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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
Media reports this week showed that the Iran war has strained relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis seem to have lost faith the Trump administration was prepared to win the military campaign it initiated in February to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.
Now that Iran is using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage over America and the rest of the world, the fallout from a rupture of U.S.-Saudi ties could affect not only America’s status in a region it’s dominated for decades but also the direction of a major Middle Eastern power that sees itself as the leader of the Muslim world.
And yet, these developments may leave Israel in a stronger position, both in the eyes of the Arabs, who have watched Jerusalem’s military prowess against Tehran with awe, and Pentagon strategists, for whom Israel is now indisputably America’s most reliable Middle East ally and are already discussing moving bases and hardware out of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf region to Israel. The question is whether that’s going to run into political headwinds given the antisemitism and anti-Zionism that’s eaten away at the Democrats and may come to shape Republican foreign policy too.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s energy supplies pass, is the only maritime exit and entry point for the Gulf. This is why the Saudis have long considered an Iranian nuclear bomb an existential threat. Sure, the revolutionary regime may one day lob a nuclear bomb at Riyadh or Jeddah, but the more immediate worry has always been that with a bomb, the Iranians could close the Strait at will.
And that’s why the Trump administration went to war — not to protect Israel, which can take care of itself, but to defend one of the pillars of the post-World War II global order and U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia that it has made rich. Accordingly, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known as “MBS,” supported the Trump administration’s decision to take down Iran and exhorted the U.S. to get it done quickly. Then the Iranians closed the Strait.
In May, the Trump administration started an initiative to escort shipping through the Strait with ships and planes. However, the Saudis refused U.S. access to their airspace and the White House was forced to end the mission after only two days. President Trump and MBS exchanged angry phone calls during which the White House warned it might hold back delivery of interceptors — a threat seemingly designed to backfire since it was America’s inability to shield Saudi and other Gulf Arab states from Iran’s drone and missile arsenal that rattled MBS in the first place. And when Tehran closed the Strait, Riyadh cried uncle and are now trying to carve out an understanding with their powerful Gulf rival.
The Saudis can certainly be faulted for what looks like strategic whimsy, but they’ve always been America’s most fragile Middle East ally. Indeed, the deal that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt struck with King Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state, in 1944 was to protect the kingdom and its oil in exchange for privileged access to it. The recent dust-up is unlikely to collapse the U.S.-Saudi relationship entirely at present, but both partners have already been looking beyond the current arrangement for some time now.
Because MBS is young enough, barely 40 years old, to imagine a post-petroleum future, he has drafted a hugely ambitious project for his country. But “Saudi Vision 2030” has stalled in part due to cash shortfalls, so the last thing he needs is the Iranians closing the Strait for any substantial time period. And yet Saudi’s biggest problem is human capital — there simply aren’t enough Saudis well-educated enough right now to fill jobs in an economy moving from oil to tech, tourism, and other services. Rational people around the world are cheering for MBS to make it work sooner rather than later because no one wants young Saudi men sitting idly with time on their hands and bad ideas filling their heads.
The kingdom is unlikely to revert to promoting Islamic radicalism but reports show that Saudi attitudes toward Israel and Jews are once again becoming increasingly hostile after a hopeful era when a normalization agreement between Riyadh and Jerusalem seemed to be in the offing. But if the public relationship appears to be deteriorating, there’s a private channel, too, where the two countries cooperate on intelligence and security matters, including Israeli supplies of advanced military systems to Saudi Arabia.
Given Riyadh’s dissatisfaction with Washington’s performance in the Gulf (to date), the Arabs may come to rely more on Israel, now the region’s unrivaled military power. And with the U.S. equally frustrated with the Saudis, American policymakers see the rift as an opportunity to accelerate their plans to move bases and equipment out of the Arab Gulf states to Israel.
The catch is that while Israel’s multi-front campaign against Iran and its proxies has proven Israel really is, in the words of a former U.S. statesman, America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier, the length and intensity of the nearly three-year war have given Israel an even bigger profile for antisemitic demagogues to target here at home.
The raging fires of antisemitism that seem to have already burned down the Democratic Party are now encircling parts of the Right as well. Thus, a growing chorus of morally-depraved outcasts reboot antisemitic themes accusing Jews and pro-Israel activists of driving America to war for causes that help only Israel.
The truth, of course, is that the U.S. went to war to protect its own interests, including allies incapable of defending themselves. Naturally then, the strategic goal of this antisemitic propaganda campaign is to weaken America by separating us from our most formidable wartime ally. To protect the sources of our peace and prosperity from dangerous forces far from our shores, we’re going to have to fight the furies that threaten to destroy us from within.
