"The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia - new cities, new infrastructure - which we've done"
About this Quote
A technocrat’s fairy tale: recycle petrodollars into “development,” call it partnership, and let the ledger wash the politics clean. John Perkins frames the arrangement as a neat financial loop - interest on securities becomes contracts, contracts become “new cities,” and everyone gets to claim a win. The casual add-on, “which we’ve done,” is the tell. It’s not argument so much as a shrugging assertion of inevitability: this isn’t a proposal, it’s a system already humming.
The specific intent is to normalize a particular kind of power. By describing the Treasury as an active engineer of foreign modernity, Perkins implies U.S. policy isn’t just diplomacy or defense; it’s finance as geopolitical plumbing. The subtext is that “building Saudi Arabia” is less altruism than leverage. Those securities and that interest are not neutral instruments; they’re the mechanism that keeps wealth circulating through American firms, tying a strategic ally to U.S. industry while projecting influence without the optics of occupation.
Context matters because “new cities, new infrastructure” is loaded language in the Gulf: futurist megaprojects, prestige architecture, and state-led modernization campaigns that can function as both nation-branding and internal control. Perkins’ phrasing compresses messy realities - labor conditions, authoritarian governance, regional security bargains - into an upbeat procurement narrative. It works rhetorically because it speaks in the soothing grammar of economics: flows, investments, hiring, building. In that diction, empire doesn’t look like conquest; it looks like a contract award.
The specific intent is to normalize a particular kind of power. By describing the Treasury as an active engineer of foreign modernity, Perkins implies U.S. policy isn’t just diplomacy or defense; it’s finance as geopolitical plumbing. The subtext is that “building Saudi Arabia” is less altruism than leverage. Those securities and that interest are not neutral instruments; they’re the mechanism that keeps wealth circulating through American firms, tying a strategic ally to U.S. industry while projecting influence without the optics of occupation.
Context matters because “new cities, new infrastructure” is loaded language in the Gulf: futurist megaprojects, prestige architecture, and state-led modernization campaigns that can function as both nation-branding and internal control. Perkins’ phrasing compresses messy realities - labor conditions, authoritarian governance, regional security bargains - into an upbeat procurement narrative. It works rhetorically because it speaks in the soothing grammar of economics: flows, investments, hiring, building. In that diction, empire doesn’t look like conquest; it looks like a contract award.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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