But especially since the start of the so-called Arab Spring in January 2011, the Obama administration -- taking its cue from a public clearly tired of low-intensity military conflict -- has signaled a major retrenchment in the region. This retrenchment can be seen in rhetoric coming from the top of both political parties.
In a wide-ranging interview published in The Atlantic in March, Obama complained at some length about "free-riding" nations in Europe and the Middle East who are happy to use U.S. military "muscle" to achieve their own private ends. The president went to some length to highlight the administration's general animus toward the Saudi government, openly criticizing Saudi Arabia's institutional exclusion of women from much of public life.
Meanwhile, the frontrunner for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, Donald Trump, in interviews with both the Washington Post and the New York Times last month, gave the distinct impression that he views the Saudi-U.S. alliance as little more than an economic burden that fails to pay off.
"We're not being reimbursed for the kind of tremendous service that we're performing by protecting various countries. Now Saudi Arabia's one of them," said Trump to the Times. "If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, I don't think it would be around."
It is doubtful either Trump or Obama could be as openly critical about Saudi Arabia without the unconventional oil and gas revolution taking place in the United States during the past 10 years, and the subsequent end of the export ban.
Conclusion: Since the 1970s, U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been based on protecting the interests of its oil-dependent allies as well as the assumption that major conflict involving major regional powers of such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, or Turkey would be economically disastrous to both enlightened and selfish American interests.
But given the slowly-dawning epiphany regarding the true nature of U.S. energy supplies -- the millions of barrels a day of latent oil supplies available for export from the U.S. Gulf Coast if prices return above $70 a barrel for an extended period of time -- it's doubtful the same political rules now apply.
If the United States can supply millions of barrels per day of oil to its political allies by itself, the deep costs to the U.S. economy and its global alliance system caused by a Middle East regional war become much less pronounced. It's possible that the United States is returning to a position similar to its place during the first half of the 20th Century, when the country's relative energy security was so strong that it could stand back and wait for parts of the world to completely implode before acting militarily.
