The United States and Saudi Arabia established full diplomatic relations in the mid-20th century. And from that point forward,

ties have been tight, largely because of what each side gets from an interwoven economic,

military, and diplomatic arrangement. The U.S. as the world's largest economy, wielding the world's

largest military, needs a lot of oil. And the Saudis have just gobs of that. They are the second

largest oil producer with the second largest oil reserves in the world, and they are the world's

largest oil exporter. That export capacity enabled in part by how cheap it is for them to produce

and ship oil compared to other producers, which generally have

more difficult to access oil deposits, which are thus more expensive to get to and pump, and which

in some cases are only able to pump oil that requires a lot more costly processing to make it

suitable for the global market. The Saudis, in contrast, have easy to get, easy to process and

sell oil, but they're located in a highly unstable part of the world where there are generally

several wars ongoing at any given moment, the consequence of invasions or turmoil caused by

internal or external forces, and they deal with near-constant threats of regime

change while also sharing a border with their ideological, governmental, and military-arch rival,

Iran. The Saudi stockpiles of cheap and easy oil then makes them a target, and even with that

resource wealth aside, they've got a lot of enemies close to home,

many of whom would love to see them wiped out, even if they didn't have all those fossil fuels

and all that money to steal. The dynamic here, then, is that the country with the world's

largest military and massive energy resource needs provides military support, physical and threatened, and diplomatic backing,

for one of the world's largest purveyors of said resources, which itself is located in a highly precarious and tumultuous region,

and surrounded by sworn enemies and potential future sworn enemies.

Both sides of this equation have traditionally gotten a lot from this relationship,

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