Why Every President Has Protected Saudi Arabia While Lying to Your Face About It

The Answer Is Always Money

At the recent 9/11 memorial in New York City, families of victims did something the mainstream press mostly refused to cover. They stood up in front of Bush, Obama, and Biden and said what the rest of America has been thinking for two decades: you protected Saudi Arabia, and you owe us an explanation.

They won’t get one. Not a real one. Because the real answer is not complicated. It is just ugly.

The answer is money. The answer is the petrodollar arrangement that Henry Kissinger engineered in the 1970s, the deal that said Saudi Arabia would price oil in U.S. dollars and park those dollars in American Treasury bonds, and in exchange, the United States would look the other way at just about anything the Saudi government did. Including, apparently, sending fifteen of nineteen hijackers to murder three thousand Americans.

That is real politik. That is how the world actually works. And the establishment media would rather run ten segments about celebrity drama than explain this to you for five minutes.

The Petrodollar Is the Root of All of This

Here is the architecture most Americans were never taught:

• After the Nixon shock in 1971 took the dollar off the gold standard, the U.S. needed a new anchor for the dollar’s global dominance.
• The petrodollar deal with Saudi Arabia provided that anchor. Oil priced in dollars meant global demand for dollars was baked into the world economy.
• That arrangement gave every U.S. president enormous financial incentive to protect Saudi Arabia regardless of what Saudi Arabia actually did.
• The military-industrial complex, Treasury markets, and the entire debt financing structure of the U.S. government depended on this deal holding together.

So when you ask why Bush flew Saudi nationals out of American airspace on September 11th, 2001, you already know the answer. It was not a conspiracy theory. It was a financial transaction dressed up in national security language.

Something Is Shifting and You Need to Pay Attention

Here is where I think the story gets genuinely important right now. We were reportedly locked and loaded to strike Houthi positions in Yemen, and then we backed off. Saudi Arabia wanted those strikes to happen. We said no.

That is new. That kind of public hesitation in the face of Saudi pressure would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. And I think it signals something real:

• American energy production has fundamentally changed the equation. We are one of the largest oil and gas producers on the planet now. We do not need Saudi oil the way we once did.
• The dollar’s dominance over oil pricing is under pressure from BRICS nations and Saudi Arabia’s own quiet conversations with China about alternative currency arrangements.
• The political cost of Middle East wars has finally started to outweigh the financial incentive for at least some policymakers.

What This Means for Everyday Americans

I was in Greece this summer and spent time at a high-end resort in Mykonos. The crowd was almost entirely from the Middle East. Serious money, bodyguards, luxury consumption on a scale most Americans cannot imagine. That wealth was built on a deal your government made on your behalf without ever asking you if you were comfortable with the terms.

Now those terms are changing. Here is what that means for you:

• Dollar reserve currency status is not guaranteed forever. If petrodollar arrangements weaken, inflation and interest rate pressure on American consumers could increase significantly.
• Domestic energy is a strategic asset, not just an economic one. Companies producing American oil and gas are not going away.
• Geopolitical risk is being repriced. Markets have ignored Middle East instability for years. That blindspot has a cost eventually.

The establishment will keep pretending these are separate conversations, foreign policy over here, your 401k over there. They are not separate. They never were. The sooner you understand that, the better decisions you will make with your money.