Yet still more billions were squandered on twenty percent of all arms transfers to the region between 2009-2013 to make the kingdom the world's fifth largest importer of arms while more Saudi orders for arms are outstanding, according to a new study released on this March 17 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
While the United States will continue to "guarantee Israel's qualitative military edge" over all the twenty two Arab nations plus Iran, Iran is developing its own defense industries to defend itself against both the US and Israel, rendering the Saudi arms procurement efforts obsolete.
Had all of those squandered billions of petrodollars spent more wisely they could have created a revolution of development in the region.
Not Assured by US Assurances
Ahead of Obama's visit, the Saudi message is self-evident. They are looking, on their own, for alternative security guarantees, or at least additional ones. They don't trust their decades - long American security umbrella anymore. The US sellout of close allies like the former presidents of Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen shed doubt on any "assurances' Washington would be trying to convey during Obama's upcoming visit.
President Obama is scheduled to be in Riyadh by the end of this March to assure Saudi Arabia of what his Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns on last February 19 told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the United States takes Saudi security concerns "seriously," " US-Saudi partnership is as important today as it ever was" and that the " Security cooperation is at the heart of our agenda" with the GCC, reminding his audience that his country still keeps about 35,000 members of the US military at 12 bases in and around the Arabian Gulf.
However, "the Saudi voices I hear do not think that what they see as the current lack of American resolve is merely a short-term feature of the Obama Presidency: They spot a deeper trend of Western disengagement from their region," Sir Tom Phillips - British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia 2010-12 and an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Programme - wrote on last February 12.
Obviously, the Saudis are not assured, neither internally, regionally or at the international level because as Burns said on the same occasion: " We don't always see eye to eye" and it is natural that Gulf states would "question our reliability as partners" given US efforts to achieve energy independence and US warnings that traditional power structures, such as the gulf monarchies, are "unsustainable."
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