Council on Foreign Relations: U.S.-Saudi Relationship Increasingly Strained

The U.S.-Saudi relationship has become strained by increasing mistrust and misunderstanding—most recently over Egypt and Bahrain—and gone are the old foundations of the informal alliance: the Cold War and U.S. operation of Riyadh's oil fields. This is according to F. Gregory Gause III in a Special Report written for the Council on Foreign Relations: Saudi Arabia in the new Middle East.

Gause writes that Saudi Arabia is the "least affected of the major Arab states by the upheavals of 2011." He explores the foundations of Riyadh's present political stability and concludes that the House of Saud is likely to remain in place.

Gause says that Saudi concerns about the Iranian nuclear program

are so intense that they have signaled in numerous ways that—without saying it directly—they would feel it necessary to obtain their own nuclear deterrent if faced with an Iranian nuclear capacity...Riyadh would, in all probability, support an American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, allowing U.S. forces access to Saudi facilities if needed (though without any publicity) and upping oil production to try to calm markets in the immediate aftermath, if Washington chose that path. But the Saudis would also blame the United States for any Iranian counterstrike.