Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

It would be wrong to say that Saudi Arabia is turning against the United States. The relationship matters too much for that. In some respects, it may even have grown closer.

The two countries signed a Strategic Defense Agreement in November 2025 and, only last month, Washington submitted their civilian nuclear cooperation agreement to Congress for review. America remains indispensable to Saudi Arabia, probably in ways that no other country quite is.

But indispensability is not quite the same thing as trust.

In The Honourable Schoolboy, following Bill Haydon’s exposure as the mole at the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the CIA freezes out the Circus, cutting British intelligence off from its American counterpart. Britain is still an ally. The relationship still exists. What has changed is the degree of American trust in it.

The circumstances could hardly be more different, but the underlying anxiety must be recognisable in cafes and social clubs in Riyadh.

I first started thinking about Saudi-US relations at a dinner at the Frontline Club in Paddington, given by a Saudi author shortly before the last American election. The United States dominated the conversation. There was no sense at all of a country preparing to abandon Washington. What came through was something more interesting: the kind of frustration you only really have with a partnership that matters.

Right now, the sharpest frustration is over security, and particularly the Houthis.

After their latest missile and drone attacks at the weekend, images of black smoke rising near Riyadh’s airport travelled around the world. For the Saudis, the argument over American security guarantees was no longer an abstraction.

One commentator accused the Saudis of having earlier targeted the runway at Sanaa International Airport in Yemen as a Houthi delegation returned from Tehran, where it had attended Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral, one of the largest in history.

But the problem is bigger than the missiles themselves.

In a startling offensive this month, the Houthis have swept through Saudi-backed positions along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, taking Mokha and the island of Perim in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The reverses have exposed weaknesses among Riyadh’s Yemeni allies and made one of the world’s great maritime chokepoints suddenly look much more vulnerable.

From Riyadh, the complaint is pretty simple. Saudi territory and infrastructure are under threat, but Washington is reluctant to use its military power in the way the Saudis would........

© CounterPunch