1. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are now fully integrated into the international production and reproduction of the international monopolies. Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are a concrete expression of this. Saudi Arabia also bought four international monopolies and Qatar one.

In connection with the crisis slump of 2008/2009, the 500 solely ruling international supermonopolies were also hit massively, with their profits collapsing by 48.4 percent from 2007 to 2008. Massive pressure emerged to increasingly invest surplus capital outside the old imperialist metropolises to achieve maximum profit. This led to a considerable shift in the balance of forces and had the effect that the necessary international crisis management had to take place via the G20 with the involvement of the most important new-imperialist countries. Saudi Arabia is also a member of the international G20 organization. (G20: EU, USA, Japan, China, Germany, France, United Kindom, Italy, Brazil, Canada, India, Russia, Australia, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, South Africa)

As a new-imperialist country, Saudi Arabia is also confidently claiming its place at the so-called Munich Security Conference 2024.

Partly as a result of this development, Saudi Arabia’s economy experienced significant dynamic growth of 120 percentage points in the midst of the crisis compared to pre-crisis levels. At the same time, the share of the global foreign direct investments stocks was increased, with Saudi Arabia doubling its stocks between 2007 and 2014 and Qatar even increasing them sixfold.

2. At the same time, Saudi Arabia and Qatar were expanding their regional imperialist position of power in competition with the old imperialist powers and other new imperialist countries – especially Israel, Turkey and Iran.

Israel, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Arab sheikdoms struggle amongst each other and with the old imperialists for regional supremacy in the Middle East and North Africa.

In this context, Saudi Arabia played a formative role in the so-called Abraham Accords of 2020. In regard to the inter-imperialist contradictions, especially between the Western imperialists (USA, UK, NATO, EU), Israel ... on the one hand and China, Iran (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) on the other, the Accords were intended to strengthen the influence of US imperialism in alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel in the region and form an axis against China, Iran and their allies. The agreements reached between Israel and Bahrain in this context to open embassies, promote trade, tourism and scientific exchange, establish direct air links and cooperate more closely on security issues are particularly important because Bahrain cannot do anything in terms of foreign policy that is not permitted by new-imperialist Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Saudi tanks crushed broad mass protests by the Shiite population majority in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. At the time, bourgeois media assumed that Israel would now also be part of the axis of states that wanted to push back the influence of “Shiite-dominated Iran” in the Middle East. In this axis, Saudi Arabia was the spearhead and most influential power in the region. In close coordination with the USA and NATO, the axis did everything it could in Egypt in 2012 to bring about the overthrow of the country’s elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi; it sided with General Khalifa Haftar in Libya and is supporting the regime in Yemen in the conflict against the Iranian-backed Houthi militias.

However, Saudi Arabia is also in contradiction with other fascist forces in Islamist guise that have been supported by Turkey and Qatar, including Hamas in Palestine, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood with the support of Israel.

It is an expression of the new-imperialist power that Saudi Arabia has gained that the country is also developing independent relations with other new-imperialist powers that are in contradiction to the USA. For example, at the instigation of Chinese imperialism, an Iranian-Saudi “reconciliation” was brokered in spring 2023. In connection with the current conflicts in Israel/Palestine/Gaza, however, a further expansion of the so-called Abraham Accords with further agreements between Israel and Saudi Arabia was torpedoed and a stop was put to the Abraham Accords and the plans of US imperialism. One implication of the new Gaza war is that US imperialism’s time as the most important imperialist power in the Middle East (as a superpower) is coming to an end and that its policy here has failed again. In the further development, the new-imperialist Saudi Arabia will also play a significant role.Saudi Arabia is thus increasingly assuming a certain leading role in this dispute. While it publicly declared on 7 February in a statement addressed to the USA that it stands firmly by the side of the “brotherly Palestinian people” and that there will be “no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital” and that the “aggression on the Gaza Strip” must stop and “Israeli occupation forces” must withdraw, it is also acting as a blockade breaker in favor of Israel. As reported by the Israeli Channel 13 and Middle East Eye, Saudi Arabia is helping Israel to circumvent the blockade of the Red Sea enforced by the Yemeni Ansarullah, with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordan allowing the blocked goods to pass through to Israel via a land bridge.

It also fits in the picture that Saudi Arabia became a member of the so-called BRICS alliance in August 2023. In South Africa, at the summit meeting of the new-imperialist BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia were welcomed as new members.

Saudi Arabia is also the largest and most influential country in OPEC. Founded in 1960, OPEC is an international association of oil-producing countries that controls a third of global oil production and is therefore involved in dictating the price of oil on the world market.

Under the leadership of China, a rapprochement between the two rival new-imperialist countries Saudi Arabia and Iran took place in mid-March 2023. Saudi Arabia then also joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a “dialogue partner.” This alliance, as a counterforce to NATO, consists so far of Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states.

The development shows that US imperialism is losing influence in the Middle East. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner. Riyadh bought 10 percent of the Chinese corporation Rongsheng Petrochemical and supplies it with 480,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The joint construction of an integrated refinery and petrochemical complex in China is planned.

In view of the intensified contradictions between the USA and China as well as Russia, Saudi Arabia wants to turn away from a one-sided orientation towards the USA. “The traditional monogamous relationship with the US is now over,” tweeted Saudi analyst Ali Shihabi, “and we have gone into a more open relationship; strong with the US, but equally strong with China, India, [the] UK, France and others.”

Like other new-imperialist countries, Saudi Arabia has grown into one of the world’s largest importers of heavy weapons. From 2011 to 2015 India headed the list with a world market share of 14 percent – followed by Saudi Arabia with 7 percent.

At the end of 2023, for the first time in five years, the so-called Federal Security Council of Germany approved a large-scale arms delivery to Saudi Arabia: the export of 150 Iris-T air-to-air missiles to arm the Eurofighter jet fighter. Saudi Arabia already has 72 Eurofighters.

Furthermore, the German government has recently decided to deliver further Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia, together with the UK. As is well known, Saudi Arabia has been leading a military alliance in Yemen against the Shiite Ansarullah, also known as the Houthis, since 2015; this has resulted in numerous war crimes and attacks on the civilian population.

The new-imperialist character is also evident in the environmental issue, where the new-imperialist countries claim special rights for the destruction of the natural foundations of human life. In this context, Saudi Arabia, too, has driven up its CO2 emissions. Despite all the protests around the world, the oil and gas business is clearly continuing to flourish. Worldwide, 244 billion euros are expected to be invested in the gas and oil industry in 2024. In view of the grandiose promises to phase out fossil fuels, which were made above all by the capitalist countries of the West most recently at the World Climate Conference in Dubai in November, these figures are remarkable. Since pipelines and production facilities have to run for several decades to pay off, this means that the promises are ultimately smoke and mirrors. Saudi Aramco from Saudi Arabia ranges at the top; the corporation expects to report a profit of over 100 billion euros for 2023.

3. It is merely a superficial and unscientific description to characterize countries such as Saudi Arabia or Qatar as regional powers or emerging countries. The argument that these two countries hardly have an advanced production base fails to recognize the following: Although the production base is concentrated on oil and gas, it is integrated into the internationalized mode of production. These countries invest their over-accumulated capital in shares in monopolies around the world. With Aramco, Saudi Arabia also has the world’s largest monopoly in terms of estimated stock market value, with a turnover of around 400 billion US dollars in 2013. Saudi Arabia owns 20 of the 2000 largest monopolies in 2013 and Qatar 8. A special feature is that around eight million workers in Saudi Arabia come from Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. They are exploited and oppressed under inhumane conditions. The situation is similar in Qatar.

Due to today’s level of the international division of labor, the existence of an all-round production base can no longer be a decisive criterion for qualifying a country as “imperialist.” The imperialist countries and their international monopolies focus on those fields in which they can achieve world market leadership, dictate monopoly prices and make other countries – including imperialist countries – dependent on them. The capital export strategy pursued by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE also corresponds to this.

The sovereign wealth fund “Qatar Investment Authority,” for instance, has an estimated 335 billion US dollars at its disposal and holds billions of US dollars in stock companies and major real estate and infrastructure projects worldwide, including 57 billion US dollars in just ten companies such as VW, Glencore and Royal Dutch Shell.

In Saudi Arabia, 450 billion euros are managed by the central bank, which globally places funds in bank deposits and buys bonds and shares.

To Saudi Arabia and Qatar applies what Lenin wrote about the parasitic nature of imperialism:

“More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the ‘rentier state’, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by ‘clipping coupons’.”

The objection that Saudi Arabia or Qatar have a “feudal ruling structure” is also not valid. Otherwise Lenin could not have qualified Russia as imperialist at the time, which he defined as “an imperialism that is much more crude, medieval, economically backward and militarily bureaucratic.”