Saudi Arabia and the United States: Awkward relations

BARACK OBAMA may recall a tricky moment when he first met King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia five years ago. Bending to shake hands with the octogenarian monarch, the taller American appeared to bow deeply. Republican snipers in America gleefully blasted the president for “kowtowing” to rich Arabs. Such protocols should run more smoothly when Mr Obama heads to Saudi Arabia on March 28th for his second time in office. Unfortunately, however, relations between the two countries have seldom been more awkward.Their close alliance dates to the end of the second world war, when an ailing Franklin Roosevelt met Saudi Arabia’s founding king, Abdul Aziz, aboard the cruiser Quincy in the Suez Canal. Then, and for decades after, the equation was simple: America would provide security, the Saudis oil. Those shared interests, cemented by a mutual loathing of communism (and a more recently shared hatred of Iran’s Shia theocracy and of al-Qaeda terrorists), papered over inevitable differences between a hermetic autocracy, backed by fearsomely puritanical Wahhabist clerics, and an ebullient, proselytising democracy.Such differences have inexorably widened since...



From The Economist: Middle East and Africa