By Ryan Suto – Business Insider

Like other longstanding American relationships in the Middle
East, the ties between Washington and Riyadh have nothing to do
with human rights or democracy. The alliance rests mostly on two
key factors: natural resources and regional stability.

First, in addition to being the Custodian of the Two Holy
Mosques, the House of Saud is the custodian of a singular holy
resource: oil. Saudi Arabia’s role as the largest
exporter of the crucial fossil fuel, as well as its cultural
and political influence over other six other Arab OPEC members, makes
friendship with the kingdom a valuable, and seemingly
indispensable, asset for a fuel-thirsty superpower.

Second, in the Cold-War era, maintaining a balance of power
between Western allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and
Soviet allies such as Iran and Syria, was central to US policy in
the region. Making overt advances in non-aligned countries like
Egypt or through intermediary forces, such as supporting Saddam
Hussein against Iran, was our preferred method of balancing
Soviet influence in the region.

In this context, retaining Saudi Arabia as a proxy for Western
influence in the Arab world was an easy policy decision. Without
American patronage, the Saudis might have turned to Russia.
Further, although Saudi Arabia has no formal relations with
Israel, unlike Egypt after the Camp David Accords, the Saudis
have never used state force against Israel, making the kingdom
more palatable to Washington.

Barack Obama’s administration has departed from the policies of
its predecessors in being willing to equivocate in its dealings with Saudi
Arabia. Obama has shown contempt
toward the diplomatic assumption that he and the Saudis will
present a common foreign policy in the region.

The most dramatic example of this new approach was the signing of
the Iran nuclear deal, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA). Although he has not spurned all Saudi
initiatives—he has backed the intervention in Yemen—Obama has been willing to
diverge from Saudi interests, which has heightened the insecurity
of Saudi leaders.

Saudi Arabia has done much to warrant Obama’s hesitation. Since
the passing of King Abdullah in 2015, King Salman and Minister of
Defense Mohammed bin Salman have intensified the simmering
regional rivalry with Iran, attempting to counter the Shia nation
in every theater in the region. Departing from post-9/11 reforms and moderations, the kingdom’s current
leadership is now committed to either ignoring or supportingextremist Sunni
theology.

Earlier this year Saudi Arabia suspended funding for the Lebanese army over the
influence of Hezbollah in the country. Viewing the Houthis in
Yemen as a proxy of Iran, Saudi has
led an
intervention in the country, generating accusations of war
crimes against civilians in the process.

In Saudi Arabia’s defense, Iran financially supports
Hamas and maintainsclose ties
with Hezbollah. The country has also played an enlarged role
fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—often
aligning with US interests. However, the extent of Iran’s role in
Yemen is debatable.
Nonetheless, German intelligence labels Saudi Arabia’s newfound
activism in the region as “impulsive intervention.”

In the past two weeks, Congress has adopted a contradictory
posture toward Saudi Arabia. It has pressed for both the declassification of a reportthat details the
potential Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks and onhuman rights violations within the Kingdom. It
also overrode an Obama veto for the first time to pass a bill
allowing the families of 9/11 victims tosue the Saudi government as a potential enabler of
the attacks. At the same time, Congress blocked an attempt to
undermine a
$1.15 billion sale of military tanks to Riyadh.

In the post-Cold War world, the interests of Riyadh and
Washington have increasingly diverged in the region. Obama is a
pivotal figure. His term straddled the Arab Spring and the
negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear program. The next
administration must operate in a post-Arab Spring, post-Iran
nuclear deal Middle East. If context, and not ideology, justified
American ties with Saudi Arabia, new rationales must be found in
this new regional context.

The first justification for the Washington-Riyadh relationship,
the politics of oil, will undoubtedly remain an important factor
for years to come. However, US per-capita consumption of foreign
oil has been steadily decreasing for decades, with 2014 levels below 1994 levels. The declining
importance of foreign oil for the US economy will allow future US
presidents more room for policy divergence with foreign
producers, such as Saudi Arabia.

The second justification, maintaining regional stability, is now
an illusion. A nation or a region is politically “stable” when it
is unlikely to change. In the context of the Cold
War, where Western-approved dictators ruled largely docile
publics, maintaining the status quo meant policy predictability.

However, in the modern Middle East where Syria, Iraq, Lebanon,
Libya, and Yemen have no effective centralized government that
can control the entire state territory, maintaining the status
quo means prolonged violence and a proliferation of failed
states. And although the Syrian civil war has given Russia a
larger foothold in the region than Washington would prefer,
Vladimir Putin is a far cry from reaching Soviet-era levels of
patronage in the region.

If the next administration continues to free US Middle East
policy from its Saudi-centric, Cold-War-era thinking, Washington
will find that it has more flexibility in making a strategic
approach to Iran, advance human rights in the region, and
effectively counter political and religious extremism, whether
Sunni, Shia, or any other variety.

Read the original article on Foreign Policy In Focus. Copyright 2016. Follow Foreign Policy In Focus on Twitter.