Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Last January, Salman bin Abdulaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia and installed his son Mohammed bin Salman as Minister of Defense. The Minister, who is thirty-four, holds an undergraduate degree in law from King Saud University. In late March, the Saudis launched a bombing campaign against neighboring Yemen, to contain a rebel force known as the Houthis, whom the Saudis see as allies of Iran, a rival. Bin Salman oversaw pilots flying advanced U.S.-made jets that, according to Human Rights Watch, dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs. Since the campaign began, Saudi-led strikes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians in schools and homes and at a camp for internal refugees. The Houthis have expanded the area under their control since the bombing started.

Bin Salman’s war is an inauspicious start to a new era for the royal family. The kingdom hasn’t experienced this kind of political shakeup since 1975, when Faisal bin Musaid, a failed student and an LSD dealer at the University of Colorado, assassinated King Faisal, his uncle. The King had been an economic modernizer, but, after the shock of his death, the Saudi throne passed laterally among aged half brothers, who ruled cautiously. It was unclear how power would ever pass to a younger generation. King Salman, who is seventy-nine, boldly resolved that question earlier this year by naming a nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, who is fifty-five and runs the Interior Ministry, as his Crown Prince and successor, and installing bin Salman as second in line. This plan empowers Salman’s branch of the House of Saud, who are known as the Sudairis, after Salman’s mother.

The new princes are rising amid an unusual estrangement between Riyadh and Washington. Last week, at the last minute, the King declined to attend a conference at Camp David, where President Obama gathered potentates from Saudi Arabia and smaller Persian Gulf emirates to discuss security coöperation. (Salman sent his nephew and his son in his stead.) The snub seemed a hollow gesture of passive-aggressiveness, yet it signalled how Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran are unsettling the kingdom.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been engaged in a contest for regional influence, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, and often violently. If Obama does reach a deal to cap Iran’s nuclear program, it could release Tehran from economic sanctions, replenishing its depleted treasury and enlarging its scope for regional maneuvering. Iran’s revolutionary creed of Shiite Islam is anathema to the clerics who espouse Saudi Arabia’s extremist form of Sunni Islam. Iran projects power in the Middle East through Shiite allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and sectarian militias in Iraq. The Saudis regard themselves as a vital counter to Iran, on behalf of Sunni states and guerrillas, such as those fighting in Iraq and Syria. The royals see a U.S. deal with Tehran as, in the words of Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief, a historic “pivot to Iran.” Obama argues that a deal would not jeopardize Saudi Arabia and could help stabilize the region by preventing a nuclear-arms race. The Administration held the Camp David confab to reinforce its arguments.

Obama has been willing to criticize Saudi Arabia publicly in ways that previous Presidents have not. In April, he told Thomas Friedman, of the Times, that Saudi Arabia and its neighbors should recognize that “the biggest threats that they may face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.” He listed sources of potential unrest: “Populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic.”

That’s a refreshing departure from the self-censorship of previous Presidents. It reflects Obama’s view that the Saudi royals misread the Arab Spring’s warnings by failing to undertake far-reaching educational and political reforms at home. The royals harbor their own bitterness about the aftermath of the uprisings of 2011. They cannot fathom why Obama has allowed Iranian militias to shore up Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, or why the President has stood by as that civil war devolved into a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Yugoslavia’s dissolution—a war in which every Syrian sect has suffered, but the Sunni majority above all.

Obama is right to press the Saudis to increase political participation and end the role that its ideology plays in fomenting radicalism and intolerance within the kingdom and abroad. Yet forecasting the fall of the House of Saud has long been a mug’s game. The kingdom’s population is young, overeducated in theology and undereducated in the skills required in a modern economy, and wired into the world’s media (including the Islamic State’s propaganda); revolution can certainly arise from such a cauldron. Still, the royal family constitutes a resilient patronage machine, and for religiously adherent men, at least, the Saudi political economy can be a comfortable one. According to the measures of life expectancy, per-capita income, and other indicators of well-being collated in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, Saudi Arabia is the thirty-fourth most developed country in the world, ahead of Poland and Portugal. And it has about seven hundred billion dollars in cash reserves with which to assuage the grievances of its teen-agers, by providing civil-service jobs and subsidies.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance is a self-enriching bargain between the two countries’ élites, sustained without mutual understanding or sympathy between their publics. Wall Street bankers fly to Riyadh regularly, seeking cash for private equity and hedge funds. U.S. arms manufacturers profit from Saudi anxiety about Iran by selling the kingdom planes, missiles, radar systems, and spy gear. Last October, the Administration announced another big deal: a $1.75 billion missile contract. Meanwhile, Obama’s envoys negotiated in secret with Tehran, without looping in the Saudis. It’s not very surprising that princes who are regularly lobbied by Lockheed Martin Corporation salesmen about the Iranian threat would be displeased.

The Saudis buy American F-18s for the same reason that bank owners hire Brinks guards: to protect their loot—in this case, huge pools of oil sitting in a region that is descending into what looks to be a long, intimately violent war. Obama has introduced novel honesty into U.S.-Saudi discourse, though the younger royals present the same dilemma as their elders. They show no sign that they are willing to embrace democratic values, act compliantly, or become less sectarian, but, to secure promises of protection from the world’s most powerful military, they likely will accommodate American bases and arms sales, up to a point. For now, the alliance remains a strange pact of mutually complicit, resentful hypocrisies. ♦