Article 102

“The Faustian Pact: How America Bankrolled Islamic Fundamentalism”

American foreign policy in the twentieth century was not conceived in the spirit of liberty, but in the pursuit of crude oil. Its sacred texts were not the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but the contracts signed between American oil companies and desert monarchs who lived in tents lined with gold. Long before Washington thundered about democracy and human rights, it shackled itself to the most absolutist religious monarchy in the world — Saudi Arabia — and in doing so fed the beast of Islamic fundamentalism that now menaces the entire globe.

The fatal handshake came on February 14, 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. In that moment, the American republic wedded itself to Wahhabi theocracy. The deal was blunt: Washington would guarantee the House of Saud’s survival with arms, money, and diplomatic protection; in return, Riyadh would guarantee a steady flow of cheap oil to keep America’s military and industrial machine humming. It was not freedom that was exported that day but a bottomless river of cash to fund theocratic tyranny.

The marriage had already been arranged by geology. In 1938 American engineers from Standard Oil of California struck oil at Dhahran. Out of that desert well gushed not only petroleum but an entire architecture of empire. ARAMCO became the spearpoint of American power in the Middle East. In exchange for security, the Saudis gave away sovereignty. For decades, Americans controlled the rigs, the pipelines, the ports, and, indirectly, the politics. Saudi Arabia was never a nation in the modern sense; it was a gas station with a flag.

From the beginning, the hypocrisy was obscene. America proclaimed itself the champion of democracy yet embraced a kingdom where elections were forbidden, where women could not drive, where religious minorities were hounded, and where public executions doubled as street theater. This medievalism was not hidden; it was paraded in broad daylight. Yet Washington shielded it with a permanent security umbrella. The contradiction was so grotesque that it became invisible, as if the entire Western world had agreed never to notice that the self-styled beacon of freedom was in bed with a family cult that treated its subjects as chattel.

By the 1950s, oil revenue had armed the Saudi clerical establishment with a new weapon: global proselytism. Wahhabism — a fanatical, puritanical interpretation of Islam — metastasized outward through mosques, madrassas, and missionary networks funded by oil wealth. This was not some accidental spillover; it was deliberate policy. The Saudi royal family bought legitimacy at home by feeding their clerics an empire abroad. Washington, needing both cheap oil and Islamist allies against the Soviets, applauded from the sidelines.

The Cold War sanctified this pact in blood. Secular Arab nationalism was branded a mortal threat, not because it oppressed its people — so did the monarchies — but because it threatened Western oil concessions and flirted with socialism. Egypt’s Nasser, Syria’s Ba’athists, Iran’s Mossadegh, Iraq’s reformers — all were marked for sabotage or destruction. The pattern was simple: secular modernizers were punished, Islamist monarchs were pampered. American strategists decided it was better to keep the Middle East chained to the seventh century than risk one inch of socialist contagion.

When Britain retreated from its Gulf protectorates in 1971, America swooped in. A new club of micro-states was born, gathered under the banner of the Gulf Cooperation Council: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. These were not sovereign nations; they were corporate subsidiaries with seats at the United Nations. Militarily pathetic, politically medieval, they survived only under American protection. Their social order was an abomination: the kafala system, a sponsorship regime for foreign workers that reduced millions of South Asians, Filipinos, and Africans to bonded laborers. It was not metaphorical slavery. It was slavery. The hierarchy was explicit — first-class citizens were the native sheikhs and princes, second-class were Americans and Britons, third-class Europeans, fourth-class Koreans and Japanese, fifth-class Filipinos, sixth-class Indians and Pakistanis. Washington and London knew this perfectly well, and for half a century pretended not to see it, because every slave-sweated barrel of oil strengthened the anti-Soviet alliance.

The money involved was staggering. In the early 1970s, oil sold for three dollars a barrel. By 1980 it touched forty. Each price spike, each war in the neighborhood, each American-engineered crisis poured rivers of money into Gulf coffers. Trillions of dollars were recycled into American banks and defense contracts, and another fortune was funneled into Islamist propaganda. Saudi Arabia built mosques in Paris and London, funded madrassas in Pakistan, exported Wahhabi preachers to Africa and Central Asia, and saturated the globe with Qur’ans printed by the ton. The United States itself distributed Qur’ans in Soviet republics as psychological warfare. The religion of nearly two billion people was turned into an imperial instrument, its scriptures weaponized for Washington’s chess game.

Then came Afghanistan. In 1979 the Soviets invaded, and Washington saw its chance. Billions of dollars in arms, logistics, and training were funneled through Pakistan’s intelligence service to the Afghan mujahideen. The Reagan administration embraced these bearded zealots as holy warriors of freedom. In 1983, Ronald Reagan welcomed a delegation of Afghan fighters to the White House and called them the “moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” This was not merely a grotesque metaphor; it was a confession. America had traded Jefferson and Madison for Kalashnikov-carrying theocrats whose dream was not liberty but theocracy.

Out of that jihad emerged a generation of killers. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi radicalized by the Afghan war, built an organization called al-Qaeda on the scaffolding America had erected. Washington’s fingerprints were everywhere: Saudi money, Pakistani logistics, American weapons. The West had not invented bin Laden, but it had fertilized the soil in which he grew.

The blowback was inevitable. On September 11, 2001, the towers fell in New York. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. The entire plot was conceived within the architecture that American foreign policy had bankrolled for decades. And yet, even then, Washington refused to confront Riyadh. Instead, it invaded Iraq — a secular dictatorship that had nothing to do with 9/11 but possessed the second-largest oil reserves on earth. Once again, the rule held: protect theocrats, punish secularists.Thus, by the dawn of the twenty-first century, America had created its own nemesis. The very forces it armed in the name of anti-communism were now global, organized, and blood-drunk. The pact with Saudi Arabia had delivered not stability but perpetual war. Washington had lied to itself and to the world, and the price was counted in rivers of blood — Afghan, Arab, American.

By the 1990s, the monster was already loose, but Washington still imagined it was the master. The First Gulf War revealed the sheer absurdity of America’s foreign policy: the United States rushed half a million troops into Saudi Arabia in 1990, ostensibly to repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Yet the deeper reality was this: America had once armed Iraq during its war with Iran, cheered Saddam as a bulwark against Tehran, and then turned against him the moment he bit the hand that fed him. America built its own Frankenstein and then staged a global spectacle of moral outrage when it slipped its leash.

The Gulf War was sold to the world as a noble defense of sovereignty. In truth, it was a war for oil monarchs, fought by American soldiers who died to preserve the thrones of sheikhs. Kuwait — a tiny, gilded enclave built on oil wealth and foreign labor — was restored, its emir flown back to his palace under American escort, while ordinary Iraqis were bombed into medieval poverty. The “Highway of Death” outside Basra, where retreating Iraqi conscripts were incinerated by American planes, was not liberation but massacre. And all the while, Saudi clerics seethed at the sight of American troops defiling the holy land. Out of that humiliation, Osama bin Laden sharpened his blade.

The 1990s were the decade of gestation. Al-Qaeda formed, trained, and tested itself in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 were all warnings written in fire. Washington responded with half-hearted missile strikes and sanctimonious speeches, but never addressed the source: its unholy pact with Riyadh and its indulgence of Pakistani intelligence, which nurtured the Taliban like a beloved son.

By September 11, 2001, the storm broke. Two towers fell in Manhattan, the Pentagon burned, and three thousand Americans were butchered in a single morning. The shock was unprecedented, but the fingerprints were unmistakable. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis. Bin Laden was Saudi. The ideology was Wahhabi. The funding pipeline ran straight from Gulf coffers into jihadist networks. The monster had returned to the hand that fed it.

And what did Washington do? It lied. Instead of turning on Saudi Arabia — the obvious source — it concocted a fantasy about Iraq. The Bush administration peddled fairy tales of weapons of mass destruction, forged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and draped the invasion in the language of liberation. The result was one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history. Baghdad was reduced to rubble, a secular state smashed, its institutions dismantled, its people thrown into chaos. Out of that chaos emerged ISIS, the child of American occupation and Saudi theology. The so-called “liberation” of Iraq opened the gates of hell.

The phrase “War on Terror” was itself the grandest deception. Terror is not an ideology; it is a tactic. To declare war on terror is as idiotic as declaring war on ambushes or sieges. It was a slogan designed to distract, to disguise the truth that America was unwilling to fight the real enemy — Islamic theocracy bankrolled by its own allies. Instead, Washington chose convenient targets: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Every one of them was a secular or semi-secular state, however brutal, that posed a lesser threat to America than the monarchy it protected in Riyadh or the emirates it pampered in Doha.

The human costs were cataclysmic. In Iraq, hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, and the country fractured into sectarian civil war. In Afghanistan, after two decades of occupation, America fled in disgrace in 2021, handing the country back to the Taliban — the very same Taliban it had armed in the 1980s and bombed in the 2000s. Libya was shattered into tribal militias and jihadist enclaves after NATO’s intervention. Syria descended into civil war, fueled by Gulf money and American meddling. Every secular Arab state was left bleeding, every fundamentalist monarchy left standing.

Meanwhile, at home, America drowned itself in paranoia. The Patriot Act shredded civil liberties. The Department of Homeland Security erected a surveillance state. Muslim immigrants were alternately courted as “moderates” or scapegoated as threats, but never asked to assimilate into any coherent civic culture. The borders opened wider, mosques funded by Saudi petro-dollars spread faster, and the very ideology America claimed to fight grew stronger within its own cities. The contradiction was suicidal: the nation that had armed jihad abroad was importing it at home under the banner of multicultural tolerance.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the results were undeniable. The Middle East lay in ruins, its secular states destroyed or crippled. Millions of refugees poured into Europe, destabilizing politics from Berlin to London to Paris. Terrorist attacks struck Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Nice. Each atrocity was explained away as the work of “lone wolves,” as if the wolves were not all howling from the same den of Wahhabi ideology. Washington and its allies continued to pretend that the real enemy was “terror,” a shapeless phantom, rather than the theocratic sponsors who had been paid trillions in oil revenues for half a century.

The deeper costs fell on America itself. Trillions of dollars were squandered on wars that produced only more chaos. Ordinary Americans grew poorer, their wages stagnant, their factories shuttered. The so-called “Christian family” that politicians invoked was collapsing under debt, drugs, and despair. Veterans returned broken from wars that accomplished nothing except multiplying their enemies. The republic itself grew weaker even as its empire sprawled further.

And through it all, the great deception continued. Presidents from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden all repeated the same lie: that America was defending freedom. In reality, America was defending the very monarchies that incubated theocracy, defended by American weapons, protected by American troops, and enriched by American consumers at the gas pump. The slogans were democratic, but the policies were feudal. The War on Terror was not a war at all but a cover story for a century of complicity.The irony could not be darker. In its obsession with destroying communism, socialism, and secular nationalism, Washington embraced theocrats who despise everything America claims to stand for. And now those theocrats, and the ideology they spread, are embedded not only in the Middle East but in Europe and America itself. This is not foreign policy; it is civilizational suicide.

By the third decade of the twenty-first century, the results of America’s century-long pact were no longer deniable. Islamic fundamentalism was no longer confined to the sands of Arabia or the mountains of Afghanistan; it had seeped into the veins of the West itself. Mosques funded by Saudi petro-dollars dotted the skylines of Paris, London, and New York. Madrassas in Pakistan, incubated with Gulf money and American indulgence, exported not scientists or reformers but suicide bombers. What was once a regional alliance of convenience had become a global civilizational struggle, and America had armed the very ideology that now stalks its cities and subways.

Europe buckled first. Millions of refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Libya poured into the continent after wars America helped unleash. Germany, Sweden, and France discovered that open borders meant importing not only human desperation but also entire communities unwilling to assimilate. Politicians spoke of “multiculturalism,” but what they delivered was parallel societies — enclaves where Sharia was more binding than secular law, where preachers thundered against the very countries that sheltered them. Each terrorist attack — Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Nice — was explained away as an aberration, yet the pattern was obvious: this was the blowback of decades of subsidizing religious absolutism abroad.

America itself was not immune. Muslim immigration swelled under the very administrations that had armed jihadists overseas. The contradiction was suicidal: Washington fought endless wars in the Middle East while inviting the populations shaped by the same fundamentalism into its own heartland. Assimilation, once the American miracle, failed. Many Muslim communities resisted integration, clinging instead to the very separatist ideologies exported by Riyadh and Doha. The republic that once melted Europeans into Americans discovered that it could not melt theocrats into democrats.

Meanwhile, the United States bankrupted itself. Trillions were squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars that destroyed secular states, bled the treasury, and accomplished nothing except multiplying enemies. The military-industrial complex gorged itself while the average American household sank into debt. Bridges collapsed, schools rotted, healthcare crumbled, but drones circled the skies of Kandahar. The contradiction could not be sharper: America’s own infrastructure decayed while it rebuilt the palaces of sheikhs. The empire grew while the republic withered.

The so-called “Christian family,” that bedrock of American political rhetoric, was shattered. Divorce rates climbed, birth rates fell, opioid addiction hollowed out entire communities. The very voters who cheered military adventures found their sons maimed or their jobs outsourced. The elites in Washington spoke of freedom, but what they delivered was bankruptcy, both moral and financial. America did not export democracy; it imported despair.

And all the while, the Gulf monarchies flourished. Saudi Arabia built gleaming cities, Qatar bought European soccer clubs, Dubai erected towers of glass and steel that mocked the slums of Detroit. The money that Americans poured into gas tanks became the fuel for theocratic empires. Washington had not just subsidized tyranny; it had subsidized the triumph of a rival civilization.

By the 2020s, the “War on Terror” lay in ruins. Afghanistan returned to the Taliban after two decades of blood and lies. Iraq remained a fractured corpse, its sectarian wounds unhealed. Libya descended into tribal war. Syria, targeted for regime change, bled out in one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the century. Everywhere America claimed to bring freedom, it brought rubble. Everywhere it targeted secular states, it left behind fertile soil for jihadists.

The deception was no longer only strategic; it became existential. Americans were told that terror was the enemy, but terror is only a tactic. The true enemy is theocratic absolutism, and it has never been confronted because it resides in the very palaces Washington protects. Presidents from Roosevelt to Biden all played the same double game: denouncing extremism while bowing before the kings and emirs who bankroll it. This is not foreign policy; it is servitude.

And so the irony curdles into tragedy. In the twentieth century, Washington chose Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against communism, socialism, and secular nationalism. It believed it could control the monster. Instead, it armed and globalized it. Today that monster is not only abroad but at home. It prowls the streets of Paris and New York, fills the mosques of London and Chicago, and dictates the politics of Riyadh, Doha, and Islamabad. America has defended everything it claims to despise, destroyed everything it claims to protect, and lied to itself so completely that it no longer knows the difference between victory and suicide.

The republic is now weaker than at any point in its history. Bankrupt at home, despised abroad, militarily exhausted, culturally divided, America is a hollow empire still pretending to be a shining city on a hill. But there is no light left in that city, only the reflection of oil fires burning across the desert, flames it ignited with its own hands.

The final verdict is merciless: America’s foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been not only a deception but a self-destruction. It armed theocrats to destroy secularists, funded jihadists to fight communists, and pampered monarchs while bombing republics. It lied to its people, looted its treasury, and poisoned its future. The empire of liberty became the financier of theocracy. And the cost — measured in ruined nations, dead soldiers, bankrupt families, and a world stalked by religious fundamentalism — is incalculable.

This is not just failure. It is betrayal. And history will not forgive it.

References

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