While Baroody framed his opposition to Article 18 as a rejection of what Makau Mutua calls 'proselytism, coupled with force and power', there was nonetheless an irony to his advocacy of non-intervention. Whatever his own personal commitments, which were largely Arabist in tenor, Baroody represented a kingdom whose participation in the inaugural UN conference was funded by the US Oil Company Aramco, and which owed its existence as an independent state largely to these same US oil interests. 'The transformation of the landscape that became Saudi Arabia', as the political scientist Robert Vitalis writes, 'was wrought in great part by foreigners, arriving in increasing numbers in the 1940s and 1950s, financed by foreign investment, foreign private and public aid, and large loans secured by future oil royalties.'

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 138