The Saudis have lost their leverage with the US

Washington Times Editorial:
The United States was only yesterday a supplicant at the oil bazaar, counting on the Saudis to be merciful by keeping OPEC a reasonable merchant, but that was then, and the United States is an oil exporter now. No more supplicant. America might even make a credible argument for membership in OPEC. South Dakota is not Saudi Arabia, but the fracking revolution has put America in league with the Arabs again, giving President Obama the opportunity to put aside his instinct for appeasement. For the foreseeable future, appeasement can be relegated to the past.

Both the Saudis and the Iranians are pumping oil furiously while attempting to make agreements to limit the decline in the price of oil. In a recession-prone world economy, an increase in consumption is severely limited. Even in league with the Russian producers, setting up oil cartels is considerably more difficult than it used to be. Even OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporters, was only partially able to control prices in its heyday, and then only for a short time and in a much narrower market.

As American exports grow, and they have already begun to grow, so will the free for all that is the global oil bazaar. Washington no longer need wink at the fact that radical Islamic terrorists obtain much of their financing from the Saudis, some of it indirectly from the fragile government that is the ruling family. The Saudis tremble, if only in their sandals beneath the hems of their robes, at the specter of the mullahs in Tehran carving out a Shia hegemony in the region. Tehran’s ability to reach across the Shia-Sunni divide to sponsor and supply Hamas in Gaza, originally a creature of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, is real and amply demonstrated. President Obama’s strategic intentions in the region, whatever they may be, have driven the Saudis into a tacit alliance with Israel, their sworn and bitter blood enemy of the recent past.
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It is past time to stop ignoring the Sadi support for radical Islam in the mosques it builds around the world and the terrorists that some Saudis fund.   As the Saudis burn through their reserves and face an existential threat from Iran they are going to need friends.  It is somewhat ironic that Obama's incompetent foreign policy has brought the Saudis closer to Israel.

Oil is not the weapon it once was.  This happened in spite of Obama.  The shale revolution happened on his watch, but he cannot honestly claim credit for it because he has teamed up with the anti-energy left to denigrate it.

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