Guilherme Hortinha first heard about Gateway KSA when he moved from Lisbon to become a student at King’s College London. The program was offering an all-expenses-paid, 10-day trip to Saudi Arabia. It was hard to pass up. “You’re going to go to a country that you’ve never been to before with a group of 15 students from around the world? I was like, Of course, sign me up.”
Since 2018, Gateway KSA—a nonprofit backed by companies controlled by the Saudi royal family—has sent hundreds of young students on these tours. It’s one of the most focused examples of the country’s attempts at increasing its soft power under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. According to its Web site, the program “throws open the door to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” Just how far the door opens is another question.
Gateway KSA is part of the country’s larger Vision 2030 project, which hopes to attract more than 70 million foreign visitors each year and diversify its oil-dominated economy by 2030. It’s also an example of the stratospherically expensive public-image campaign designed to conceal Saudi Arabia’s woeful human-rights record and imprisonment of dissidents and journalists beneath piles and piles of money.
Through its Public Investment Fund, the kingdom has spent billions on massive sports-investment programs (buying an 80 percent stake in Newcastle United, the creation of the LIV Golf tour), huge donations to U.S. universities (more than $500 million in funding since 2012), large stakes in U.S. companies (Uber, Blackstone), and promises to finance U.S. infrastructure projects ($40 billion promised in 2017). The country is in the midst of an all-out push to distract and enchant, and Gateway KSA is aimed squarely at charming the younger generation.
Though any student can apply for the Gateway KSA trip through the organization’s Web site, most come from “elected universities,” 16 top schools ranging from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Oxford University and China’s top-ranked Tsinghua University. To obtain a spot, students must submit a video explaining their career aspirations as well as their opinions on Saudi Arabia.
“The cohort was phenomenally chosen,” says Irati Evworo Diez, a senior at Harvard, who went on a trip in January. Diez’s group included a Spanish engineer studying at Tsinghua, an early-career Finnish geopolitical consultant, and a Penn senior who had an offer to work at SpaceX upon graduating. “They created a delegation in which you were having truly enriching conversations.”
Saudi Arabia is far from the only country to try to wow young foreigners with sponsored holidays. Indeed, Gateway KSA bears a striking resemblance to Birthright Israel, the all-expenses-paid, 10-day Jewish-heritage trip, partially funded by the Israeli government, in which young Diaspora Jews between the ages of 18 and 26 go on a whirlwind tour around the country, accompanied by good-looking Israel Defense Forces soldiers with whom they are encouraged to have “intimate encounters.”
No such romantic entanglements are suggested at Gateway KSA, but the messaging is clear from the outset. Groups are flown to Riyadh. Upon arrival, female participants are given two abayas, traditional robe-like Muslim dresses, which they’re required to wear. Male participants receive traditional Saudi robes and headdresses, although wearing them is optional.
Delegations split their time between visiting tourist destinations and networking with Saudi power players. Participants stay at five-star hotels, such as the Voco Riyadh, and eat out at buzzy restaurants. When in Jeddah, they are taken on boat excursions to snorkel in the Red Sea. At Al-Ula, a newly developed resort city, they visit the 2,000-year-old Nabataean tombs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Students meet with female entrepreneurs and view clean-tech initiatives. Many travel to Dammam, the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned petroleum-and-natural-gas company, although tours tend to downplay the company’s role as the world’s largest exporter of crude oil, while stressing its eco-friendly initiatives, such as the planting of a nature sanctuary and mangrove-tree park.
A trip is even organized to the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center, a rehabilitation center for suspected Islamic-extremist terrorists, some of whom were once imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. “They showed us the facilities, but we didn’t get to see or speak to any people who were living there,” says one student visitor. “That was a little bit strange.”
Finally, at the end of their tour, most delegations visit the house of Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a major booster of the program and former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency. (Allegations of links to Osama bin Laden have long dogged him.) “From the beginning, the trip leaders were very clear that we could ask any questions we wanted,” says Dalton Price, a Cornell graduate who participated in the program in 2019. “They didn’t want to hide things from you.” At dinner with Prince Al-Faisal, Price says, “I asked how Saudi Arabia can justify the crimes against humanity that their government has been accused of in their military interventions in Yemen.” The prince was receptive. “He was like, ‘Let’s talk about it.’” Nevertheless, Price remembered “not being convinced.”
Hortinha, too, was impressed by the way future business opportunities were extended to the students. “They said they wanted us to come here and meet all these important people, so if we ever think of doing business in the kingdom, we’d already have contacts to set ourselves up professionally.”
Not everyone is persuaded. “Gateway KSA fits right into Saudi Arabia’s overall influence operation,” says Ben Freeman, the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in Washington, D.C. “They want to manage their image in the West. Whenever people think of Saudi Arabia, the last thing they want them to think about is Jamal Khashoggi, human-rights issues, or women’s-rights issues.” Freeman, who calls Saudi Arabia a “repressive regime,” says of Gateway KSA, “You’re certainly not getting an objective, unvarnished view of Saudi Arabia.”
For Hortinha, that doesn’t necessarily matter. “It’s very easy to prejudge a country when you read about it in the media,” he says. “But by being on the ground and meeting people on the street, you see that these are real people. Of course, maybe they are restricted in some ways, but Saudis are very young and positive. They have a really active spirit.”
Yet soft power can only do so much. Despite his trip, Hortinha isn’t sure he’d ever actually want to move there. He wants to live in a cosmopolitan city. “In Saudi,” he says, “I would live in a compound with other expats and do everything in the compound.... The other thing is, the weather is too hot in the summer. It is a country in the desert at the end of the day.”
Sage Lattman is a writer based in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts