Mar 18, 2026 14:11 pm IST

Opinion | Behind Trump's Iran War Is A Saudi 'Equation' Few Can See

Everyone knows that Israel has a huge lobby in the US. It is the Saudi influence that is less evident.

Tara Kartha Tara Kartha Columnist

Tara Kartha Columnist

Saudi Arabia is increasingly an enigma wrapped in a mantle of white. This is the most evident in recent days, as the war in Iran brings the whole region under threat. It seemed that what was apparently a triangular confrontation between Israel, the US and Tehran, in fact was not. It had an additional actor. Riyadh was in it, from the beginning, reportedly pushing Trump into exactly the kind of war he had sworn never to get Americans into. Yet he did. What's more, the public stance in Riyadh is for diplomacy and an end to war, even as it ships out its oil through a little-known pipeline that entirely bypasses the Straits of Hormuz. Iran has now attacked the nearby port of Fujairah, which belongs to Abu Dhabi. The Saudi pipeline, however, remains safe. That needs some explaining.

Everyone knows that Israel has a huge lobby in the US. It is the Saudi influence that is less evident. Astonishingly, a former Wall Street bond trader who was Nixon's Treasury Secretary, and earlier heading the Energy office, was critical to making a deal with the Saudis way back in 1974, which remains unwritten, due to Saudi King Faisal's demand for total secrecy. It essentially involved the US buying Saudi oil, providing military equipment - and with it an unwritten protection clause - in return for which Riyadh would send its dollars back to the US (the famous 'petrodollar') issue, eventually funding as much as USD 117 billion in debt in 2016. That in itself seems to have been just the tip of the iceberg. A Bloomberg investigation at the time showed that actual figures were probably double, hidden in Treasuries held in offshore accounts, and, eventually, as other Gulf Countries joined in, masked over with data from these sources. 

That trend seems to continue.........

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