Peace dividend: 80 years of US-Saudi relations

On Feb. 14, 2025, it will be exactly 80 years since King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia stepped aboard a US warship moored in the Suez Canal for a historic meeting with American President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had a great deal on his mind.
In Europe, where Soviet troops were within 60 km of Berlin, the Second World War was drawing to its bloody conclusion, but in the Far East the conflict was a long way from ending.
As he welcomed King Abdulaziz aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake, Roosevelt knew that in five days’ time thousands of US Marines would die in a costly battle to seize the Pacific island of Iwo Jima.
The storming of the island of Okinawa, the last battle before an anticipated invasion of the Japanese home islands, would follow on April 1. This would prove even more bloody, costing the lives of 100,000 American and Japanese soldiers.
The president, who in 1942 had launched the top-secret Manhattan Project, was wrestling with an epoch-defining decision: whether to end the war by using the world’s first nuclear weapons.
But in February 1945, Roosevelt, on his way back to the US from the Yalta conference of the soon-to-be-victorious Allies, made time to meet the man known in the West as Ibn Saud — the enigmatic leader who in 1932 had successfully united the tribes of Najd and Hijaz under the banner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Roosevelt knew that, even as the Second World War was drawing to a close, in the wings a new world order was taking shape — and that Saudi Arabia was a nation that the US needed to befriend.
The president did not have long to live — in two months’ time he would be dead. But the meeting with King Abdulaziz was the first step toward a close relationship between the two countries that has endured for the past eight decades.
Eighty years is a mere blink of the eye of time — there are Saudis alive today who were alive when the president met the king. Yet in that time the Kingdom has developed beyond all recognition, and its influence on the world stage has grown exponentially.
On the eve of a new year fraught with uncertainty, that influence is set to play a pivotal role in the thinking of key players, including the new US president-elect, as the Middle East seeks to turn its back on death and destruction and looks forward with hope to a future of peace and prosperity.
It was not by chance that during his first presidency President Donald Trump’s first official overseas trip, in May 2017, was to Saudi Arabia. At the time the visit was portrayed in Western media as a departure from diplomatic norms, but in fact since 1974 no fewer than eight US presidents have followed Roosevelt eastward and walked on Saudi soil in recognition of the reality that the Kingdom is an influential locus of security and stability in an otherwise troubled and unstable region.
It is not yet known where President-elect Trump’s travels will take him after his inauguration on Jan. 20. But what is clear is that his administration will be looking toward Saudi Arabia as a key partner in Trump’s declared intention to end the war in Palestine and Lebanon swiftly. 

The Americans are not alone in looking to the Kingdom as a vital partner.

Jonathan Gornall

The Americans are not alone in looking to Saudi Arabia as a vital partner in diplomacy and commerce, as the recent appearances of British Princess Beatrice at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh and, with her sister Princess Eugenie, at the World Economic Forum meeting in the city in April testify.
The upcoming visit to the Kingdom of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is further evidence of the extent to which the polarity of the relationship between the two countries has reversed since the days when Britain rather highhandedly considered the Arabian Peninsula to be within its sphere of influence.
Eighty years ago, Roosevelt saw that the postwar world would become increasingly dependent on the emerging oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
But his meeting with King Abdulaziz in 1945 had a second purpose — to persuade the most influential leader on the Arabian Peninsula that, in the wake of the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews, Palestine should become a Jewish homeland.
On this matter the king was adamant, and prescient.
At their meeting, with his words recorded by an American translator, the Saudi ruler had told Roosevelt that “amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander.
“What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe?” he asked. “It is the ‘Christian’ Germans who stole their homes and lives. Let the Germans pay.”
King Abdulaziz felt so strongly that a great catastrophe was about to be unleashed on the Middle East that after their meeting he wrote to Roosevelt to press his case again.
“To install Jews from every horizon in this sacred Muslim Arab country,” would be “a calamitous and infamous miscarriage of justice,” he wrote in a letter dated April 30, 1945.
The Jews, he predicted, “will do wrong to the quiet and peaceful Arabs. The Heavens will split, the earth will be rent asunder, and the mountains will tremble at what the Jews claim in Palestine, both materially and spiritually.”
Three years after the historic meeting on board the USS Quincy, on May 14, 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel, which was recognized by US President Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, that same day.
The tragic consequences of the Jewish colonial adventure, foretold by King Abdulaziz, are still with us.
It can only be hoped that in 2025 the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, begun 80 years ago and alive today in the affinity between Trump and a Saudi leadership committed to sovereignty for the Palestinian people, might yet yield the long overdue dividend of peace, prosperity, and justice for the Arabs of Palestine.

• Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly with The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the UK.