A second pillar was erected in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel. In the ensuing years, the American commitment to the survival of the Jewish state has become even stronger than that to Saudi Arabia. Standing on these two mismatched bases of policy, the United States has habitually intoned a mantra of orderly progress toward a peaceful, prosperous, democratic Middle East. Israel and Saudi Arabia are inborn rivals. During the Gulf War of 1991 the United States exerted a major political effort insure against Israeli participation, which might well have shattered the allied coalition.
Democracy is an elusive commodity.
The United States has been practicing it for over 200 years and still hasn't gotten it right, as demonstrated by Congress' egregious failure to insulate the electoral process from the corrosive effects of special-interest money. Middle East frontiers are haphazard, the product of millennia of communal conflict and foreign invasion, further skewed in recent times by colonialist caprice. They contravene racial distribution. They disregard sectarian divisions. They interrupt pipelines.