The Saudi Arabia that US President Barack Obama witnessed on his official visit to Riyadh to attend the 2nd GCC-US summit, is one that is undergoing profound change, just as the Saudi-US relationship is changing too.

With oil prices down substantially from two years ago, when they hit more than $100 a barrel, the Kingdom has been forced to look at all of its spending and cut back or slow down spending on non-essential projects. Leading this complex and sensitive mission has been Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

In a recent and wide-ranging interview given to Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, Prince Mohammed detailed the actions he is taking to slow down the rate at which the Kingdom was going through its foreign currency reserves. His bold initiative to move to a non-oil based economy will be announced tomorrow (April 25).

Yet already, Prince Mohammed has said that the Public Investment Fund, established in 1971 to facilitate the development of the Saudi economy, would be widened to include some of the funds of the national oil producer Saudi Aramco, which in turn would then invest this money worldwide in stocks of blue-chip companies, in order to give the Kingdom a stream of non-oil returns from these investments.

He also proposed selling five percent of Saudi Aramco’s shares on the stock market, and is working with other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations to introduce a value-added tax on the sales of goods and services of around four to five percent by 2018.

On the Saudi-US relations front, the Obama administration was taken by surprise when the Kingdom intervened militarily in Yemeni last year to restore the legitimate government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. As one US analyst told me recently: “The Americans were happy to sell the Saudis lots of weapons as long as they stayed on the shelf and were not used. Now that they are using them in Yemen, the Americans are a bit surprised and do not know what to do.”

Western nations cannot believe that when they sell us weapons we will not use them. That would be an idiotic waste of money for us. In Yemen, the Kingdom saw the threat posed by the Houthi rebels trying to take over the whole country, with the backing of Iran. This we could never allow, and intervened accordingly.

President Obama agreed with the GCC’s fear of Iran’s expansion in the region and pledged once again that if any of our countries were attacked by Iran, the US would intervene to protect us.

President Obama complained recently in an interview that Gulf and European countries were not doing enough to help defend themselves, putting the entire burden, both financial and military, on the US. This was mistaken as all of the Gulf countries buy billions in American aircraft and weapons, and the US military has bases in Kuwait and Qatar. Apart from the financial side, the Kingdom has shown much initiative in its support of Syrian opposition fighting the regime of Bashar Assad, and in its intervention in Yemen. We are paying for all of this with our own money, and have never asked the West for any favors.

US government officials may be surprised at a newly assertive Kingdom, but they should accept it and adjust the strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states. For decades our main objective in this relationship was to contain Soviet expansion in the Middle East and maintain stable oil prices. This we achieved superbly well. Our ongoing cooperation with US officials in fighting terrorism and extremism has been of the highest quality, and most US officials admit that they would be caught short-handed and left in the dark if we stopped this cooperation.

All relationships change over time and that is only natural. The Saudi-US relationship is not exempt from change too. I think top officials from both countries have realized that the relationship is too strategic and long-lived to be abandoned. Thus we continue with fewer stars in our eyes — seeing each other more clearly as we really are — in a relationship that is of utmost importance to both sides.

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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.