Bin Salman had already launched his Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to diversify the Saudi economy and boost foreign investment. The crown prince consolidated his control of military and security agencies, disbanding longstanding patronage networks and quashing potential rivals in the royal family. Within months of his appointment, the heir apparent drew widespread criticism for launching a regional blockade of Qatar and ordering a corruption crackdown in which dozens of Saudi elites were arrested and detained without formal charges. Amid the shake-up, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri was summoned to Riyadh, where he resigned under apparent pressure.
(He withdrew the resignation upon his return to Lebanon.) Arrests of prominent religious and political activists, including dissidents, have prompted human rights advocates to criticize the country's leadership. According to the BICC, Saudi Arabia is the 28th most militarized country in the world and possesses the second-best military equipment qualitatively in the region, after Israel. By the late 2010s, there have been continual calls for halting of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, mainly due to alleged war crimes in Yemen and especially following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, founded in 1932, traces its roots to an alliance between the Saud family and descendants of religious cleric Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahab, who espoused conservative Sunni jurisprudence. This pact has endured for centuries, influencing the country's domestic and foreign policy. Saudi authorities enforce religious restrictions, denying women rights they enjoy in Western democracies, and the government promotes its interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, by funding religious schools around the world.
Though it has recently lifted some restrictions, including a ban on women drivers, human rights groups say rights abuses persist. Of course, there is more going on here, at least for the administration. Cutting off the weapons supply to the Saudis is not going to stop the war in Yemen.
It may make it harder after some time, but the Yemen conflict will not end by an act of Congress. The Biden administration's policy is based on this reality and on a recognition that it is awfully hard to make Saudi Arabia into a pariah. That Riyadh needs Washington more than Washington needs Riyadh, and this fact gives the United States leverage. Like everything else in life, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is more complicated.
The two countries need each for different things and often at different times. Following recognition in 1931, the United States and Saudi Arabia established full diplomatic relations, with exchange of credentials and the first U.S. ambassadorial posting to Jeddah, in 1940. Saudi Arabia's unique role in the Arab and Islamic worlds, its holding of the world's second largest reserves of oil, and its strategic location all play a role in the long-standing bilateral relationship between the Kingdom and the United States.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in preserving the stability, security, and prosperity of the Gulf region and consult closely on a wide range of regional and global issues. Saudi Arabia plays an important role in working toward a peaceful and prosperous future for the region and is a strong partner in security and counterterrorism efforts and in military, diplomatic, and financial cooperation. Its forces work closely with U.S. military and law enforcement bodies to safeguard both countries' national security interests. The United States and Saudi Arabia also enjoy robust cultural and educational ties with some 37,000 Saudi students studying in U.S. colleges and universities and scores of educational and cultural exchange visitors each year.
The United States also provides promising youth and emerging Saudi leaders the opportunity to experience the United States and its institutions through the International Visitor Leadership Program and various other exchange programs. From 2003 to 2013, "several key services" were privatized—municipal water supply, electricity, telecommunications—and parts of education and health care, traffic control and car accident reporting were also privatized. In November 2005, Saudi Arabia was approved as a member of the World Trade Organization. Negotiations to join had focused on the degree to which Saudi Arabia is willing to increase market access to foreign goods and in 2000, the government established the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority to encourage foreign direct investment in the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia maintains a list of sectors in which foreign investment is prohibited, but the government plans to open some closed sectors such as telecommunications, insurance, and power transmission/distribution over time. The government has also made an attempt at "Saudizing" the economy, replacing foreign workers with Saudi nationals with limited success. The vast wealth generated by oil revenues was beginning to have an even greater impact on Saudi society. It led to rapid technological modernization, urbanization, mass public education, and the creation of new media. This and the presence of increasingly large numbers of foreign workers greatly affected traditional Saudi norms and values. Although there was a dramatic change in the social and economic life of the country, political power continued to be monopolized by the royal family leading to discontent among many Saudis who began to look for wider participation in government.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia constitutes the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia with a total area of approximately 2.25 million km2 of which about 38% are desert lands. The country is arid, and the sand desert renders several regions susceptible to flooding and desertification. Saudi Arabia's population is approximately 35 million people and its economy is heavily dependent on oil. Saudi Arabia lacks permanent water resources and, therefore, must depend on groundwater and seawater desalination to meet its water demands. Saudi Arabia is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that pose increasing risk to its water security, such as decrease in frequency and amount of precipitation and increase in temperature.
As of October 2018, Saudi Arabia is the largest economy in the Middle East and the 18th largest in the world.Saudi Arabia has the world's second-largest proven petroleum reserves and the country is the largest exporter of petroleum. It has the second highest total estimated value of natural resources, valued at US$34.4 trillion in 2016.Saudi Arabia's command economy is petroleum-based; roughly 63% of budget revenues and 67% of export earnings come from the oil industry. In its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2010, Transparency International gave Saudi Arabia a score of 4.7 (on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is "highly corrupt" and 10 is "highly clean"). A number of prominent Saudi Arabian princes, government ministers, and businesspeople, including Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, were arrested in Saudi Arabia in November 2017. The king combines legislative, executive, and judicial functions and royal decrees form the basis of the country's legislation.
The king is also the prime minister, and presides over the Council of Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia. The family's vast numbers allow it to control most of the kingdom's important posts and to have an involvement and presence at all levels of government. The number of princes is estimated to be at least 7,000, with most power and influence being wielded by the 200 or so male descendants of Ibn Saud.
The key ministries are generally reserved for the royal family, as are the 13 regional governorships. By 1976, Saudi Arabia had become the largest oil producer in the world. Khalid's reign saw economic and social development progress at an extremely rapid rate, transforming the infrastructure and educational system of the country; in foreign policy, close ties with the US were developed. In 1979, two events occurred which greatly concerned the government, and had a long-term influence on Saudi foreign and domestic policy.
It was feared that the country's Shi'ite minority in the Eastern Province might rebel under the influence of their Iranian co-religionists. There were several anti-government uprisings in the region such as the 1979 Qatif Uprising. Tourism is a key element of Vision 2030, an economic-reform plan meant to wean the kingdom off oil that was unveiled five years ago by Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince. The government expects tourism to be the largest source of new jobs in the private sector, accounting for 10% of both GDP and employment within a decade.
"The industry is at the top of our 2030 agenda," says Ahmed al-Khateeb, the tourism minister, who hopes to see 100m local and foreign tourists in ten years' time. Saudi Arabia's proven crude oil reserves are among the largest in the world. Its oil production averaged 10.7 million barrels a day, of which 7.43 million were exported, in September 2018, according to theJoint Organizations Data Initiative, which compiles information about global energy production. Protecting Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf producers has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy for decades. On 2 May, the Finance Minister of Saudi Arabia admitted that the country's economy was facing a severe economical crisis for the first time in decades, due to the pandemic as well as declining global oil markets.
Mohammed Al-Jadaan said that the country will take "painful" measures and keep all options open to deal with the impact. The totalitarian regime ruling the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is consistently ranked among the "worstest" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights. According to Amnesty International, security forces continued to torture and ill- treat detainees to extract confessions to be used as evidence against them at trial. Saudi Arabia abstained from the United Nations vote adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying it contradicted sharia law. Mass execution such as those carried out in 2016 and in 2019 have been condemned by international rights groups. By the late Bronze Age, a historically recorded people and land in the north-western portion of Saudi Arabia are well-documented in the Bible.
Centred in Tabouk, it stretched from Wadi Arabah in the north to the area of al-Wejh in the south. The capital of Midian was Qurayyah, it consists of a large fortified citadel encompassing 35 hectares and below it lies a walled settlement of 15 hectares. The Midianites were depicted in two major events in the Bible that recount Israel's two wars with Midian, somewhere in the early 11th century BC. Politically, the Midianites were described as having a decentralized structure headed by five kings , the names appears to be toponyms of important Midianite settlements. It is common to view that Midian designated a confederation of tribes, the sedentary element settled in the Hijaz while its nomadic affiliates pastured, and sometimes pillaged as far away land as Palestine.
The nomadic Midianites were one of the earliest exploiters of the domestication of camels that enabled them to navigate through the harsh terrains of the region. The conservative capital city of Saudi Arabia is one of the world's wealthiest cities, combining traditional ideals and cultural values with modern developments in trade, business, architecture and tourism. Dedicated to upholding traditional Islamic values yet undergoing significant change following growing economic prosperity and innovation, Riyadh is a city full of contradictions. This makes it both intriguing and confusing for many foreigners, though there's also plenty to ensure visitors are comfortable – including swanky hotels overlooking the surrounding desert, and the fact that almost everyone speaks business English. King Saud University, the second-ranked university in Saudi Arabia, is located here. Saudi government officials and businessmen, both royals and commoners, have deep ties to the United States that extend beyond oil to finance and Silicon Valley.
Saudi ministers, including those of finance and petroleum, have degrees from U.S. universities. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, an alumnus of Syracuse University, is the kingdom's most famous billionaire investor and owns stakes in Citigroup, Twitter, and Snap. (Bin Talal was detained for nearly three months as part of the 2017 crackdown.) Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has stakes in major U.S. tech firms, including Uber and Tesla. The Trump administration has generally embraced the new Saudi leadership. Saudi actions in 2018, however, brought to the fore questions about U.S. support for the kingdom. Late this year, U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups called on the administration to penalize Riyadh for the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate.
Treasury Department levied sanctions against seventeen Saudi officials suspected of being involved. However, President Trump dismissed proposals to cut arms sales to the kingdom and backed bin Salman's assertions that he did not order the killing, despite the reported conclusions of the CIA. Repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly intensified. Virtually all known Saudi Arabian human rights defenders inside the country were detained or imprisoned at the end of the year.
How many states does Saudi Arabia have Grossly unfair trials continued before the Specialized Criminal Court and other courts. Courts resorted extensively to the death penalty and people were executed for a wide range of crimes. Migrant workers were even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation because of the pandemic, and thousands were arbitrarily detained in dire conditions, leading to an unknown number of deaths. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the Arabian Peninsula, with the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to the west and the Persian Gulf to the east. Neighbouring countries are Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the Sultanate of Oman, Yemen, and Bahrain, connected to the Saudi mainland by a causeway.
Saudi Arabia's population is 28.29 million and its capital city is Riyadh. Saudi Arabia's economy is petroleum-based; 90% of export earnings come from the oil industry; the Kingdom is the world's largest producer and exporter of oil. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the largest Arab countries of the Arabian Peninsula; it covers about 80 % of the Region.
Geographically Saudi Arabia includes 6 regions; Eastern, Central, Northern, Northwest, Midwest, and Southwest regions; these regions are comprised of 13 provinces (Fig. 9). KSA has a high income economy based entirely on oil; however, agricultural economy has been expanding since the late 1970s due to development of new dams and irrigation projects. Schistosomiasis has been endemic in the Arabian Peninsula since the tenth century; Ibin Sina ... In 2018, the Al Jouf Agricultural Development Company received a certificate of merit from The Guinness World Records for the largest modern olive plantation in the world. Also, the Guinness World Records took their production capacity of tonnes of high-quality olive oil into consideration, while the kingdom consumes double that. The Al Jouf farms are located in Sakaka, a city in the north-western part of Saudi Arabia, which is a deeply-rooted in history.
The Al Jouf region has millions of olive trees and the expected number is expected to go up to 20 million trees soon. Consuming non-renewable groundwater resulted in the loss of an estimated four-fifths of the total groundwater reserves by 2012. This contributes, they said, to a practice in Washington whereby the bad behavior of other Middle East states — particularly US adversaries such as Iran — receive heavy attention and debate. But bad behavior by Gulf allies — human rights abuses, opposition to democracy movements, foreign policy actions that often undercut US interests — while far from ignored are discussed with less frequency and vigor. Miriam is a correspondent intern at the Organization for World Peace.
She is currently studying International Relations at American University, with a concentration in foreign policy, national security, and global security, and a minor in French. Miriam is particularly interested in counterterrorism , women's rights, and politics in the MENA region. The capital, Riyadh, currently has 5.2 million inhabitants, followed by Jeddah (3.2 million), Mecca , Medina (1.3 million), and Dammam . @FanackSaudi Arabia contains the world's largest continuous sand desert, al-Rub al-Khali .
The largest is the Najd, a central plateau, which rises from about 600 metres in the east to about 1,500 metres in the west. The Hijaz stretches along the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aqaba south to Asir and is the location of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Asir, extending south to the Yemen border, includes a fertile coastal plain.
The Eastern Province extends along the Persian Gulf and is the primary oil-producing region of the country. These ties, along with the large number of wealthy families in Saudi Arabia, have long made the country a source of investments in U.S. companies. Many international fundraising "road shows" for private equity firms and hedge funds make stops in Riyadh, or at least visits with the bankers in Dubai who manage money for Saudis. Moreover, many U.S. and European firms have opened or expanded operations in Saudi Arabia since it opened its stock market to foreign investors in 2015. Following Khashoggi's murder, however, dozens of top business leaders and media sponsors pulled out of a major investment conference for the kingdom.
Analysts say that it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia to realize its vision for economic reform without such foreign investment. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 with close links to the kingdom's intelligence officials. But his opposition to U.S. troops in the Middle East put him at odds with the royal family, which welcomed the U.S. forces that had driven Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait.
Bin Laden, who would found al-Qaeda, left the country by early 1992 and was stripped of citizenship in 1994. From his new base in Afghanistan, where he was protected by the new Taliban leadership, bin Laden issued a fatwa against "Americans occupying the land of the two holy mosques" , referring to the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, in 1996. Balancing the oil market, or making the price "fair" for both producers and consumers, is the stated goal of Riyadh's energy policy. However, more recently, the kingdom has manipulated oil prices to try to keep U.S. shale from becoming a viable competitor in the global market.
In 2014, facing a glut in supply, Saudi Arabia and OPEC once again faced calls to curb production. But the Saudi oil minister at the time, Ali al-Naimi, persuaded OPEC to keep pumping to force high-cost producers—those exploiting shale, oil sands, and deep-sea resources—to reduce their output. The policy also put heightened pressure on Russia, which was sanctioned by the United States and others after its invasion of Crimea. With such a large population, the majority of Saudi Arabian residents live in the urbanized cities. Just 17% of the population lives in the country's rural areas, while the remaining 83% live in the larger cities that provide more opportunities, both in industries including oil, finance and agriculture, and education. This is a dramatic decrease from the 1960 recorded rural population of 69% of the population.
Like many other countries, however, the development and expansion of cities, combined with migrants and natives moving to the cities, has contributed to the decline in rural populations. As the world's 13th largest country by area, it is no surprise that Saudia Arabia is also one of the most populous countries in the world. The city of Riyadh is the country's largest, boasting a population of over 4 million, which contributes heavily to the total population.
