In 1963, Crown Prince Faisal told US Ambassador Parker T Hart that ‘after Allah, we trust America’ while Saudis were involved in a confrontation with Egypt over Yemen, highlighting the depth of their relationship that has endured
In an October 1945 memorandum, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson drew President Harry S Truman’s attention to Saudi Arabia’s oil, calling it a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in history. Acheson said a concession covering oil is nominally in control. He warned that it will be lost unless the US government can demonstrate ‘in a practical way’ its recognition of this concession as of national interest.
Acheson recommended acceding to the reasonable requests of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud for temporary assistance to overcome economic and financial difficulties until the exploitation of the concession began to bring substantial royalties to Saudi Arabia. The memorandum came against the backdrop of the American inability to grant the king loans of about $10 million annually as long as revenues began to accrue from petroleum development.
Acheson noted that this money annually for five years would be necessary to obtain economic stability in Saudi Arabia, to give reasonable security to American interests in the vast Arabian oil fields for ‘winning peace’ in a crucial part of the world.
The Enduring US-Saudi Partnership
Months earlier, in February 1945, Truman’s predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, met Saud on a warship anchored in the Red Sea as the US sought allies following the Second World War and America’s emergence as a superpower. Roosevelt’s advisors and oil explorers also pushed him to befriend the al-Saud dynasty founder before the British for oil. Ibn Saud would soon give concessions to American oil companies in exchange for a military alliance to protect his fledgling Kingdom from the rival Hashemite tribe.
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America’s post-war policy of acquiring oil for its safety and security made Saudi Arabia indispensable to Washington. The US-Saudi alliance has since endured, overcoming odds. The American project of exporting democracy and its total absence in Saudi Arabia, which is named after the ruling family, has had no impact on it. The alliance continued despite America’s failure to keep its pledges to the Palestinians dispossessed with Israel’s creation.
Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s holiest places, has followed ibn Saud’s pragmatism and furthered its interests closely tied to the US. It secretly continued oil supplies to the US and refused to sever ties after the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israel wars. America’s thirst for oil and the security it offers Saudi rulers to maintain their power cemented the alliance.
US Role in Shaping Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia provides 12% of the estimated 19 million barrels of oil that the US consumes daily. It has long adjusted international oil prices to suit US interests. Riyadh reportedly increased its oil production to drop prices to help Barack Obama in his re-election campaign. Saudis unsuccessfully tried the same to help President Carter in his 1980s re-election campaign.
The alliance has not been about oil for security alone. According to author Thomas Lippman, Americans have had a formative influence on almost every aspect of contemporary Saudi life except religion.’ Americans first went to Saudi Arabia for oil and became involved in Saudi Arabian economic development, governmental restructuring, foreign policy, and infrastructure development.
Saudi Arabia got further intertwined with the US in the 1980s when it signed an agreement to invest its petrodollars in America. This was done to avoid the repeat of the 1970s oil shock due to the oil embargo and the growing American realisation that Arab states could again effectively use oil as a weapon. The agreement means the Saudis have an estimated trillion dollars in American banks. This, along with American investments in Saudi Arabia, has strengthened cooperation. The US Treasury Department has the Office of Saudi Arabian Affairs, the only such arrangement with any country.
How Common Enemies Bonded Riyadh and Washington
Common foes such as secular Arab rulers and communism, too, contributed to the relationship. President Dwight D Eisenhower promoted the Saudi king as an Islamic Pope in the 1950s to counter Egyptian Pan-Arabist Kamel Abdul-Naseer, who sought to unite Arabs and challenged US-backed despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia with Soviet help.
The depth of the US-Saudi Arabia relationship is perhaps best illustrated in Crown Prince Faisal’s conversation with US Ambassador Parker T Hart in 1963. Faisal, who took over as the king the following year, told Hart that ‘after Allah, we trust America’ while the kingdom was involved in a confrontation with Egypt over Yemen. He told Hart that he considered the Saudi interests to be the same as those of the US.
Saudi Arabia’s importance to the US increased after the 1979 Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah. The Iranian monarch was installed after an American Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup removed democrat Mossadegh for nationalizing oil and ending British monopoly in 1953.
Saudi-US Ties Weather Upheaval
Ibn Saud’s son, King Fahd, pumped money into anti-Communist campaigns in places such as Afghanistan in the 1980s. The first Gulf War, a decade later, was the high point of the relationship. The Saudis assisted the US in the war. They allowed 500,000 American soldiers into the land of Islam’s holiest places to end Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait and stop him from advancing towards the Kingdom’s oil-rich provinces.
A leading cleric issued a fatwa legitimising the war and the presence of American troops. Dissident clerics were imprisoned. Osama bin Laden declared war on the Saudi ruling family over the American presence after he was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile. The 9/11 attacks briefly strained the ties, as most of the attackers were Saudis. But the ruling Saudi clan’s known proximity to the Bush family, which has given the US two presidents, saved the day. Laden family members and other Saudi notables were evacuated from the US within 48 hours of the attacks, while the air traffic was suspended.
The Second Gulf War, which led to Saddam’s removal and the installation of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq, was another irritant in the ties the two countries have since repaired. The signing of American history’s biggest arms deal, worth $60 billion to sell military equipment to the Saudis in 2010, underscored the thaw in the ties. The deal created much-needed jobs in an ailing US economy. It ensured Riyadh’s dependence on Washington for the training and maintenance of these weapons for decades.
MBS-Trump Bonhomie
In November 2025, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, popularly known as MBS, met US President Donald Trump and discussed deepening ties and cooperation months after their meeting in Riyadh in May. The kingdom’s $600 billion trade and investment commitment was the highlight of Trump’s trip.
MBS’s visit was his first to the US since the killing of his critic Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident. The killing at a Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018 sparked global outrage. The US intelligence linked it to MBS, who denied ordering it, but admitted responsibility as de facto ruler. The Saudi-US ties were hit when Joe Biden took over as the president. As a presidential candidate, Biden had called for making Saudi Arabia a pariah over Khashoggi’s killing. The US ultimately moved on before Trump’s return to power in 2025 revived the historical warmth between the two countries.
Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest defense budget. It spends a bulk of that on US weapons. The US has reciprocated by turning a blind eye to uprisings in Saudi Arabia’s eastern provinces, its role in crushing anti-monarchy demonstrators in Bahrain, and, most recently, its military campaign in Yemen. Democracy in Saudi Arabia does not suit the US for fear of losing another dependable ally. And the paradoxical special relationship between the two diametrically opposite countries – one a champion of liberty and another an absolutist monarchy – is here to stay.
