- Congress consistently attempted to pressure President Donald Trump to distance the US from Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a terrorist attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola by a Saudi service member, and the war in Yemen.
The United States is Saudi Arabia’s closest western ally.
All this was made clear to me when I went to the kingdom’s National Museum in main Riyadh last month. I was struck by abundance of United States paraphernalia there, which recommended to me that Saudi Arabia deeply values its relationship a lot that it borders on respect.
The US-Saudi alliance began with Americans drilling for oil in the kingdom in 1933, which at the time had just been one years of age.
Service interests came before political relations, with the Requirement Oil of California– now Chevron– and Texas Oil Company– or Texaco– moneying in when they discovered oil in 1938.
Diplomatic relations were only developed in February 1940, and their leaders at the time, King Abdulaziz and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fulfilled for the very first time in 1945.
In December 2019, the United States Embassy in Riyadh also released the hashtag #Together2020 to honor 75 years of the two countries’ partnership.
Here’s what I saw at Saudi’s national museum:
The very first two displays at the King Abdulaziz Historic Center are the most striking.
Expense Bostock/Business Insider
” His Majesty King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, as an expression of relationship and goodwill from Harry Truman President of the United States of America October 1950,” the brass placard checks out.
The second item, simply a few feet to the desk’s right, is a 1939 letter from US businessman and arabophile Charles R. Crane to Roosevelt extolling the virtues of King Abdulaziz, also called Ibn Saud.
Expense Bostock/Business Expert
” He is the most important man who has appeared in Arabia since the time of Mohammed,” Crane composed, referring to the creator of Islam.
Expense Bostock/Business Insider
Here it remains in Dammam, eastern Saudi Arabia, which is the center of Saudi Aramco’s drilling program:
Saudi National Museum/Bill Bostock/Business Insider
The museum is likewise plastered with pictures of King Abdulaziz and Roosevelt’s very first conference, which occurred on the of USS Quincy as Roosevelt was returning from the Yalta conference, where he and other world leaders talked about post-World War II logistics for Germany and Europe.
The pair struck it off, finding commonalities in “oil, God, and real estate,” according to nuclear professional Rachel Bronson’s book, “Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Collaboration with Saudi Arabia.”
AP Images
Ellen R. Wald, an energy historian who wrote a book on Saudi oil, composed in The Washington Post this week that these extremely pictures are “used regularly in propaganda within Saudi Arabia and in messages targeted at American audiences.”
( Incidentally, the United States Embassy in Riyadh used this specific same picture in a marketing video for the hashtag last month.)
Wald said, however, that the Saudi-US relationship is not as symbolic and pure as either side would have us think either. She said it was “a simply transactional relationship” focused on oil, and later, military co-dependence.
” While effective forces have actually mythologized it for their own reasons, the United States and Saudi Arabia are not and never have actually been allies,” Wald wrote.
The Saudi national museum’s curators would likely refute that, as their message seemed to be clearly about real relationship, respect, and commitment between the Saudis and Americans.
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