In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I traced connections between the American and Saudi players rebuilding Gaza into a surveillance city-state—and building Saudi surveillance cities whose offshoots are finding their ways to America. Digging deeper into these links shows an even more troubling picture with sharper implications for American policy and even, disturbingly, some Americans’ daily lives.
The connections begin with China’s infiltration of Saudi Arabia, but they don’t end there. They move across the Atlantic to America at the hands of Saudi-connected politicians backed by American supporters of Israel. Then they circle back to China and its infiltration of the United States via state-owned companies buying up American property at the hands of the same American movers backing the Saudis and Israel.
What emerges from an investigation is a class of operators who, under the headings of “modernization” and “western values,” are pushing government-backed corporate arrangements that put America and Americans at the mercy, globally and locally, of unaccountable elites—the very kind of subjugation opposed by believers in America First.
Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia is little-known enough in America to miss the front pages of most of our newspapers, and well-known enough worldwide to emit an endless list of online results. “Saudi Arabia is seeking billions in Chinese investment for [its new mega-city] Neom”; “NEOM hosts leading industry figures and investors for its ‘Discover NEOM’ China showcase”; “Splashy Saudi mega-project NEOM chases Chinese funds”; “Chinese company completes project in Saudi futuristic city NEOM.” These results are from the summer of 2024 alone. By September 2024, The Eurasia Review was reporting that “in August, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund signed six agreements worth US$ 50 billion with Chinese firms to encourage capital flows” for the purpose of building Neom.
As I’ve reported for the Libertarian Institute, Neom is a “vertical city” based around the Line: “the ultimate sidescraper,” a building the height of a skyscraper but turned on its side to snake across the ground. It will “eventually accommodate 9 million people and will be built on a footprint of just 34 square kilometers.” (As I mentioned in the past, to put this in perspective, New York City has an area of about 778 square kilometers and a population of approximately 8.2 million.) According to the New York Post, quoting Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Access Now:
“Although Neom and other cities like it are being marketed as ‘smart’ or ‘eco cities,’ they’re actually ‘surveillance cities’ because ‘essentially they’re built on an architecture that is fueled by people’s personal data…China is playing a major role in distributing surveillance technology, so as to enable the creation of [cities like Neom]—part of…Xi Jinping’s larger plan to ‘normalize and seek to legitimize [China’s] vision of a state-led cyberspace and surveilled public’…It would appear that the Saudi Prince—whose ties with Jinping have recently grown stronger—is eager to assist…”
What’s unmentioned in this Post article is that, even as China is infiltrating Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are infiltrating America. Namely, American politicians are encouraging Saudi Arabia’s investments in America while pushing foreign policy moves that benefit the Saudis. A case in point is the Post’s own home of New York.
This list begins with Ritchie Torres, the progressive Bronx congressman who prominent supporters have anointed the explainer of “working class Democrats.” This last moniker is part true: Torres, who is black and gay and from the Bronx, came from a low income background. But he entered politics from the top. He started by working with Daniel Doctoroff, whom as I mentioned in my past article was a consultant to the Saudis on the development of Neom. Doctoroff is currently the founder and CEO of the cultural center of the New York mega-mall Hudson Yards, which, as I’ve reported in the past, is backed by the Saudi Arabi Public Investment Fund via its 15% stake in Hudson Yard’s developer Related Companies.
And Torres’ pro-Saudi backers extend beyond Doctoroff. One of his most vocal is Ron Torossian, a prominent backer of Saudi Arabia’s modernization project who served as “a partner, Chief Marketing Officer and advisory board member” of JetSmarter, which has received more than $300 million in investments from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Another is Matthew Pritzker, of the Pritzker Family, which owns the Hyatt and has extensive investments in Saudi Arabia. A third is Anthony Malkin, whose Empire State Trust, which owns the Empire State Building, recently received a $600 million investment from the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Qatar, a close Saudi ally.
Many of these donors are also supporters of Israel, and it’s not a coincidence that Torres, who is known for his pro-Israel politics, is casting votes de facto backing Saudi Arabia, whom many pro-Israel Americans (though not, tellingly, a vocal minority of Israelis) see as Israel’s necessary ally in the Middle East.
So is U.S. congressman from New Jersey Josh Gottheimer, another pro-Israel Democrat with Saudi connections. Gottheimer worked for many years for Mark Penn, famously the adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid. Penn has deep and longstanding ties to Saudi state investors. Specifically, one branch of Penn’s lobbying operations, Stagwell, where Gottheimer was employed, was paid during Gottheimer’s tenure more than $1 million “to write 55 tweets and create advertising campaigns on behalf of…[the] Twitter account” of the Saudi Embassy-backed website Arabia Now. This account was meant to “highligh[t] Saudi Arabia’s efforts in counter-terrorism, women’s empowerment, innovation and green technology.”
Gottheimer took these connections with him to Congress. According to The Intercept, citing an analyst at the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, Gottheimer is “one of the top recipients” of donations from the small number of Washington DC law and lobbying firms “registered as agents on behalf of Saudi Arabia.” According to the Initiative,
“That makes Gottheimer one of the top 20 biggest recipients of Saudi agent cash in either party, but that number is deceptive, as the rest of the list includes party leaders and veterans…Nobody as junior as Gottheimer comes anywhere close.”
In this context, it’s instructive to consider Gottheimer’s very public backing during President Donald Trump’s first term for U.S. funding of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen: a priority for the Saudis since it represented, for them, a necessary buttressing against Iranian influence in Yemen. According to The Intercept, Gottheimer’s “boldest” moment “came amid the push for a congressional War Powers Resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen,” a resolution drafted by a bipartisan coalition of legislators including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT):
“…Gottheimer organized behind the scenes to take the resolution down, in part by attempting to make it a referendum on support for Israel — and very nearly succeeded. The bill’s supporters out-organized him, and in April, Congress sent a War Powers Resolution to Trump’s desk. He vetoed their resolution…which…was expected…For advocates who worked on it, Gottheimer’s intervention was unwelcome but not surprising.”
Pretty quickly, moves like this that help Saudi Arabia find their way back to China, at some of the same hands.
The key player here is former National Security official Matthew Pottinger, who co-authored in the summer of 2024 a widely read article in Foreign Affairs, “No Substitute For Victory: America’s Competition with China Must Be Won Not Managed.” Pottinger is widely known as an architect of President Trump’s pivot to confronting China in his first term. But, unlike Pottinger’s policy rival Elbridge Colby, currently nominated to serve as Undersecretary for Defense for Policy, and who supports isolating China and dealing with the country pragmatically, Pottinger emphasizes pushing for regime change in China. Specifically, Pottinger argues for treating China as a “Marxist-Leninist” regime that is part of an unbreakable ideological alliance with Russia and Iran.
Pottinger benefits financially from taking this stand. He is employed by the pro-Israel think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which makes a regular case for the China-Russia-Iran axis and the need for America, in partnership with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to confront it. One of the Foundation’s most prominent funders is Douglas Feith, the Pentagon official who, along with Paul Wolfowitz, was most responsible for pushing the line that Saddam Hussein was an ideological threat in 2003. Feith pushed this line against dissenters like Colby, who, rightly, saw Saddam as a pragmatist who was lying about possessing WMD in order to maintain his regional influence. For Feith, speaking in 2017, Saudi Arabia is the key to his own focus: “a partnership between the US and those elements of the Muslim world that want to fight against…extremists.”
Pottinger has also rolled his China stand into direct financial advantage for himself and for companies doing business in China. He’s joined with Australian journalist John Garnaut to launch Garnaut Global, “a consulting firm that bills itself as a Chinese politics interpreter for financial firms.” The key tenet of Pottinger’s and Garnaut’s interpretation is that China is a “Marxist-Leninist” regime motivated by an ideology of expansion, a threat on the level of the 1940s Soviet Union or pre-1914 Germany or (though Garnaut Global doesn’t mention this comparison) 2003 Iraq. Interestingly, in this context of Garnaut Global ascribing ideological threats to nations abroad, one of Pottinger’s most prominent employees at Garnaut Global, the former Wall Street Journal writer David Feith, is the son of Douglas Feith.
Pottinger’s and Feith Jr.’s promotion of China as an ideological threat is far from proven. Indeed, according to one analysis, “the type of textual analysis that Garnaut Global does,” of ideological statements from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “risks minimizing the messiness, as well as the push-and-pull nature, of Chinese bureaucratic policy making.” In other words, the approach focuses on text at the expense of context, on words rather than how they’re used. But, just as Feith Sr.’s promotion of the ideological threat of Saddam ensured contracts and consultations for Feith Sr.’s allies in think tanks and weapons manufacturers, Pottinger’s stance justifies endless consultations for Garnaut Global with companies who want the China market but now think they need to navigate Marxist-Leninist ideology to do so. It also justifies endless consultations by Garnaut Global with American politicians in the name of stopping Marxist-Leninist attacks on America.
One of these politicians is Pottinger’s co-author of the Foreign Affairs’ article “No Substitute for Victory”: former U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a Republican with Saudi connections. He was recently hired by Palantir, the artificial intelligence conglomerate which has a “strategic partnership” with the Saudis to develop Neom. Gallagher calls John Garnaut part of his “kitchen cabinet,” and “an invaluable resource.”
In this context, it’s instructive that Gallagher, Israel backer and Saudi-supported Congressman Josh Gottheimer, and Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) were the leading proponents of the bipartisan ban of TikTok in 2024, with vocal support from Pottinger and Garnaut: a move which even some backers argue was meant to silence criticism on TikTok of Israel’s and therefore Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical actions in the Middle East. Yet, at the same time, it’s these operators’ Saudi-linked backers who are allowing the CCP to infiltrate America in the most tangible of ways—property acquisition and investment.
Indeed, as I have mentioned in this article, Ritchie Torres’s first backer, Neom development adviser and former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Daniel Doctoroff, is the founder and CEO of the cultural center of the mega-mall Hudson Yards, which was developed by the Related Company, in which the Saudis have a 15% stake. Tellingly, the Related Company also has as another investors in one of its preeminent projects to develop LA CORE, a “mixed-use complex in downtown Los Angeles” along with a Chinese company that is owned by the CCP. Doctoroff, for his part, has been widely criticized for a recent “smart city” project in Toronto which was aborted over surveillance concerns.
But more connections exist as well. In 2014, the Waldorf Astoria, which along with the St. Regis and the Plaza is one of the most storied hotels in New York and was the residence for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was sold to a Chinese company later directly taken over by the CCP. The owner of the Waldorf at the time of its sale was the Hyatt, owned by the Pritzker Family, supporters of Torres with deep ties to Saudi Arabia and to Chinese real estate companies worldwide.
In 2020, another New York landmark, the Empire State Building, partnered with Delos, a “wellness” company backed by the Chinese Communist Party, to supply technical support for the building. The Empire State Building, as I have mentioned, is run by Anthony Malkin’s Empire State Trust.
Tellingly, both Delos’ moves and Doctoroff’s development plan were advanced in New York by then-Governor and, possibly future mayor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo not only allowed Delos a contract with New York state schools, but he promoted surveillance cities of the type that Doctoroff has been criticized for developing in Neom. Specifically, Cuomo’s 2015 plan to Reimagine New York’s Crossings, “an initiative that includes several technological updates to transportation systems in New York,” included “calls for installing controversial advanced cameras, license plate readers and facial recognition technology.”
It is, again, the case that many of the American backers of the Saudis’ and the CCP’s plays here are also backers of Israel—just as Joseph Pelzman, the architect of the Trump White House’s Gaza rebuilding plans whom I’ve written about in an earlier piece, is an American with longtime links to Israel. The linkage is likely because, for many liberal and rightwing American Zionists, a Saudi alliance with Israel seems a necessary deterrent against Iran.
This perception is not, notably, shared by leftwing and libertarian American Jews, who see a different picture both in the Middle East and at home. That picture, when it comes to America, goes something like this: utting off this foreign infiltration of domestic politics and infrastructure, not waging a Middle East proxy war against Iran in the name of stopping the CCP, should be a priority for anyone claiming the mantle of America First.
