This is CBS. I'm the world. I'm John Batcher with Johnson Shanzer on the foundation for

the defensive democracy. We begin with a specific example of the Civil War in Sudan, a

contest between two Gulf powers, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Now we've got a Washington

NTC in the Biden administration. Jonathan, I read an item that looks like an outlier,

but it suggests that Saudi Arabia is going its own direction about the European war

in Ukraine. Reuters, date line these last hours Singapore, Saudi Arabia imported record

volumes of discounted Russian fuel oil in June, a tenfold annual increase to meet summer

power generation demand and maintain crude exports despite OPEC cut production cuts.

What? I thought. What? Saudi Arabia, I understand that there's all this business about sports

washing about promising everything for professional athletes, but by and jet fuel, is this a way

of showing Washington they're independent? Does Washington wink at this? What does it mean?

John, it's the right question to ask and you may recall that President Biden actually went to

visit Saudi Arabia. It was a controversial visit because the president had already declared

as a candidate that he wanted to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state. And there were, I think,

efforts to to minimize America's reliance on Saudi oil. And we've seen particularly Democrats in

Congress, this is not a partisan statement, it's a fact that Democrats have been going after Saudi

Arabia trying to vilify Saudi Arabia, trying to downgrade the relationship with Saudi Arabia.

And this is of course not immune to a democratic president in the White House. And so what we've

watched is a period of time in which over the last two years, the relationship between Saudi Arabia,

which is a, this is a strategic relationship for the United States dating back to the immediate

aftermath of World War II and an agreement signed on the USS Quincy. Right? I mean, we know the

story here about this, that the US and Saudi Arabia, even though they're not shared values,

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