US, SAUDI ARABIA IN BAD CONFLICT

 

Obama arrives on Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on April 20. Saudi King Salman did not greet the President on his arrival. The perceived slight was seen as one more sign that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is encountering friction.

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From left, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande sit together at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, Germany, on Monday, April 25. Germany was the third stop on Obama's recent trip, which also included the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

This is only one of the troubling questions that President Obama confronted this week as he sat with Saudi King Salman to discuss the state of the region and the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

The Saudis sent a lower-level official to greet Obama and Saudi state television didn't even bother covering the President's arrival.

So to paraphrase Hamlet, clearly something is rotten in the state of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

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And regardless of how this week's meetings conclude the Saudi-American enterprise will remain a delicate and fraught affair. The answers to the following five questions tell you why.

Is Saudi Arabia a U.S. ally?

That depends of course on how you define the word ally. But by any measure countries that don't share common values and whose interests on many critical issues seem to fundamentally collide can't simply be described the way we might look at U.S. relations with fellow democracies like Britain or Canada.

Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian regime that discriminates against women, doesn't permit religious freedom, and prevents freedom of the press. It has been exporting a fundamentalist Wahhabist ideology for years that demonizes Shia, Jews, Christians and the West.

Yet Saudi Arabia isn't the Islamic state, nor as some analysts have suggested, a junior version of it.

It's not seeking to undermine the regional order or sponsor terror against the West and create a caliphate. In fact, the Saudis are themselves a victim of jihadi terror and have worked closely with the United States against al Qaeda in Yemen and on counterterrorism against ISIS.

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Still al Qaeda developed out of Wahhabist doctrine and Saudi Arabia has done more than its fair share to nurture Islamic extremists and to fund jihadi groups in Syria such al Nusra. And the latest Saudi threat to sell off U.S. securities if Congress passes legislation holding them responsible for any official involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks highlights a disturbing possibility of some link.