Standing alongside Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley at the Pentagon on Oct. 11, 2019, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced that additional U.S. troops and assets would be deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the kingdom’s oil infrastructure. The order came roughly a month after alleged Iranian cruise missiles hit Saudi crude facilities in a pinpoint attack, knocking half of the country’s oil production offline. The deployment at the time increased the U.S. troop presence in the kingdom to 3,000 and essentially turned the U.S. military into security guards for Saudi Arabia’s oil business.
Apparently, some of those U.S. troops are preparing to redeploy. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Pentagon officials are in the process of removing four Patriot missile batteries from Saudi Arabia, coming on top of the departure of two U.S. fighter squadrons from the region and a possible reduction in the U.S. Navy’s presence in the Persian Gulf. While the plan has yet to be officially confirmed by Trump administration officials, one can only hope the redeployment orders proceed quickly.
U.S. troops should never have been sent to Saudi Arabia in the first place. Last I checked, the ultraconservative monarchy had a military of its own — one stocked to the brim with tens of billions of dollars in U.S. equipment.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have finally woken up to the fact that Saudi Arabia is not a reliable friend of the United States. Unfortunately, it took the premeditated slaying of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents before much of the Beltway was violently shocked from its slumber. Saudi Arabia hunting down dissidents and throwing human rights and civil society activists in prison to rot is nothing new, of course. Khashoggi’s murder, however, was such a brazen, unapologetic act of sheer evil that Republicans and Democrats, who would ordinarily give the Saudi royal family the benefit of the doubt, were forced to look at Riyadh for what it always was — not a friend or an adversary, but just another authoritarian power that isn’t any better than any other country in the Middle East.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship was due for a strategic evolution long before Saudi agents lured Khashoggi to a diplomatic facility in Istanbul. The oil-for-security deal that formed the core of the relationship since 1945 is becoming less relevant to Washington with each passing year. With the U.S. increasing its crude oil production by nearly 60% between 2008 and 2019 and Washington’s imports of Persian Gulf oil declining by over 62% during the same period, Saudi oil is simply not as vital to Washington as it was in the past. Indeed, as Saudi Arabia’s price war with Russia in March and April made clear, Riyadh is now as much of a competitor to the U.S. shale industry in the pursuit of global market share as it is a reliable supplier — if not more so.
Nor is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman proving himself to be a calm or constructive presence for Saudi Arabia or for U.S. interests. The general assumption in Washington, D.C., for decades, was that what’s good for Saudi Arabia is good for the U.S. Therefore, there was almost an expectation that the U.S. would support Riyadh as if it were an ally. The only problem: Saudi Arabia was never a U.S. ally, to begin with.
Bin Salman’s reckless nature — a recklessness that was laid bare in dumb decisions such as the kidnapping of a former Lebanese prime minister, going to war against U.S. energy companies, and destroying a neighboring country’s hospital network and public infrastructure with a merciless campaign of airstrikes — has demonstrated in real-time to U.S. officials and the public at large that the oil monarchy is a cutthroat, self-interested player that will quickly toss the U.S. overboard if it gives them an advantage.
Nobody should be surprised by this behavior. Any realist would be able to predict it. Yet curiously, it has taken the U.S. foreign policy community a long time to come to the same conclusion.
Bottom line: Saudi Arabia is not entitled to U.S. military support when it makes stupid decisions. In fact, Riyadh isn’t entitled to U.S. support, period.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
