Epistemica

Saudi Arabia spent the last several years trying to recast its image in the United States through cultural projects, focusing on a range of demographics. The country has poured massive amounts of money into professional golf, gaming, boxing, Formula One, tourism promotion, and other prestige-oriented sectors to influence public imagination more effectively than formal diplomacy. The point was never merely commercial. Saudi leaders understood that culture reaches audiences that policy white papers do not. It creates familiarity, normalizes association, and turns a government from a political problem into a lifestyle presence. Yet the campaign has produced limited tangible returns in the U.S. Even now, as new reports have raised questions about whether Saudi Arabia might reduce or rethink support for LIV Golf, the larger pattern is already visible. Saudi Arabia spent enormous sums trying to soften American attitudes and secure cultural legitimacy, but the payoff has been weak and unstable, though the long-term effects are uncertain.

It seems that Saudi Arabia may have misunderstood the cultural field into which it was intervening. It treated American culture as though it were a relatively coherent public sphere in which expensive symbolic investments could gradually shift opinion, and maybe there was a time (i.e., before rampant social media) that it would have been true. In practice, the Trump era U.S. has been a fragmented, distrustful, and emotionally overheated environment in which cultural signals are quickly absorbed into partisan conflict. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony includes “intellectual and moral leadership,” culture and institutions are major parts of the actual terrain of politics. For Gramsci, culture is one of the domains where political legitimacy is built, contested, or denied. Saudi Arabia tried to buy entry into American popular culture, but it entered a field already saturated with domestic struggle, moral suspicion, and symbolic overload.

That problem became sharper under Trump because Trump polarized American politics, and took a polarizing America and produce a cultural environment defined by spectacle, volatility, and exhaustion. Tariffs led to uncertainty chilling business activity and roiling markets. There is a renewed economic fog after legal and political reversals again destabilized tariff expectations. Trump’s approval remains in the 30s and severe partisan polarization and widespread concern about rising politically motivated violence remain. It is a poor setting for Saudi Arabia to try to rehabilitate itself. Of course, the Saudis began this campaign well before Trump’s second term. American attention was already captured by domestic crisis. Public trust was already eroded. Moral judgment was already filtered through factional identity. In such a setting, foreign image management gets folded into existing narratives of corruption, oligarchy, elite manipulation, and culture war, or even largely ignored.

Saudi Arabia’s cultural strategy was  structurally vulnerable because it relied too heavily on acquisition rather than persuasion. It could buy tournaments, sponsorships, ambassadors, franchises, and gaming assets, but it could not purchase moral credibility on comparable terms. It is not clear whether Saudi Arabia’s campaign unfolded under the shadow of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and continuing human rights criticism, or simply hasn’t gained staying power because the conditions haven’t been favorable. The American left was never going to embrace Saudi Arabia, and the right largely ignores Khashoggi’s murder. Trump is the right; so Trump ignoring the murder means the right ignores the murder.

LIV Golf has been criticized as a vehicle for sportswashing, particularly because of Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia’s record on political rights. A 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment shows that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill Khashoggi. Human Rights Watch argued in 2024 that the Public Investment Fund had been used for image rehabilitation through high-profile sports and entertainment investments, while continuing to be linked to abuses. Under those conditions, every Saudi cultural investment in America arrived with an interpretive frame already attached. Americans were encountering a state actor widely perceived as trying to cleanse its reputation through spectacle.

LIV Golf became the clearest test case because it represented both the ambition and the weakness of the entire strategy. Saudi Arabia tried to reorder the symbolic center of an elite American sport through unprecedented spending, celebrity recruitment, and institutional disruption. Yet the political meaning of LIV never disappeared behind the entertainment product. The league remained entangled with congressional scrutiny, human rights criticism, and persistent questions about audience demand. In 2023, U.S. senators sharply criticized the proposed PGA-LIV tie-up and explicitly treated LIV as part of a Saudi reputation-management strategy. Even while Saudi backing reportedly continues, the league remains dogged by stories about financial losses, a possible support reduction, and the difficulty of achieving durable legitimacy in the American market. The problem has been that LIV never became culturally ordinary as it remained politically marked despite massive Saudi spending.

The same pattern appears beyond golf. Saudi Arabia invested heavily in gaming as part of Vision 2030, with $38 billion earmarked to make the kingdom a global gaming hub and later backed major deals involving Scopely, Niantic’s gaming assets, and eventually Electronic Arts. Saudi Arabia also used celebrities such as Lionel Messi as tourism ambassadors, another effort to normalize the kingdom through aspirational culture rather than diplomatic argument. Saudi investment across soccer, Formula One, boxing, tennis, golf, and esports. It was an expansive and coordinated effort designed to place Saudi Arabia inside the circuits through which younger and broader audiences form attachments. But scale did not translate into consensus, at least not yet. In Gramscian terms, money created presence, not hegemony. It purchased platforms but not moral leadership, so it failed to establish itself politically, even somewhat culturally.

Trump’s role in this failure is reflected in his style of politics which changed the context of foreign soft-power campaigns. Trump trained American public life to read cultural performance as power play, transactional influence, or propaganda. He blurred the line between governance, branding, media theater, and private dealmaking which made it more difficult for Saudi Arabia’s investments to appear as benign modernization or ordinary global integration. They entered a public culture already primed to suspect oligarchic bargains. Gulf state-owned investment into the U.S. was reaching record levels, with Trump publicly touting vast Saudi investment pledges after renewed ties with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The proximity to Trump risked reinforcing the sense that Saudi influence in America was fundamentally transactional and elite-driven. To many Americans, the campaign looked less like cultural exchange than like another chapter in the privatization of public life.

There is a further irony here. Saudi Arabia appears to have wagered that Trump-era America would be easier to influence because institutional resistance was weaker and moral fatigue was deeper. There was some logic to that assumption. In a fragmented society, there are more openings for money to shape attention. Yet fragmentation cuts both ways. A shattered public sphere does not easily grant stable legitimacy to anyone. It produces circulation without settlement. Saudi Arabia could dominate headlines for a week, recruit stars for a season, or force institutions to negotiate. It could not secure a durable reinterpretation of itself in American common sense. The sportswashing frame kept returning because the host society was too conflict-ridden to absorb Saudi messaging as apolitical entertainment, and too morally suspicious to forget the underlying record. Even Saudi officials have signaled a certain bluntness about the strategy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in 2023 he did not care about sportswashing accusations if the policy raised GDP.

The recent LIV funding uncertainty, even if it does not immediately result in withdrawal, is a reflection of Saudi efforts as it suggests that Saudi Arabia may be confronting the limits of a model built on lavish spending and assumed symbolic conversion. There are now broader fiscal pressures on Gulf sovereign wealth funds amid lower oil prices and heavy investment commitments. Saudi leaders have prioritized sports and entertainment as part of both economic diversification and soft-power projection. But when the American returns are measured in changed public meaning, the record looks thin. Saudi Arabia is seemingly no closer being widely trusted. Visibility is not legitimacy in this context. Presence in American culture isn’t winning America’s cultural common sense.

Gramsci says that culture is effective when it organizes consent through institutions, habits, and moral leadership. It cannot be reduced to publicity or expenditure. Saudi Arabia’s campaign in the U.S. has thus far failed in part because it treated culture too instrumentally and because it entered an American setting made especially inhospitable by Trumpist chaos. In a calmer and more coherent environment, some of the investments might have softened elite attitudes more durably. In the Trump era, however, the same investments were refracted through scandal, polarization, economic instability, anti-elite suspicion, and nonstop spectacle. Saudi Arabia encountered a society fighting with itself over the meaning of legitimacy, truth, and public life. Under those conditions, even billions of dollars could not convert visibility into consent. Saudi Arabia bought attention culturally, but not influence; it buys its influence directly through Trump, which will last at max two and half more years.