Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, US Navy, died a warrior’s death at Naval Air Station Pensacola last week, and now the question is how best for the Navy — for America — to memorialize the young hero.

How about with a Silver Star — and a stern warning to Saudi Arabia to stop sending us radicalized young men who say they want to learn how to fly?

This would command attention in Riyadh, which needs reminding that America’s newfound energy independence is changing the rules of global petro-diplomacy,

Watson was a duty watch officer at the Florida panhandle training center on Friday, when Mohammed Alshamrani, a Saudi national at Pensacola for training, pulled a gun and opened fire. Watson deliberately placed himself between the weapon and Alshamrani’s targets; he was mortally wounded but still managed to direct arriving police to where they needed to be. Authorities said the aspiring naval aviator, now forever 23, had saved many lives, and who’s to doubt it?

That Watson acted in the highest tradition of the naval service is ­obvious, and the Navy doesn’t lack for means to recognize such heroism. It needs to do right by the young officer, of course, and a posthumously awarded set of gold aviator’s wings wouldn’t be out of ­order, either.

But for now there is the matter of Alshamrani, and what he was doing at Pensacola in the first place. It turns out that his radicalization wasn’t exactly a secret. He allegedly had hosted a dinner party where Islamist snuff videos were played — and the FBI now has at least 10 fellow Saudi trainees in custody while it sorts out the ­details.

For its part, in a classic ex post facto barring of the barn door, the Navy on Tuesday grounded 300 Saudi aviation trainees at three Florida bases as it, too, parsed ­evidence.

Or at least that’s what the agencies say they are doing. When it comes to Islamist fanaticism, it’s not always useful to take Washington’s words at face value.

Certainly, Friday’s butcher’s bill — three dead, including Watson and enlisted sailors Mohammed Haitham, 19, and Cameron Walters, 21 — was more modest than the 13 lives extracted by radical Islamist Army Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, 10 years ago.

And there’s some small comfort to be taken from the fact that it only required 24-plus hours for the FBI to “presume” the Pensacola ­attack was an act of terrorism — a sharp departure from the Obama administration’s declaration that the Fort Hood assassinations constituted “workplace violence.”

Little steps for little feet, as it were.

But other things have changed over the past decade, as well, perhaps not the least being that America has all but achieved energy independence since then. It no longer must abase itself before Middle Eastern oil potentates, including, if not especially, the Saudis.

The whole mob has had inordinate influence in the West since the end of World War II and not just the West. Both Japan and China largely depend on the Mideast for oil, and that matters a lot.

As does stability in the Mideast. There is no need to be reckless.

But there is also no need to continue the pretense that Saudi Arabia is in any meaningful way capable of protecting itself from its regional enemies — a task America has undertaken to the tune of two conventional Mideast wars in the last 30 years and a special-operations oriented presence in Afghanistan that has persisted for almost two decades.

The training of Saudi military personnel is part of the charade, and while bringing an end to the practice would largely be symbolic, it also would be noticed.

More to the point is the need to inform Riyadh that America will no longer tolerate its long-standing and well-documented practice of funding Islamist radicals who agree to stay out of Saudi Arabia but who nevertheless work elsewhere to destabilize the West.

This led directly to 9/11 and to much of the turmoil that followed — and, indeed, to much of the Islamist violence that plagues the world today. (Count Ensign Watson and naval Airmen Haitham and Walters as among the latest victims.)

The Mideast is a devil’s cauldron, to be sure, and wrong steps can bring terrible consequences. But what’s the point of energy independence if America is to continue kowtowing to the energy sheiks?

We don’t have to. So enough.

Twitter: @RLMac2