One of the more iconic 20th-century images is of King Abdulaziz Al Saud and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on 14 February 1945 as it passed through the Suez Canal.
Their pivotal meeting laid the groundwork for an alliance that helped reshape the post-war order, particularly in the Middle East.
FDR was to die just a few weeks later, but he met the king despite being gravely ill because he knew how important Saudi oil was to the United States, as it proved.
At the time, America seemed to be inheriting great swathes of the world from Britain, which once famously governed an empire “on which the sun never sets”.
Nothing illustrated this transition better than the Suez Crisis a few years later, in 1956, which humiliated the British and the French, ensured Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s survival in Egypt, and established the US and Soviet Union as the new global superpowers.
Getting familiarised
America was now an active power in the Middle East. After the First Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces in 1991, its role and presence only deepened.
After the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda in September 2001, Washington limbered up for another major incursion, this time to Afghanistan and to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which ultimately toppled Saddam.