Saudi Arabia’s UN participation was financed by the US oil company Aramco

Evidence

While Baroody framed his opposition to Article 18 as a rejection of what Makau Mutua calls ‘proselytism, coupled with force and power’, there was nonetheless an irony to his advocacy of non-intervention. Whatever his own personal commitments, which were largely Arabist in tenor, Baroody represented a kingdom whose participation in the inaugural UN conference was funded by the US Oil Company Aramco, and which owed its existence as an independent state largely to these same US oil interests. ‘The transformation of the landscape that became Saudi Arabia’, as the political scientist Robert Vitalis writes, ‘was wrought in great part by foreigners, arriving in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s, financed by foreign investment, foreign private and public aid, and large loans secured by future oil royalties.’ — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how purportedly anti-interventionist postcolonial states were themselves constituted and financed by the very Western powers they resisted — a structural irony relevant to human-rights discourse critique. — connects to: US aid to Saudi Arabia skirted Lend-Lease rules requiring Axis attack. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 1146; Saudi Arabia’s UN participation was financially underwritten by US oil interests it opposed rhetorically — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 138

Broader Connections

• US aid to Saudi Arabia skirted Lend-Lease rules requiring Axis attack. #expands (0.75) — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 1146