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“Look at the calamity we brought upon ourselves, simply because we invited an American to eat bananas.” — Colonel Aureliano Buendía, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.
On 29 May 1933, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud signed an oil exploration concession with the American company SoCal, setting in motion a chain of events that would reshape the region’s relationship with Washington. The agreement led to the creation of the California Arabian Standard Oil Co., or Casoc, which was renamed Aramco in 1944.
The concession marked Washington’s first major foothold in a region where Britain dominated, and France also wielded considerable influence. It also resulted from sustained efforts by American businesspeople who had begun pushing US commercial interests into the region, laying the groundwork for a deeper political presence.
The 1945 meeting aboard the USS Quincy between US President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul-Aziz was pivotal, shaping a relationship central to Washington’s regional strategy for decades and built around oil, Israel, and US power. This underscores its lasting importance for the audience.
The largely overlooked history of how commercial interests evolved into strategic influence helps the audience grasp the forces shaping US policy towards the Middle East and Saudi Arabia’s key role in Washington’s calculations.
The unfinished first deal of the century
On 1 May 1939, the start of oil production in Dhahran marked a significant milestone, with King Abdulaziz turning the oil valve, symbolizing the beginning of a new economic era that would influence regional power dynamics.
Waiting for the king was Socal president Bill Berg, who presented him with a red Packard fitted with supplies for desert travel. More significantly, according to Russian historian Alexei Vassiliev in his book *King Faisal: Personality, Faith and Times*, the company provided a lifeline to the kingdom’s struggling treasury, paying 200,000 British gold pounds and promising further payments. Company executives understood that the largest onshore reserves had yet to be found and that greater revenues could follow.
The Middle East’s geography and resources have long made it a setting where several histories unfold at once. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the emergence of Saudi oil coincided with the Second World War and the growing strength of the Zionist project.
For King Abdulaziz, however, hopes of rapidly expanding oil revenues soon faded. Hajj revenues remained the kingdom’s main source of income, but the treasury took a sharp hit as pilgrim numbers fell during the 1939-40 season. Their number fell to around 37,000 from 60,000 the previous year, leaving the government unable to pay salaries to state employees and military personnel.
Meanwhile, the machinery of the Second World War was gathering pace. In January 1940, Abdullah Philby, an envoy of King Abdulaziz, returned from a conference involving Malcolm MacDonald, Britain’s colonial secretary, who had sought to address the Arab-Zionist conflict through the White Paper. The policy limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the following five years.
According to Vassiliev, Philby returned believing he had found a possible solution to the king’s financial and political predicament. In London, on the sidelines of the conference, he secretly met Chaim Weizmann and proposed what he regarded as a way out of the Palestine question.
Under the proposal, Jews around the world would pay King Abdulaziz £20m in return for his support for the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish homeland there. Palestinians would receive compensation and be relocated to other Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.
In effect, it was an early version of what would later be described as a “deal of the century”. But it never materialized. Despite Weizmann’s apparent enthusiasm, King Abdulaziz rejected the proposal and reprimanded Philby.
The king’s financial crisis, however, was about to take a different turn – one driven not by London or the Zionist movement, but by American businessmen.
‘This Country Is Very Far Away’
After German commander Erwin Rommel was driven out of the region following the Battle of El Alamein in late 1942, Casoc resumed expanding oil production, reopening wells it had previously sealed with reinforced concrete.
But the company’s executives were increasingly concerned that the king’s financial crisis, coupled with British pressure and regional tensions, could lead him to revoke the concession and transfer it to the British Anglo-Persian Oil Co., raising questions about regional sovereignty and US influence in safeguarding its interests.
Casoc’s managing director, James Moffett, therefore turned to an old friend who was by then president of the United States: Franklin Roosevelt. His intervention would help set in motion a relationship that served powerful economic interests while drawing Washington deeper into the Middle East for decades to come.
Moffett proposed that the US provide Saudi Arabia with $6m a year for five years, while Casoc would supply the US fleet with Saudi oil at a discounted price. The US State Department, meanwhile, would recommend that Britain increase its financial assistance to the kingdom.
Moffett also asked Roosevelt to secure commitments from London that it would not claim any rights in the areas of the American concession, and he also asked him to provide American aid to Saudi Arabia through the famous American wartime economic program: “Lend-Lease.”
That was an enormous list of requests for one friend to accept from another, so Roosevelt framed his refusal in a famous letter, writing to his friend: “My dear James, would it not be better to ask the British to look after the King of Saudi Arabia? As far as we are concerned, that country is a long way away.”
Despair was not an option. As James Barr recounts in his book “Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East,” Moffett turned to Interior Secretary and wartime petroleum reserve administrator Harold Ickes with a memorandum in which CASOC told the secretary that the British government was generously assisting Saudi Arabia because it, in turn, was receiving massive aid from Washington; so would it not be better for us to help the kingdom directly?
That demand aligned with the secretary’s wartime oil strategy, which aimed to have the United States consume more foreign oil from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia at a time when the U.S. War Department warned of a severe aviation-fuel shortage that needed to be addressed.
Accordingly, on Feb. 16, 1943, during a dinner with President Roosevelt, Ickes warned the president about the British, saying: “They have never missed an opportunity to move in wherever there is oil, and they were trying to force their way into Saudi Arabia, which may contain the largest and richest oil field in the world.”
Two days later, the president declared that Saudi Arabia was “vital to the defense of the United States.” Accordingly, the kingdom received aid under the Lend-Lease program. From that moment on, as Barr notes, and with U.S. forces stationed in North Africa, Roosevelt suddenly began paying greater attention to the politics of the Arab world.
Over the next two years, the kingdom received, in addition to oil revenues, $33 million in cash, goods, and gold and silver currency. According to Vassiliev’s book, in 1948 the Senate National Defense Committee estimated U.S. aid provided to Saudi Arabia during and after the war, in the form of direct and indirect loans, at about $99 million. In this way, American oil companies, with the help of their government, were able to hem in the influence of their British rivals and finish it off.
Pledges Aboard the Quincy
We now arrive at the point from which we began: from the standpoint of that newly awakened American interest in Saudi Arabia, President Roosevelt realized that King Abdulaziz might be one of the most important Arab leaders, if not the most important, capable of helping him resolve the question of the Jews at the end of the war.
He therefore invited him to meet aboard the “Quincy.” After a meeting rich in conversation and discussion, recorded in several sets of minutes, President Roosevelt promised his Saudi counterpart that he “would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.”
When he returned to Washington, he had endorsed the plan proposed by Abdulaziz: sending a delegation to the West to explain the Arab point of view on Palestine. Roosevelt told the U.S. Congress upon his return to Washington, saying: “In five minutes, I learned from Ibn Saud, King of the Arabian Peninsula, more about the Muslim question and the Jewish question than I had learned from a dozen reports.”
Vasiliev says that during the farewell, alongside his promise on the Palestine issue, the American president gave his wheelchair to King Abdulaziz, who was suffering from knee pain, and promised to send him an airplane as a gift.
For his part, King Abdul-Aziz gave Roosevelt his approval to allow Allied ships to use Saudi ports in the Arabian Gulf and to build a massive air base there, to be leased for no more than five years before being returned to the kingdom with the buildings constructed on it.
He also offered him two pledges: first, that he would declare war on the Axis powers; and second, regarding oil. Roosevelt secured from the king confirmation that existing American concessions would remain in place and be expanded, and approval to extend an oil pipeline across the Arabian Peninsula, linking the Al-Ahsa region to the Mediterranean coast.
More importantly, the king asked the president whether the United States would return to the Western Hemisphere after the war, leaving Saudi Arabia within the sphere of British domination, as the British had always told him. Roosevelt, however, pledged to him that the United States would not allow British domination to remain exclusive in the region.
President Roosevelt reaffirmed his pledges in a written letter, and those pledges and promises were poised to form the foundations of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia in the region for decades to come, had death not overtaken President Roosevelt a week after that letter. With him died promises never destined to outlive him, while others have endured to this day.
“Any such understanding does not bind me”
When Harry Truman assumed the presidency of the United States, he first had to end the war. At the same time, the Palestine issue was also at a boiling point.
In August 1945, Earl Harrison, the U.S. commissioner tasked with examining the affairs of Jewish refugees and displaced victims of the Holocaust, sent his report to the president before its official publication in 1946, urging Truman to take decisive action by immediately allowing 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine. Truman embraced the proposal for humanitarian reasons, as the Holocaust Encyclopedia notes.
But, as Vasiliev recounts, Truman also had electoral motives — and they were the more important ones, as became clear from his meeting with four heads of diplomatic missions in the Middle East, whom he invited to present their views on the damage that would be done to American positions in the region if the state of Israel were established.
After putting several questions to them on the matter, the president summed up his position with utmost candor: “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to satisfy the demands of hundreds of thousands of Americans who want Zionism to triumph, and I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among the voters who support me.”
At a news conference in October 1945, he translated that regret into an early sign that he was turning against his predecessor’s principles. When one journalist asked whether Roosevelt’s pledges to King Abdul-Aziz were real, he answered with an unequivocal “No.”
He went further, claiming: “I have examined the records of the foreign conferences with the greatest care and found no such commitment. In the absence of any official or unofficial record proving that my predecessor made such a pledge, I am not bound by any such understanding.”
As James Barr also notes, the statement caused an early rift in Truman’s first term between the White House and his diplomatic establishment, which wanted to preserve the relationship with Saudi Arabia. It angered Ibn Saud and his advisers, who were listening to the news on the radio, and they informed U.S. Ambassador Bill Eddy that the king would demand clarification. They were entirely certain that the record of the king’s meeting with President Roosevelt contradicted what Truman had declared, and they were prepared to publish it.
Truman tried to stop the Saudi king from carrying out his threat before the presidential election, writing him an angry letter saying that his remarks had been conveyed inaccurately. He also said he was prepared to publish Roosevelt’s final letter before his death, but not the meeting minutes, because that would not serve the two countries’ shared interest. King Abdul-Aziz agreed to the proposal, and the letter was indeed published in October 1945, showing that the United States had not changed its position or its commitment.
But at the time, just as Arabs felt America would inherit the empires and the postwar world, Jews felt the same. Political pressure on Truman therefore intensified; during 1947 and 1948, he received some 48,000 telegrams and three-quarters of a million postcards at the White House on the question of Palestine alone, to the point that he became, at one stage, irritated by the persistence of Zionist lobbying groups, and refused for a time to receive any more pro-Israel delegations. But in the end, he chose to stand with Israel. The reversal by the US administration, embodied in him, was less an individual decision than an institutional struggle within the administration itself.
Secretary of State George Marshall and his aides, led by Loy Henderson, director of Near Eastern affairs, opposed the idea of establishing a Jewish state, warning of its impact on the flow of oil to Washington. In March 1948, Truman was surprised to find that his State Department had shifted the administration’s position from supporting partition to proposing an international trusteeship, without his knowledge. He wrote in his diary that he had been made to look like a deceitful liar after personally promising the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that he would support partition.
Tensions between the two men peaked at a meeting in May 1948, when Marshall threatened Truman that he would vote against him in the election if he decided to recognize the anticipated Jewish state immediately. That did not prevent the United States from becoming the first country in the world to recognize Israel after it declared its establishment.
On the other side, this was another moment of misplaced faith between the Arabs and the United States. As Vassiliev notes, Prince Faisal remained convinced, right up to the moment of the 1947 UN vote on the partition of Palestine, that Truman would uphold Roosevelt’s position when the time came — and that did not happen. So why was there no rupture then?
Standing on the right side of history!
Saudi bitterness did not come to define the shape of the kingdom’s relationship with the United States. The reality was that the Saudis had dug in alongside the United States in the same trench, in the emerging world of the Cold War, with communism standing in the opposing camp. Up to that point, the United States had offered Israel no more than diplomatic support.
Accordingly, as Vassiliev explains, King Abdul-Aziz quickly mastered Cold War rhetoric. He chose to stand on the right side of history against the danger of godless communism, which, for its part, had also made no secret of its support for the establishment of the state of Israel, leaving nothing in his eyes to excuse it.
At that time, the United States and Saudi Arabia learned together how to build a new policy based on separating the oil and political tracks, each running on a separate rail, while together serving the higher objective of comprehensive American hegemony, as well as Saudi interests.
Starting in 1944, an American military mission was tasked with reorganizing the Saudi army and Bedouin formations, transforming them into a modern regular army. In 1946, the U.S. air base in Dhahran was inaugurated, and the agreement governing its use was renewed in 1949 and 1951.
In 1949, the Truman Program was announced in Washington, and its fourth point called for technical assistance to foreign countries. On that basis, Saudi Arabia received about $5 million between 1952 and 1954 to develop agriculture and exploit natural resources.
A new world was taking shape, ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt began pressing, through the 1941 Atlantic Charter, for the dismantling of the imperial preference trade system that protected British colonial markets. Churchill sensed this so acutely that he said, “I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”
But the war had exhausted Britain’s capacity to finance and sustain a military presence, and a geopolitical vacuum gradually emerged in its traditional spheres of influence as the age of decolonization dawned. Although it had won the war, it found that no one had reaped the spoils except the United States and the Soviet Union.
At that moment, Middle Eastern states differed in how they assessed which camp to join. Saudi Arabia clearly chose the United States for ideological reasons rooted in opposition to atheistic communist doctrine, and because a web of interests had already taken shape with the United States through oil monopolies.
Walking More Than One Tightrope
All of this coexisted with Israel’s presence as a sensitive point of friction in the relationship between the two countries — the elephant in the room — as both sides chose to ignore the impact of that issue on their ties. Throughout the 20th century, Saudi Arabia supported the war against Israel financially and by embracing Palestinian resistance movements that the United States classifies as terrorist organizations.
On the other hand, the United States had learned from the Truman lesson that it could disguise its commitment as a neutral mediator while preserving its interests in other issues, and it began establishing its role as a dishonest broker, reaching the height of its brazenness in its biases during the 1967 and 1973 wars.
In his book “Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East,” historian Rashid Khalidi discusses America’s role in the settlement process, dismantling the notion that Washington was ever a neutral mediator between the two sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The roots of this pattern trace back to the events of 1947 and 1948, which we discussed earlier. Within just a few weeks, Washington chose to retreat from its position at the United Nations’ founding moment as a sponsor of a partition-based solution and shift instead to unilateral recognition of Israel, apart from any regional consensus, in a pattern of duplicity that would later recur at every stage of what came to be known as the peace process.
From this perspective, the formative moment in Washington’s relationship with the Arab-Israeli conflict was not one of neutrality that later slipped into bias. From the outset, it was a process of internal American bargaining among conflicting interests: oil and relations with Arab allies on one side, and domestic electoral pressure and a moral commitment toward Jewish refugees on the other. Each time, the decision favored the Israeli option, while formally preserving the language of mediation and neutrality.
When we try to summarize this article in a paragraph answering the question of why we chose its subject as a turning point in a quarter millennium of American existence and in its relationship with the Middle East, we see, by reading these moments together, that the triangle of oil, Israel, and hegemony did not take shape all at once aboard the cruiser Quincy, but rather accumulated through three successive waves.
In the first wave, Washington filled the power vacuum left by an exhausted Britain through pragmatic oil alliances that paid little heed to Palestine. The second witnessed a domestic political reversal that swept away Roosevelt’s cautious promises in favor of internal electoral pressures, while taking care not to let that reversal translate into a loss of oil interests. The third wave redefined Washington from an arbiter between two sides into a strategic partner of one of them, under the cover of mediation and neutrality.
Between the oil moment, which effectively began in the early 1940s, and the Israel moment, which closed out that decade and whose contours for the United States were not fully completed until after the 1967 war, lies the transitional era in which the United States, step by step and deliberately, forged its identity as a hegemonic power, an indispensable ally to Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, and at the same time a dishonest broker on the Palestinian issue. That identity still governs the rules of political engagement in the region today.
That equation was not fixed in its components, as we will show in the remainder of this file, but rather a flexible structure within which Washington reordered its priorities according to the demands of each stage.