Anyway, to answer the question of the OP: Whatever else you might say about them, Saudi Arabia has remained a pretty steadfast
strategic ally of the US ever since dying FDR met with Ibn Saud in early 1945 (in which he promised the Saudi King that he wouldn't commit to supporting a Jewish state in Palestine).
Even after Truman broke this "promise" and the US pretty clearly became Israel's ally (and the USSR decided to support the Arab states that fought against Israel in 1948), even after the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur and the OPEC boycott (from which American oil companies and the House of Saud both mad profited), even after 9/11, the al-Saud have stuck with the US - and the US's Western allies. Consequently, they've refrained from attacking Israel.
And, though many Saudis still hate Jews and complain about the treatment of Palestinians, yadda yadda (while doing nothing for them, other than - at least historically - funding the Hamases and Islamic Jihads of the region), compared to an openly hostile Iranian Islamic Revolution (the three scariest words in the English language to the House of Saud) that has allied governments in Syria and (sort of?) Iraq now - and of course, Russia and China - and has, via the IRGC/Quds Force, Hezbollah, etc., created incredibly powerful and locally embedded proxies that the Iranian regime can still have a "command-and-control" relationship with (compare to the Saudis' schizophrenic and self-contradictory relationship with al-Qaeda and ISIS, lol)...well, why
wouldn't the Saudis (and the Emiratis) look to the US's military and economic might for protection?
Plus, the whole political Islam thing ie. the Muslim Brotherhood, whom hilariously, were once supported by the Saudis (kind of like bin Laden and al-Qaeda were!) before they became powerful and popular enough to pose a *real* threat to the House of Saud's very existence...
Anyway, all of this is very useful stuff for the US/the UK, etc. (and Israel) if they're looking for a powerful friend in the regional and global geopolitical chessboard of the region, where the aforementioned countries have and share a lot of enemies (especially since we seem to keep making them
). Naturally, the most militaristic and chauvinistic of the people in our countries will tend to double down on keeping our friendly Middle East neighborhood autocrats in power.
