Americans don’t understand the difference between Allies and Client States. The Western Europeans, the Canadians and Australia qualify as allies. It is a give and take relationship where each country looks out for the security interests of the other although there may be some minor breakdowns from time to time. Client States on the other hand only take. With that in mind we have no allies in the Middle East and that includes Saudi Arabia and yes Israel. If any one country was responsible for 911 it would be Saudi Arabia. The country’s export of extreme Wahhabism is probably the leading cause of terrorism in the world. And when was the last time Israel did anything to enhance US security?
Daniel Larison writing at The American Conservative says The U.S. Should Stop Indulging Its Whining Clients.
When client governments are trying to scam the U.S. out of additional support, they have every incentive to profess their alarm at being “neglected” or “abandoned” by their patron, and hawks at home have every reason to amplify those complaints to score points in debates here. All of this is bound up with the misguided obsession with “credibility,” which clients and domestic hawks are both skilled at using to their advantage. I have commented on this several times before. That is why such complaints from clients should always be greeted with skepticism, and they should force us to ask whether the interests of our clients and our own interests are actually aligned on the issue in question.
For example, if the Saudis and other Gulf states are opposed to a nuclear deal with Iran, that does not mean that the U.S. needs to be bending over backwards to assuage their doubts. Furthermore, if regional clients want to throw a fit over a major U.S. diplomatic initiative, the right answer is not to find ways to bribe them into silence or compliance. It is rather to prove to them that their hostility to U.S. goals comes at a price in their relationship with the U.S. Clients are certainly not obliged to endorse all U.S. policies, but they shouldn’t be be rewarded for actively seeking to undermine them. If they want to sell their support to the U.S. on a given issue, they would need to demonstrate first that their support is necessary and useful. When they won’t or can’t do this, the U.S. gains nothing except new commitments and burdens by offering them more support.
The attempts by Netanyahu and Israel to undermine the Iran nuclear talks by the US and it’s real allies in Europe is despicable. That is why much of the world sees Israel not Iran as the pariah of the Middle East. For the Saudis it is simply a continuation of the centuries long war between the Sunni and Shia. Neither of these countries have the security interests of the United State in mind. Larison continues:
There is a related problem that U.S. policymakers have so often overstated the interests that the U.S. has in various parts of the world, especially the Near East, that they have tricked themselves into believing that the U.S. needs its clients more than they need U.S. support. The U.S. goes to great lengths to placate and satisfy governments that contribute little or nothing to making the U.S. more secure. If our policymakers were less inclined to perceive “vital” interests everywhere, they would be less inclined to indulge clients in their attempted extortion when our interests and theirs diverge.
Why Iran may not have the most enlightened government in the region it is certainly no worse than the tyranny of the House Of Saud And then there is the apartheid practiced by Israel which now includes Ethiopian Jews.