interest are much more avoided. In general, the bar is much higher to get these experiments accepted.” He added that the more rigorous process leads to better science.
We don’t know the full scope of animal experiments or what exactly happens to the tens of millions of animals estimated to go under the knife in the name of science and product development each year. The USDA inspects each facility at least once a year and publishes those inspections, but they’re only a small snapshot of animal treatment. And labs accredited by AAALAC International, a private veterinary organization, benefit from only being subject to partial inspections. According to Science, 91 out of 322 facilities inspected during one period only received partial inspections.
It’s not uncommon for testing labs to fight to prevent details of experiments from coming to light (PCRM has sued UC Davis to hand over photos from the experiments under California’s public records law). But public records requests have exposed a number of disturbing experiments.
Wayne State University in Michigan has induced heart failure in dogs, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison deafened two cats with an antibiotic to study hearing implants, and the Department of Veterans Affairs implanted devices into cats’ skulls to study sleep disorders (one employee said it gave them nightmares). Last year, Vice reported on the mental health crisis among those who kill animals for science.
A Harvard researcher recently drew condemnation after publishing work about separating mother monkeys from their newborns and replacing them with stuffed animals, and suturing baby monkeys’ eyelids shut to study how they process faces.
There’s also the more mundane but cruel everyday practices, like keeping social animals, including mice and rats, in captivity for weeks, months, or years on end. It’s not uncommon for nonhuman primates to be caged alone, despite the USDA’s acknowledgment, back in 1999, that “… primates are clearly social beings and social housing is the most appropriate way to promote normal social behavior and meet social needs.” Routine toxicity tests required by the EPA force animals to inhale and ingest pesticides.
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Roger Kingbird / We Animals Media
Even when Animal Welfare Act violations are found, researchers get off easy, according to Delcianna Winders, director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s animal law and policy institute. The USDA can impose severe penalties against other enterprises governed by the Animal Welfare Act, including criminal charges, confiscating animals, revoking or suspending licenses, or applying for injunctions. But for research facilities, these are generally off the table (there’s a small caveat for confiscation). It’s what Winders calls “animal experimentation exceptionalism.”
Instead, violators might pay a settlement that’s a fraction of the maximum penalty. The USDA “typically offers to settle for a civil penalty that is much lower than the maximum civil penalty authorized in the relevant statute,” according to an agency FAQ. In a 2014 audit, the Office of Inspector General found that the USDA reduced penalties by an average of 86 percent from the AWA’s authorized maximum penalty per violation.
The USDA has also excluded certain violations from public reports. For the past six years, the agency had a policy called “Teachable Moments,” in which it refrained from including minor violations in public inspection reports (the policy ended this summer after years of pressure). Last year, the agency terminated a program that excluded some violations from public inspection reports if the research facility self-reported and corrected them.
In an emailed statement, the USDA said, “When inspectors identify items that are not in compliance with the federal standards, USDA Animal Care holds those facilities responsible for properly addressing and correcting those items within a set timeframe. If the noncompliance is not corrected, or if it is serious enough in nature, USDA pursues appropriate regulatory compliance and enforcement actions.”
The moral math of animal testing
Animal testing is often justified using a kind of moral math: It’s worth killing X number of animals if it leads to outcome Y, like helping paralyzed people walk or blind people see. But the problem is that we rarely know the number for X — it could take experimenting on one more animal, or millions more, for Neuralink to achieve its goal (even if Musk’s true goal is to use brain-computer interfaces to merge humans with AI). The same goes for inventing important new medical devices, pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines. And of course, achieving outcome Y is almost always uncertain.
But moral math is hard to do if you’re missing half the equation. We have no idea how many animals are experimented on because federal agencies don’t keep a comprehensive tally. In fiscal year 2018, the USDA reported that 780,070 AWA-covered animals were used in experiments, with an additional 122,717 held in facilities but not used for research. But that number excludes birds, reptiles, and fish, as well as rats and mice, who make up the vast majority of animals used in experiments — over 99 percent according to veterinarian Larry Carbone, who estimates the US experiments on 111.5 million rats and mice per year (though some critics say this estimate is flawed).
Animal testing has led to scientific breakthroughs we all benefit from, but it’s also costly and slow, and it often fails — according to the NIH, 95 percent of pharmaceutical drugs that work in animal trials fail in human trials. But just how much humans benefit from animal experimentation is hard to parse: A 2018 meta-analysis from UK researchers looked at 212 studies from 1967 to 2005, involving over 27,000 animals, and concluded that most studies were poorly designed and didn’t meaningfully advance scientific knowledge. Only 3 percent of the studies mentioned pain relief for animals. Some in the science community wonder why we’re betting so much of the future of medicine on mice and rats.
Public opinion is changing on the issue, with the percentage of Americans who support medical animal testing dropping from 65 percent in 2001 to 51 percent in 2017. There’s also a growing chorus of voices — not just activists and law professors, but also drug developers, researchers, veterinarians, and entrepreneurs — arguing that a new suite of high-tech, non-animal alternative methods could lead to faster, safer, and more ethical drug development and product testing.
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Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“There has been, over the last 40 years, an enormous change,” said Hartung. “Alternative methods are as good or better than animals in many areas.”
Musk has always viewed himself as a change agent, a disruptor, and Neuralink is part of that. But in allegedly mistreating animals in research, his company is all too conventional.
Though the Islamic Republic has a history of protest, this year’s unrest is unique.
For nearly three months, protests have gripped Iran — protests that have not only been surprisingly durable, but also led primarily by women.
On Thursday, the Islamic Republic, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, executed 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari for the crime of “waging war against God,” or moharebeh in Farsi.
Shekari was the first prisoner to be executed due to the recent unrest, in what head of the Norway-based organization Iran Human Rights Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam told the BBC was a “show trial without any due process.”
With Shekari’s execution — likely the first of dozens — the Iranian regime is reverting to a tried and tested playbook of executing political opponents and dissidents. But it’s not clear that the mass imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, and further possible state-sanctioned executions will deter the protesters who have for more than two months now defied crackdowns and curfews to call for an end to Khamenei’s regime.
It’s also not clear what success looks like for the protesters should they somehow manage to topple the regime that’s had an iron grip on the nation since the 1979 revolution — or how they would manage to do so in the first place.
The inciting spark for the now 11-week-long protests was the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16 while in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Amini, a 21-year old Kurdish woman, was arrested while in Tehran for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly; since her death, she has become a potent symbol of many Iranians’ contempt for the country’s oppressive theocracy.
The protests have gained momentum since they began in Amini’s hometown of Saqez, in Iranian Kurdistan, appearing in dozens of cities throughout the Islamic Republic despite the government’s efforts — including internet and mobile network disruptions, mass arrests, and civilian killings — to quash them.
There are some ways this protest echoes past movements, but there are also key differences — not just the longevity, but the degree of societal cohesion and solidarity, too. Women have led and been the public face of this movement — a particularly notable fact in 2022, though, given the ways that women have been repressed under the current regime.
All of that, however, doesn’t mean that this movement will bring down the Islamic Republic; decades of repression, a poor economic outlook, extremely limited opposition in the political establishment, plus the fact that that military and security service as well as the economic elite continue to throw their lot in with the regime make it difficult to imagine an alternative vision for the future of Iran.
Why the protests are happening now
The protests began with one young woman’s death in police custody, but quickly grew into a call to change the future of Iranian society.
Amini, who was also known by her Kurdish name, Jina or Zhina, was taken into custody by the Guidance Patrol — Iran’s so-called morality police — on September 13 at a Tehran metro station. Police alleged she was wearing her hijab incorrectly, and they were taking her into custody to “educate” her, as Reuters reported in October. Sometime between her arrest and September 16, when she died at Tehran’s Kasra hospital, she fell into a coma. Police said it was due to a heart condition, but Amini’s family denied any heart problems, and her father claimed he saw bruises on Mahsa’s legs.
“There was nothing wrong with what she was wearing,” Azadeh Moaveni, an Iranian-American journalist and former head of the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, said on a November episode of the London Review of Books podcast. “She was completely covered and she died, so I think that’s what’s shaking about it. Any mother, from any religious background, from whatever type of family — and I think that’s why so many religious families are with the protesters — that could have been anyone’s daughter.”
News of Amini’s death spread quickly via social media, and her funeral erupted into protests; according to Reuters, security forces fired teargas at the demonstrators as protests quickly spread to Sanandaj, the regional capital. Already protesters were shouting “death to the dictator,” and women were removing their headscarves. By September 18, protesters at the University of Iran were shouting what is now the protest’s slogan: “Woman, life, freedom,” in short, calling for the end of the regime.
“This corrupt regime will do anything to stay where they are,” a female protester told BBC News Hour December 4. “We the protesters don’t care about ‘no hijab’ no more [sic]. We’ve been going out without it for the past 70 days. A revolution is what we care [about] — hijab was the start of it, and we don’t want anything, anything less than death for the dictator, and regime change.”
Amini’s death became the catalyzing event to unleash pent-up fury at the government; political opposition is basically nonexistent, with Iran’s Reform Party suggesting gradual fixes in the face of protester’s demands for radical change. Ordinary Iranians have little political representation, particularly after the election of the hard-line current President Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei’s preferred candidate in the 2021 elections who has a record of grievous human rights abuses. Many Iranians refused to vote in those most recent elections, both as the only feasible way to show disgust with the system, and because many understood the vote to be rigged in Raisi’s favor.
One of the main sources of people’s dissatisfaction is Iran’s miserable economy — the result of brutal sanctions on the part of the US and its allies, as well as the regime’s determination to exert its influence in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and now Russia by funding proxy groups and exporting weapons. With unemployment running at about 11.5 percent, people have both the incentive and the time to protest, and little to lose.
However, the country’s elite seem to be surviving the economic free-fall and maintaining their support for and ties to the regime, too. “We have seen no serious defections so far” among the country’s well-connected and powerful upper class, Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, told Vox in a November 18 email interview. Despite “the abject failures of the regime to improve the country’s economic well-being,” the highest echelons of society have, at least publicly, refused to stand up to those in power.
These protests pose a unique challenge to the Iranian government
Protest is an important, and fairly consistent, part of Iranian political life dating even before the 1979 revolution. But this year’s uprising differs from recent mass movements, like the 2009 Green Movement that called for the annulment of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election and 2019 economic protests which spiraled into a call for regime change.
This time, the protests are demanding a reimagining of Iranian society; so far, the protests have seen remarkably diverse groups with their own unique sources of frustration, coming together to demand change.
As with the 2019 protests, the dire economic circumstances of 2022 — the result of the US’s aggressive sanctions, a corrupt and inefficient government concerned primarily with maintaining power, and lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic — set the stage for the nationwide eruption.
In a significant show of solidarity, some businesses across the nation — including Tehran’s grand Bazaar — closed for a three-day general strike this week.
“Historically, protest movements in Iran, going back to the 19th century, have involved workers, shopkeepers, bazaars, and the like to succeed,” Kashani-Sabet said. “Although the economic and social landscape of today’s Iran is very different from 1890, 1906, 1953, or 1979, today’s strikes and boycotts nonetheless show the widespread nature of dissent and the willing participation of important commercial sectors of society.”
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on modern Iran and the Middle East, called the current movement an “extraordinary departure” in that “women are its symbol and became the initial propellors of change.”
“Through these uprisings, it has become apparent that gender issues can no longer be relegated globally to tertiary political preoccupations, but rather gender concerns have become the driving force and motivators of social change,” Kashani-Sabet told Vox in an email. “For Iranian dissenters, gender issues are not their only grievances, but this fight has enabled them to connect gender violence and inequality to the regime’s other authoritarian behaviors.”
Iran is “a country whose identity is shaped around ethnic diversity,” Kashani-Sabet said, and many of those ethnic groups, like Balochs and Kurds, are subject to additional violence based on their identity. Whether that’s physical violence enacted by the state in the border regions many minorities call home, or the denial of their right to speak their own languages, such minority groups have even less of a voice in Iranian governance than ethnic Persians who speak Farsi and practice Shia Islam.
“These protests are primarily driven by a broadly shared sense of nationalism, not separatism,” Vaez told Vox in a previous email interview.
As Kashani-Sabet pointed out, there are a number of “deep-rooted frustrations that many Iranian dissenters share,” primary among them, “this sense of being deprived of human rights and of the ability to participate effectively in shaping the political outlook of their country.”
How the Iranian government has responded, briefly explained
The government’s response to the protests has been somewhat inconsistent, but primarily quite harsh. Raisi claimed in a recent speech that Iran “has the most progressive constitution in the world” and has blamed the unrest on outside influences, primarily Iran’s adversaries, Israel and the US.
Guidance Patrol forces have been scarce during the protests, and women and girls are out on the streets every day without head coverings despite the laws. But the government hasn’t made any official concessions or policy changes. While comments from Attorney General Mohammad-Jafar Montazeri were initially reported by the international press as an announcement that the government would be disbanding the Guidance Patrol and changing hijab laws, it later appeared his remarks were either misunderstood or overblown.
While Moaveni did indicate in her that some politicians would be willing to loosen hijab laws — and clothing laws have been less strict under previous presidents, even the notorious Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But, Moaveni pointed out, at this point, for Raisi to allow such a change would be tantamount to “admitting that revolution secularized Iran, and […] that’s a very humiliating thing for the authorities.”
Meanwhile, physical violence against protesters has escalated and could get worse.
To date, more than 300 people have been killed during the protests, though the actual number is likely higher, as rights groups indicate. That number includes roughly 50 children under 18, the New York Times’ Farnaz Fassihi previously reported. But casualties and arrests — the latter of which the HRANA activist news agency puts at around 18,000 — are difficult to track; social media and internet access are severely curtailed, and foreign reporters can’t access the country. Thus far, at least 12 people are set to be executed for participating in the uprising, the Washington Post reported Thursday; Shekari’s death marks the first.
Borzou Daragahi, a senior international correspondent for the Independent and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Vox in a previous phone interview. “In the mind of the regime, nothing is off limits because ‘we’re doing God’s work,’” he said.
Could regime change happen?
Regardless of the strength of the protests, regime change remains a very distant possibility. Authoritarian governments can have impressive longevity, as Syria, China, North Korea, and Russia show.
Still, the memory of the Arab Spring invites comparison; Moaveni likened Amini’s death to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who died by self-immolation in 2010 after suffering humiliation at the hands of the police and the local government, setting off the Arab Spring. That multi-nation protest movement did see regime change in places like Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. In some cases, however, the alternatives that replaced the dictatorships were perhaps not what protesters had hoped for or imagined.
For Ali Khamenei’s theocracy to collapse would most likely require “pressure from below and divisions at the top,” Karim Sadjadpour wrote for Foreign Affairs this spring. The pressure from below is certainly there, despite the increasingly high costs.
There’s not so much pressure from the top, and while there are cracks in the regime’s façade, Daragahi said, they’re small and easy to miss.
“It appears that the difference is between those who support the crackdown and those who want more crackdown,” Vaez told Vox. The political fractures aren’t as extreme as they have been in past protest movements, likely due to the fact that “the system purged the most pragmatic forces of Iranian politics and is now left with either ultra-hardliners or sycophants,” he said.
Looming over Iran’s political future is the fact that the Supreme Leader is 83 years old. In the running to replace him when he dies are his second son Mojtaba and a familiar figure — Ebrahim Raisi.
Though there are vocal opposition groups formed by the diaspora, “any viable government for a post-Islamic Republic Iran cannot come from exile, but must emerge from the ground up,” Kashani-Sabet said. “Some individuals or groups in exile will undoubtedly be stakeholders, but it is hard to know whether the majority of the people in Iran, who are living under dire conditions every day, will want someone from the outside.”
In the present, the three-day general strikes show that the protests have real support from workers, who are a critical part of any political struggle in Iran and whose decision to close their businesses in a time of economic precariousness shows great solidarity with the protesters. But as of yet, the protest movement hasn’t defined a specific vision of Iranian society — which it will need to do in order to maintain momentum and work toward a political future.
The US’s decades-long relationship with Saudi Arabia continues to crumble.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, participated in a major meeting Friday, signaling increasingly close ties between the nations as US relations with both nations grow increasingly chilly.
One significant result of the summit — which focused on trade agreements concerning oil, technology, infrastructure, and security — was an agreement that the two nations would not interfere with each other’s domestic affairs. Alleged human rights violations have been a serious pressure point in the once-strong US-Saudi alliance, while criticism of China’s treatment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region have rankled the economic superpower.
The China-Saudi relationship isn’t new, but Friday’s summit outlined the terms of the two countries’ cooperation and heralds a shift in the global geopolitical order — away from the US.
The US-Saudi alliance, which has endured through seven Saudi monarchs and 15 presidents, has taken a blow under US President Joe Biden, who vowed during his campaign in 2019 to make the oil-rich Gulf nation a “pariah” for directing the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamaal Khashoggi in 2018 and the kingdom’s role in the punishing Yemeni civil war. The tension has continued, most notably over Saudi oil production as sanctions on Russian energy help drive up fuel prices around the world.
What do Saudi and China get from a stronger alliance?
The Crown Prince, who is commonly known by the acronym MBS, has met with Xi before, most recently at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Though it might seem an odd pairing, the two nations actually have quite a bit in common, including autocratic leadership, serious repression of dissent, a clear need to diversify in order to maintain economic growth, and ambitious infrastructure projects.
China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner, with Chinese exports to the kingdom reaching $30.3 billion in 2021 and Saudi exports totaling $57 billion in the same year, according to Reuters. Saudi oil makes up 18 percent of Beijing’s total crude oil imports — worth about $55.5 billion between January and October of this year.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has great ambitions to diversify its economy, which has for decades relied on crude oil output. But in order to do that, it needs money — oil money. That’s at least part of why Saudi Arabia limited production in the midst of a global oil crisis and prices for crude oil remain high.
Both nations also tout ambitious infrastructure projects. The Belt and Road initiative, China’s effort to create a 21st-century Silk Road international trade route by providing the finances to develop series of ports, pipelines, railroads, bridges, and other trade infrastructure to nations across Asia and Africa, is a milestone effort for Xi. It’s also received major criticism for potentially exploiting poor nations by essentially loaning them money they can’t pay back, in some cases granting China control over these critical hubs.
Xi’s presence in Saudi Arabia, both with MBS and as part of a larger summit with Arab and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, present multiple opportunities to strengthen ties with a host of nations in the region — and to make sure that in the global great power competition, those nations are, at least, not aligned with the US, as Shannon Tiezzi wrote in The Diplomat Wednesday.
Critically, Saudi Arabia knows it cannot depend on generous US weapons sales under Biden so China is an increasingly viable alternative. In fact, Reuters reported, Riyadh is thought to have signed $30 billion in defense contracts at this summit with China.
In forging their alliance, both nations get a strong trading partner who won’t question their policies; Saudi gets a more predictable relationship in Xi than it has seen in the switch from former President Donald Trump to Biden.
How does this affect the US and its global position as a superpower?
The US-Saudi relationship is longstanding; it officially started toward the end of World War II; the basic oil-for-security trade that has lasted for decades and has been increasingly important to the kingdom, between Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s and the increasing influence of regional rival Iran. Despite Saudi repression and alleged human rights abuses, Riyadh could count on US weapons, and the US could almost always count on cheap Saudi oil.
Of course, there have been tensions in the relationship before; the 1973 oil embargo in retaliation for the US decision to resupply the Israeli military during the Arab-Israeli War, as well as Saudi involvement in the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, tested the alliance, but US leadership maintained that the kingdom was a key regional partner nonetheless.
Under Trump, the relationship between the two nations was somewhere between transactional and downright chummy — Trump even reportedly bragged that he defended MBS against criticism from Congress over Khashoggi’s death.
But the relationship has become the most strained it has been in recent memory due to MBS’s abuses and Biden’s criticism. In March, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a fuel shortage, MBS refused to take Biden’s calls to negotiate increased oil production and help ease prices. When they finally met in July, Biden was extremely uncomfortable — and he left almost empty-handed.
The growing Saudi-China relationship may indicate a threat to the US’s historic position as an international leader, evidenced in Saudi Arabia’s failure to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in favor of its own economic needs. This fall, after Biden asked for increased oil production to help drive down inflation in the US, Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC+ countries, including Russia, chose to continue a limited production scale — a move Washington interpreted as tacit support for Russia.
MBS has done much, at least superficially, to bring Saudi Arabia into the 21st century; women are now allowed to drive, and entertainment like cinemas, concerts, and sporting events are available after decades of conservative Wahabbist culture. But he’s also committed egregious, violent acts like fueling a war that’s killed an estimated 15,000 Yemeni civilians and further devastated the impoverished country, as well as ordering Khashoggi — a US resident who wrote for the Washington Post — to be killed.
The deepening China-Saudi relationship has implications beyond just the geopolitical, though. If, as China has repeatedly requested, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations begin allowing China to pay for oil in its currency, the yuan, as opposed to the dollar, it could have even further economic consequences for the US. Such a move, the Wall Street Journal explained in March, would devalue the dollar and erode its standing in the international financial system
“The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency,” economist Gal Luft, co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, told the Journal at the time. “If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse.”
A single alliance doesn’t necessarily indicate that US primacy and hegemony is over for good — but it certainly solidifies a major repositioning of the global order. How that will unfold, and the US’s role in that order, remains unclear.