The -- burning -- issue of freezing all Saudi assets across the planet has come up with the US Congress considering a bill exposing the Saudi connection to 9/11.
The 28 pages did intimidate the House of Saud and Saudi intelligence though. Especially because the odd sharp brain in Riyadh could make the connection; the 28 pages were being paraded around in Western corporate media before the OPEC meeting to keep the Saudis in line on the oil war against Russia. That may have been yet another Mafia-style "offer you can't refuse"; if the House of Saud cuts oil production, then it will be destroyed by the release of the 28 pages.
So we are now deep into Mutually Assured Threat (MAT) territory, more than Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
No one really knows how much Saudi Arabia has tied up in US Treasuries -- except for a few insiders in both Riyadh and Washington, and they are not talking. What is known is that the US Treasury bundles Riyadh's holdings along with other GCC petrodollar monarchies. Together, that amounted to $281 billion two months ago.
Yet the Saudis are now saying they would get rid of a whopping $750 billion. A New York investment banker advances that "six trillion dollars would be more like it." Earlier this year, I revealed on Sputnik how the House of Saud was busy unloading at least $1 trillion in US securities on the market to balance its increasingly disastrous budget. The problem is no one was ever supposed to know about it.
The fact is the US and the West froze $80 billion in assets that belonged to the deposed head of the Egyptian snake, Mubarak. So a freeze tied up with framing Saudi Arabia for terrorism would not exactly be a hard sell.
The nuclear option
For all the pledges of eternal love, it's an open secret in the Beltway that the House of Saud is the object of bipartisan contempt; and their purchased support, when push comes to shove, may reveal itself to be worthless.
Now picture a geopolitical no exit with a self-cornered House of Saud having both superpowers, the US and Russia, as their enemies.
As the source close to Riyadh advances, "the real nuclear option for the Saudis would be to cooperate with Russia in a new alliance to cut back oil production 20% for all of OPEC, in the process raising the oil price to $200 a barrel to make up for lost revenue, forced on them by the United States." This is what the West fears like the plague. And this is what the perennial vassal, the House of Saud, will never have the balls to pull off.
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