President Biden’s pledge to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, made during the heat of the presidential campaign in November 2019, has run smack dab into geopolitical reality and record-high gasoline prices.
Next month, the president is scheduled to attend a regional security conference in Saudi Arabia where, the White House confirmed, Mr. Biden will meet the man he promised to treat as a pariah for allegedly ordering Mr. Khashoggi’s murder: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
In other words, there will be no divorce between two countries that continue to need one another. In this episode of History As It Happens, we explore a decades-long relationship shaped by oil, war, terrorism and political expediency.
Franklin Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to meet Saudi Arabia’s king in 1945, but it took several decades for the United States to develop a deep political relationship with Saudi Arabia. For many years, American interests in the kingdom were run by powerful oil consortiums that operated with little political interference prior to the formation of OPEC.
“The kingdom was founded in 1932. Our only diplomatic representative for the next 15 years was stationed in Cairo … the state to state relations were very tenuous,” said Bob Vitalis, an expert on the Middle East and energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
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“It’s the 1970s that matter,” said Mr. Vitalis, referring to the oil shocks of 1973, caused by the Saudi embargo on oil sales to the U.S., and of 1979, triggered by the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
By the end of the decade, the U.S. had prepared to militarize its presence in the Persian Gulf to protect the global oil supply. That presence became permanent after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 provoked a U.S.-led intervention that required staging U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. The relationship would survive the outrage of Americans who witnessed 15 Saudi citizens hijack passenger aircraft on September 11, 2001.
Listen to Bob Vitalis discuss the ups and downs of the U.S.-Saudi marriage by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
