Saudi Arabia tries to shed ‘pariah status,’ remaking itself as a key middleman in global conflicts

Saudi Arabia will host a key summit Tuesday between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is trying to repair relations with Washington following his disastrous Oval Office bust-up with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. 

It’s another soft-power coup for a country that has deliberately cultivated a reputation as a diplomatic go-between. Whether it’s hosting American officials for negotiations to end the Ukraine war, orchestrating talks about the future of Gaza or rolling out the red carpet for Trump’s first foreign trip, Saudi Arabia has emerged in recent years as an unlikely global powerbroker.

Less than five years ago, then-presidential hopeful Joe Biden called the kingdom a “pariah” and, even after significant reforms, rights groups say the authoritarian Gulf state still has an “abysmal” human rights record.

The talks in the coastal city of Jeddah are emblematic of the rebranding effort choreographed by powerful Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

They come as MBS, as he’s widely known, is attempting  to transform Saudi Arabia’s image from the deeply conservative, oil-rich theocracy whose officials murdered the American-based Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, into a regional giant built on diplomacy, business, tourism, entertainment and sports.

The kingdom “is a more visible and energetic player on the world scene than it once was,” said Thomas Lippman, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.  “This is a new Saudi Arabia — better educated, well-traveled, and more open to ideas than in the past,” added Lippman, an author of the book “Saudi Arabia on the Edge.”

As well as the Zelenskyy-Rubio meeting, Trump revealed last week that the first foreign visit of his second term would be to Saudi Arabia, just as it was during his first administration. As then, he said that, in return, the Saudis had agreed to invest a bonanza sum in American businesses, this time $1 trillion. 

This relationship has raised questions about ties between Riyadh and the Trump family.

Ron Wyden, former Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, last year raised “obvious conflicts of interest concerns” about Saudi Arabia’s $2 billion investment in  a fund run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who  has denied any such conflict. 

NBC News has requested comment from the White House about concerns over the Trump family’s relations with Riyadh.

But “there has never been a sharp distinction in Saudi Arabia between family business and the state’s business,” said F. Gregory Gause III, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute. “In the Trump era, that element is entering American politics.”

Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a diplomatic superpower goes far beyond the Trump family.

The Gulf state hosted talks between the U.S.  and Russia last month, as well as convening Arab leaders days later to discuss Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” proposal.

Saudi Arabia certainly wants to “advertise itself as a location for such meetings” and is “trying to set itself up as an alternative to Geneva or Vienna,” Gause said.

Analysts also point out that Saudi Arabia, alongside so-called “middle”  or “swing” powers such as India, Brazil and South Africa, has been able to maintain its relationship with both the U.S. and China, while being seen as aligned with either.   

Bin Salman has also been central, spearheading an epic-scale infrastructure project called Vision 2030, a plan to diversify Saudi’s oil-dominated economy with a series of ambitious infrastructure projects. 

It has also become a regular home for concerts by Western pop stars and sports events. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has also invested in the English Premier League team Newcastle United and in 2022, alongside two of the world’s most prominent players, Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman, it created the controversial LIV golf tour which eventually merged with the PGA. 

After Riyadh’s “coming out” party hosting the G20 in 2020, which showed “a more forceful Saudi diplomacy,” the kingdom now stands “nonaligned, developmental state with tremendous resources to transform domestically,” said Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. It also has the power to influence international politics “through economic statecraft.”

Trump’s embrace of Riyadh follows an evolution under then-President Joe Biden, who went from condemning Khashoggi’s killing to visiting and fist-bumping MBS, who said he took responsibility for the brutal murder but denied personal involvement.

There have also been significant reforms inside Saudi Arabia, including the removal of the requirement for women to wear headscarves in public, and allowing them to drive and attend soccer matches — the country plans to host the 2034 soccer World Cup.

“Anyone who has visited the country recently can easily notice significant improvements in human rights,” said Rayan Alyusufi, a Saudi doctoral student at England’s Bournemouth University who is studying soft power and diplomacy. “Almost every aspect of the country has experienced tremendous reforms, and foreign policy is no exception.”

Still, the country’s rights record remains dire.

In a report last year, the State Department said Saudi Arabia’s  “significant human rights abuses” included “arbitrary or unlawful killings,” “extreme repression of peaceful dissent,” “torture” and “inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government agents.”

NBC News has contacted the Saudi Embassy in London for comment, both on its record of human rights abuses and its emerging role as a diplomatic superpower.

Diplomats and businesspeople now “treat Saudi Arabia a little bit like they treat China,” said Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That is to say: “a sometimes-brutal government that brooks no challenge, but an important global player with whom it is better to engage than isolate.”