Description
Drawing on the correspondence between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, and the British diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia, held in the British National Archives, this paper examines how it was possible for the British to land one of the biggest arms deals in history with Saudi Arabia in 1985, despite evident strained relations in the preceding years. The British were not only struggling at the bilateral level, but also in the competitive multilateral setting of the Cold War. Saudi Arabia was staunchly anti-communist and therefore Western aligned. Thus, only Western Bloc countries competed for Saudi defence contracts. In the 1970s and early 1980s, other Western states, particularly France and the United States, were much more successful at winning the big contracts to a degree that the Saudis informed the British that they were a disappointment. Yet, despite the shared Anglo-Saudi frustration over British performance, the two parties signed the first Al-Yamamah arms deal in 1985. It was the first part of what became one of the biggest arms deals in history- catapulting Britain into the top tier of Saudi security partners, surpassing the other Western states.
