Jim – All the oil in the KSA is owned by the KSA (and thus in practice by the ruling family.)
However, oil is behind this… the whole world needs the Saudi oil, and all the major participants in the Global economy who need to import oil (which is pretty much everyone outside of Russia and maybe Canada and Norway) stay on working relationships with the house of Saud because of the oil.
Secondly, the US needs money as well as oil. With such a great private and public debt that the US has, and on top of that the significant trade deficit, the US needs to export something. If we didn’t sell them armaments – something at which we are state of the art – another country (Germany, Italy, France, Russia) would just step in and take the money.
So this whole protest by people against this deal is just not well thought through. We need them, they sort of need us, so we all deal.
