U.S.-Saudi Relations: Salman Snubs, Obama Shrugs

Anthony Bubalo

Security, Middle East

If the Saudi leadership thinks that it can simply wait for Obama's successor to resume normal service then they are in for a nasty surprise.

There has been a lot of parsing of yesterday's reputed snub of President Obama by King Salman of Saudi Arabia. It certainly was a snub. In 2009 the late King Abdullah greeted Obama off the plane during the U.S. president's first to the Kingdom; yesterday King Salman sent the governor of Riyadh to welcome the U.S. president while he received his Gulf counterparts a few hundred meters down the runway.

The reasons for the snub are pretty obvious too. Saudi impatience with Obama personally has grown exponentially. They blame him for an assortment of failings, real and imagined: abandoning the Mubarak regime in Egypt in 2011; failing to hold his red-line against Bashar al-Assad in 2012; and cozying up to the Iranians with a nuclear deal in 2015.

For Obama, sharp-eyed about U.S. interests and unsentimental about U.S. allies, the snub will have mattered very little. But if the Saudi leadership thinks, as it apparently does, that it can simply wait for Obama's successor to resume normal service then they are in for a nasty surprise.

The truth is that, with or without Obama, the fabric of interests that once tied the two countries together has been fraying for some time now. Certainly personalities do matter, especially in a country like Saudi Arabia, run more like a family business than a state. The Saudi royal family's close ties to the Bush family in the U.S., for example, certainly helped to hold some of threads of the relationship together.

But absent these personal ties, interests are brought into sharper focus. The United States needs less Saudi oil. It no longer bases much of its regional military forces in the country. And in recent years the answer to the question of whether Saudi Arabia is more of an asset or a liability in the fight against terrorism is much more finely poised.