On Valentine’s Day 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Saudi King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy, a US cruiser, in the Suez Canal. It was the dawn of what is now the United States’ longest relationship with an Arab state. FDR and Ibn Saud could not have been more different. FDR was in his fourth term as president-elect of the world’s most powerful country and on the eve of victory in World War II. He had traveled the world and was returning from the Yalta Summit with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. He was gravely ill and had only weeks to live. His blood pressure was 260 over 150. But he was convinced that Saudi Arabia would be crucial to America’s postwar existence, thanks to its oil. Ibn Saud had never been to sea before, or outside the Arabian Peninsula, except for a brief trip to Basra, Iraq. He was a warrior who had created the modern Saudi kingdom through countless battles. He had little experience in international diplomacy. He was an absolute monarch supported by the fanatical Wahhabi clergy. But in 1943, he sent two of his sons, Faisal and Khaled, to America to meet with Roosevelt, tour the country, and report back that America was the strongest and most advanced country in the world. The substance of this meeting on the Quincy was dominated by a disagreement over the future of Palestine: FDR supported a Jewish state, and Ibn Saud protested that the Jews should have their own state in Bavaria. But the substance was overshadowed by the good atmosphere of the meeting. The president forsook his usual cigarette and cocktail to honor the king’s Islamic sentiments. They exchanged gifts and were deeply impressed with each other. The American presence in the Arabian Peninsula was strengthened along two lines: economic, with Aramco (Arabian American Company—initially American, then nationalized by the Saudis), and military, with the U.S. Air Force base in Dhahran.
