In February 1945 President Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from the Yalta summit with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, met King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the USS Quincy, anchored in the Great Bitter Lake midway up the Suez Canal. Having settled the dispositions of postwar Europe, Roosevelt laid a foundation stone of the postwar Middle East. The US, in essence, would guarantee the security and integrity of Ibn Saud’s Arabian kingdom — united by the sword in 52 battles over 30 years — while the Saudis would guarantee the free flow of oil at reasonable prices.
As US President Barack Obama arrives on a valedictory visit to Saudi Arabia this week, that 70-year-old bargain looks frayed by fractious relations with a ruling House of Saud that is coming under unpredictable new management. The shale-based energy revolution meanwhile shows the potential to liberate the US from dependence on Saudi and Gulf oil. Mr Obama’s main foreign policy achievement, the nuclear deal struck last year between international powers and Iran, is abhorrent to Saudi Arabia, whose virulently sectarian Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam abominates the Shia Islam of Iran and its Arab network of co-religionists from Baghdad to Beirut.
Even when the Iran deal was only at an interim and fragile stage in 2013, the Saudis were so affronted they rejected a seat for which they had vigorously lobbied on the UN Security Council. But differences between Washington and Riyadh had been steadily accumulating — starting with the fact that it was mainly Saudi terrorists, on orders of the Saudi Osama bin Laden, who struck America on 9/11.