In 1945 Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from the Yalta summit with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, met King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud on a US warship midway up the Suez Canal. Having settled the disposition of postwar Europe, FDR laid a foundation stone of the postwar Middle East: the US would underwrite the security and integrity of the kingdom Ibn Saud had only recently united by the sword, and the Saudis would guarantee the free flow of oil westwards at reasonable prices. That deal now looks as though it may be falling apart.
Saudi Arabia, ruled by Ibn Saud’s aged sons, is so exasperated by US behaviour in the Middle East that this month it took the unprecedented step of refusing to take the coveted temporary seat to which it had been elected on the UN Security Council. Things got worse after Reuters reported that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi spy chief, warned of a shift away from the US in private remarks echoed by public ridicule heaped on US policy towards Syria by Prince Turki al-Faisal, for long the kingdom’s intelligence chief.
As former Saudi ambassadors to Washington, both men are more than familiar with the vagaries of US policy making. They may or may not be channelling the sentiments of King Abdullah, the ailing Saudi monarch. But they did not come down with the last shower of rain.