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Comment by edblarney | Hacker News Reader

House of Saud are not vassals of the US, and they don't control the US.

They made a deal way back that the US would keep House of Saud in power, in exchange for their Oil at market prices. That - and the fact that they are allies on 'terrorism' means a degree of mutually beneficial transactions.

Strategic partners, that's it.

The US does things that massively piss of the Saudis - particularly the removal of Iran sanctions. That is pretty much #1 worst thing that the US could do, outside of withdrawing support for them unilaterally.

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> That - and the fact that they are allies on 'terrorism'

I think you put the quotation marks in the wrong place. The Saudi government are "allies" with the US on terrorism - that is, they nominally support the US efforts to combat terrorism, which means that the US overlooks Saudi-originating terrorism and instead directs its attention elsewhere.

In exchange for selling their oil at market prices? That's not much of an exchange, given the Saudis have to sell their oil at market prices to someone and the market is entirely fungible. If they sell it to different countries we can just buy the oil those countries no longer need.

"That's not much of an exchange, given the Saudis have to sell their oil at market prices to someone and the market is entirely fungible"

It's a very important deal considering how much Oil they have, and that they could chose to use it as a geostratgic weapon - but really, if the US did not protect them they would have been invaded long ago.

It's not so apparent in 2016, but it was more important way back.

Saudi Oil is sweet, and very easy to access with old-school technology. Nowadays you have off-shore, deep-water, Oil Sands, horizontal drilling etc. etc. that didn't exist.

If I'm not mistaken, the US doesn't consume that much Saudi oil anyway.

So may be it's more about protecting the interests of American Oil companies rather than direct consumption.

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