ABSTRACT
The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the USA is, by conventional standards, amongst the most important linking any Third World country to an industrialised nation. Whilst the foreign policy of most countries is a compound of different factors – strategic, military, political, economic – that of Washington towards Saudi Arabia is more overtly and massively founded on economic interest than in almost any other comparable case. The US concern with Cuba, affected as it may have been by sugar, cannot be reduced to that substance. America’s intervention in Vietnam was determined by factors far weightier than control of rubber plantations. Even its concern with Iran was, in the context of the whole post-war period, determined less by concern over oil than by the strategic position which Iran occupied. All these junior allies could, with reluctance, be abandoned. In the case of Saudi Arabia, however, oil provides an urgent reason for its indispensability.
