The Saudi-US summit meeting in Washington may be King Salman’s first visit to the White House since becoming ruler in January but it is only the latest in the regular consultations between the leaders and between senior officials in both governments.

The summits of Saudi kings and American presidents are a showcase for the broad range of elements in the relationship that have evolved since King Salman’s father, King Abdul Aziz, met President Franklin Roosevelt aboard a US warship 70 years ago in the Suez Canal. They are also a time when specialists and pundits summarize the performance of the historic partnership in rhetorical average grades.

The assessments that give context to the summits often focus on a single subject grabbed from a report card that should consist of grades in many fields of work. In this visit, the Saudi delegation which is working through national security issues with their American counterparts is accompanied by a high-powered team of ministers, advisers and officials working to boost cooperation in trade, investment, industrial development, education, health care and a host of other bilateral interests.

The complexity of the relationship, and by extension the reliability of an episodic grade, was discussed by former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Ford Fraker last year, as Washington and Riyadh worked through political-military challenges. “The relationship is always strong at different levels,” he said. “People have different views and they have different ideas of what should happen in certain situations. That will always be the case. But in terms of where the relationship grinds along day to day, overall it’s rock solid.”

Another former helmsman of American diplomacy in the Kingdom, Ambassador James Smith, has given context to the government-to-government interactions and the ability to make progress in the face of challenges. “You can either focus on shared interests and then you can actually get something done, or you can focus on differences then you are challenged to get things done.”

Smith said that approach leads to successful management of the relationship.

The King Salman-President Obama summit, despite the breadth of conversations between the American and Saudi delegations and the well-traveled paths to consensus, is drawing much attention to the sometimes rancorous question of strategy to deal with post-deal Iran.

In the past two years following reports of “secret” talks in Oman between Washington and Tehran, there have been marked efforts by the American side to improve consultations with Riyadh on the P5+1 international group’s progress. American and Saudi officials have exchanged numerous visits which culminated in this spring’s US-GCC Summit at Camp David, where the leaders “underscored their mutual commitment” and discussed “a new US-GCC strategic partnership to enhance their work to improve security cooperation.”

The summit communiqué, reflecting Riyadh’s commitment to the US-Gulf partnership, signed off on the P5+1 process while reaffirming that, “The United States and GCC member states oppose and will work together to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region…” The Camp David Summit also affirmed the unity of purpose in addressing the threat from ISIS (Daesh), conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and other regional security challenges.

The fruits of these consultations by heads of state and ministers, at the bilateral and multilateral levels, are seen as the basis for the King Salman-President Obama summit and for joint efforts going forward. So, despite criticism aimed at each side from outside observers, the partnership endures based on foundational and new shared interests.

As Fraker observed: “People may criticize one another. That all happens at the political level. To be frank, most people don’t pay much attention to that.” He added: “Certainly nobody in Saudi Arabia believes that the relationship is threatened in any way. People are just trying to figure out what the right positions are for some tricky situations.”

— Patrick W. Ryan is an independent analyst on Gulf affairs. His editorial consulting firm produces the SUSRIS.com project that chronicles developments in Saudi-US relations.