As Obama concludes his fourth and supposedly final meeting to Saudi Arabia as U.S. president, the White House was quick to explain where relations with the Saudi Kingdom lay, and as CNN reported this morning, moved to tamp down suggestions that ties with Saudi Arabia are fraying, with administration officials saying that President Barack Obama "really cleared the air" with King Salman at a meeting Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia have violated the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty by acquiring nuclear weapons from Pakistan. According to Saudi political analyst and spokesman for Riyadh, Daham al-Anzi, the Saudi regime have obtained atomic bombs in order to confront the “Iranian threat”. al-Anzi told Russia Today on February 19th that “We [Saudi Arabia] have nuclear bombs,” before repeating the same on another Arab channel.
The trend we flagged in November of 2014 continues unabated.
When the Saudis moved to artificially suppress crude prices in an effort to preserve market share by bankrupting the cash flow negative US shale space, Riyadh was gambling.
Gambling on how long US producers could rely on wide open capital markets to keep them afloat. Gambling on how tolerant everyday Saudis would be should it become necessary to cut subsidies to shore up the budget. Gambling on the extent to which the market would test the riyal peg. And on and on.
Saudi Arabia is to host what has been described as the “the largest and most important” military drills in the region’s history. The drills will last for 18 days with contingents from 20 countries, including Pakistan the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said. The announcement which was made on Sunday said that participating troops were to begin arriving in “the next few hours” and follows Riyadh’s warning that Syrian President Bashar Assad would be toppled.
“What’s going on in Syria can only go on for so long. At some point it has to change,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on a plane back to Turkey from Latin America over the weekend.
As we’ve documented extensively over the past several days, Ankara, Riyadh, and Doha have their backs against the wall when it comes to the effort to oust Bashar al-Assad and perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.