Arms sales to Saudi Arabia are an ongoing reinforcement of the violence of capitalist accumulation that directly contributes to the profit motive and anti-democratic interventions globally.

We have documented the influence of an integrated transnational capitalist bloc on U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf over the past four decades. Transnational capital has pooled its efforts in corporate-funded think-tanks that integrate the interests of U.S.-based defense, energy, and financial corporations across a wide network of growing U.S.-Saudi investment ties. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to neatly separate the interests of a transnational investment bloc, focused on maximizing their own profits, from how the U.S. foreign policy establishment defines “strategic” interests. As we have shown, a transnational investment bloc led by defense contractors, as early as the 1970s, was instrumental in working with U.S. policymakers to identify U.S. military expansion in the Persian Gulf region as central to U.S. national security. They were joined as early as the 1980s by an emerging transnational investment coalition that included U.S. energy and financial corporations. These relationships have expanded dramatically over the decades, as an even wider range of U.S. transnational investors have committed substantial capital in Saudi Arabia as part of the restructuring of the Saudi economy. Furthermore, the substantial growth of Saudi Public Investment funds into a wide range of U.S. investments have further solidified and deepened the lobbying power of this transnational investment bloc, which operates as a two-directional lobbying network that attempts to influence a wide range of policies. Although the broader political goals of this investment bloc are beyond the scope of this paper, there is considerable evidence that this transnational investment bloc linking U.S., Saudi Arabian and GCC investors has been prominent in successfully working to scuttle the Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. This bloc has also continued to lobby for increasing U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and supporting Saudi foreign policy ventures in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Countering this bloc in U.S. foreign policy would require building a broad coalition that could link the concerns of human rights groups, social welfare organizations, labor unions and peace organizations in a campaign to reverse U.S. militarization abroad and at home. The fact that the U.S. Congress voted in 2019 to cut off U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and, in a separate vote in 2020, to block $23 billion in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates that had been approved by President Trump, indicates that there is some momentum to challenge some aspects of status quo policy (despite President Trump’s successful vetoes). Whether this momentum can continue will be largely dependent on the ability of critics of the U.S. militarization of the Persian Gulf to build a broad enough coalition to challenge the power of the well-financed and deeply entrenched transnational investment bloc. Contrary to accounts that speak of U.S. “strategic interests” without referencing how the transnational investment bloc defines those interest, our account emphasizes the profit-making motives behind those “strategic” choices. We hope this helps to advance a broader politicization about the relationship between this transnational investment bloc, U.S. militarization, and the efforts to build constructive alternative definitions of “security” and human welfare.