Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR
Journal: Bustan The Middle East Book Review
Year: 2018

One of the most unlikely foreign alliances the United States has maintained for nearly seventy-five years is that with Saudi Arabia, a kingdom whose puritanical Islamic faith and nondemocratic values put it at the opposite end of the social and political spectrum. This old-couple's “special relationship” has undergone periodic seismic shocks, from a Saudi oil boycott in 1973 to the involvement of sixteen Saudis in the most deadly terrorist attack on the American homeland in US history, to the fa