Fracking set Barack Obama free. His predecessors had been obligated to support the Saudi regime, in spite of its many unpleasant qualities, because Saudi Arabia had too much clout within OPEC to ignore. America was now the principal swing producer, however, and so Obama was able to look at Saudi aspirations with a more jaundiced eye. In his view, there was no American interest in giving the Saudis unqualified support against Iran; the latter regime was more democratic, and had fewer ties to extremists throughout the world. While there were, to be sure, plenty of hard feelings to address on both sides, he looked forward to cooperating with both Iran and Saudi Arabia on a case-by-case basis to promote stability; the days of the US taking sides in a sectarian power struggle were coming to an end.
Hillary Clinton didn’t see things quite that way. She had stronger ties to the Saudis, the Israelis, and America’s other traditional allies in the Middle East, and was more willing to use force to help them. The differences between her and Obama were of degree rather than kind, but they were significant.
Candidate Trump, for all of his bombast, sounded much like Obama with regard to the Saudis; he complained bitterly about the cost of protecting them and expressed skepticism about their relations with terrorists. President Trump, on the other hand, appears to be driving us into an aggressive alliance with Sunni despots against the Shiites and liberalism. In that respect, his foreign policy more closely resembles Hillary’s than Obama’s. It could, in practice, amount to an American blank check for Saudi military interventions throughout the Middle East.
How’s that for irony? Saudi Arabia first!