The House of Saud’s eternal dilemma

Descendants of former US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia’s first king, Ibn Saud, celebrated this month in Miami the 60th anniversary of the first Saudi-US summit at the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake, where the foundations were laid for a “special relationship” between the two countries based on an oil-for-security alliance.

What no one realized on February 14, 1945, of course, was that the foundations of that “special relationship” were being laid on active fault lines, and that a seismic shift would one day shake it all down to the ground again.