In this interview, Flynt Leverett considers prospects for the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia -- a key dynamic in the Middle East -- under the Obama administration. Leverett is director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, and teaches at Pennsylvania State University's new School of International Affairs. He previously served in the US government for 11 years, as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, on the secretary of state's policy planning staff, and as a senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

How do you see the US-Saudi relationship faring under President Barack Obama, compared with the Bush administration?

In truth, US-Saudi relations have been in decline since the Clinton administration. After eight years of Clinton, Saudi leaders were initially pleased with the election of George W. Bush in 2000, anticipating that this would return US-Saudi relations to the kinds of pragmatic and strategically significant cooperation that characterized the relationship under the first President Bush. However, America's Middle East policy under George W. Bush turned out to be extremely negative from a Saudi perspective -- the Iraq war and a bungled postwar occupation, the destructive neglect of the Palestinian issue (notwithstanding the Saudi peace initiative which was endorsed by the whole Arab League in 2002), and the inadvertent facilitation of rising Iranian influence in the region. Furthermore, the Bush administration -- while it did not join the chorus of anti-Saudi critics in the United States following the 9/11 attacks -- did not (from the Saudi perspective) step up to the plate and defend publicly the critical importance of America's relationship with the kingdom to the American public. All of this was very disappointing to the Saudis.

That said, today there is concern in Saudi Arabia that relations with the United States could deteriorate even further under the Obama administration. As a presidential candidate and in his initial days in the White House, President Obama has signaled his intention to pursue a number of policies that could prove deeply troubling to the Saudis. In response, the Saudis are sending what I believe are unprecedented warnings to the United States about the consequences for US-Saudi relations if the Obama administration continues the pattern of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations of ignoring Saudi interests.

Do you see Obama's personal inclination or ideology affecting the relationship?Instinctively, will he prefer to deal with Cairo or others in the region?

It seems as if President Obama has come to office without a really deep understanding of the US-Saudi relationship; given Obama's background, there is no reason to expect that he would possess such an understanding. But it also seems that President Obama has no one around him -- not his national security adviser, not his secretary of state, and nobody in his inner circle -- who understands and has experience managing that relationship. So we do not see Obama and his national security team reaching out to the Saudis, from day one, with the same alacrity that they have attached to engaging the Egyptians or the Jordanians.

Now, I certainly think that Egypt and Jordan are important partners for the United States in the Middle East, but it will prove profoundly counterproductive if Obama and his advisers try to pursue their policy agenda for the Middle East without establishing an effective strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia.

The lack of understanding about Saudi Arabia is also reflected in the way that National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handled the fallout from the appallingly amateurish withdrawal of their offer to Tony Zinni to serve as the US ambassador to Iraq.As a "consolation prize" to Zinni -- for whom I have the highest regard -- they reportedly offered him a job as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, which Zinni declined. The apparent lack of serious reflection about who should be President Obama's ambassador to the kingdom is not very encouraging.

You have noted early hiccups in the relationship, including Riyadh's omission from Obama's first telephone calls and special envoy George Mitchell's initial itinerary. Do you see these reflecting this inclination, uncertainty over how to manage the relationship, or mere oversight in a busy first few days?

Only time will tell, for sure. Perhaps, as time goes on, there will be something of a learning curve for the Obama administration with regard to Saudi Arabia. But a fair amount of damage can be done to US interests while they are learning. Again, the failure to think through, in a serious way, the appointment of President Obama's ambassador to Saudi Arabia suggests that the Obama administration is starting from a low base of experience and knowledge regarding Saudi Arabia.

How will Riyadh view the administration's declared goal of reducing or eliminating dependence on Mideast oil? Will it regard Obama with suspicion, even as anti-oil?

I assume that the Obama administration will, like its predecessors, exhort the Saudis to invest more in expanding the kingdom's productive capacity for crude oil. But these exhortations will be undermined if Obama sticks to his ridiculous campaign rhetoric that he intends to eliminate US demand for imported oil "from the Middle East and Venezuela" during his tenure as president. The Saudis do not want to repeat the experience of the 1980s, when they invested heavily in new upstream productive capacity, only to see the bottom fall out of the oil market in the latter part of that decade.

What do you think Riyadh's biggest concerns are with US energy and foreign policy? What do you see as the main sources of tension in the relationship?

The Saudis are deeply concerned with what they believe could be the Obama administration's inclination to "cut a deal" with Iran at Saudi expense. The Saudis are genuinely alarmed by what they see as a massive increase in Iran's regional influence in recent years -- an increase in influence that was largely enabled by US policy choices during the George W. Bush administration. Against this backdrop, senior Saudi princes and other Saudi officials now say explicitly that the United States needs to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, put Lebanon on a more secure trajectory, and stabilize Iraq before even considering serious diplomatic engagement with Iran. I have long advocated US rapprochement with the Islamic republic, as something that would serve the interests of the United States and of our allies in the region. But, right now, the Saudis don't see it that way, and this is something the Obama administration will need to manage if it is really serious about a diplomatic opening to Iran.

The Saudis are also concerned that the Obama administration will withdraw US forces from Iraq too quickly, in a way that reignites ethnic and sectarian conflict there and creates serious challenges to Saudi security. At this point, I think that Saudi expectations about how much Shia dominance of Iraqi politics can be rolled back are not realistic, but the way in which Iraq has evolved since Saddam Hussein was overthrown genuinely concerns the Saudis. As the Obama administration works to reconfigure the American presence in Iraq, it would be well advised to talk with the Saudis much more than the Bush administration ever did about what the United States is doing.

Finally, the Saudis are not likely to have much patience with an Obama administration that offers high-minded rhetoric but doesn't really deliver in mediating a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially on the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Do you see any change in the historic and pragmatic "oil-for-security" arrangement that underpins the relationship?

Some fundamental aspects of this relationship are not likely to change in the foreseeable future. The Saudis recognize that, for at least the next couple of decades, the United States will remain the only country in the world capable of projecting substantial amounts of conventional military power into the Persian Gulf. That makes the United States indispensable to the Saudis in some very basic ways.

But, as the Saudis seek partners for their own long-term economic development, they are becoming much more diversified in their interlocutors, and the United States is playing much less of a role in Saudi affairs than was the case just a decade ago. The Saudis are now even procuring much more of their military equipment from non-US sources than used to be the case. Those trends are likely to continue and even to accelerate in coming years. And, with regard to China, I would argue that the Saudis are pursuing what could be called a "hedging" strategy -- they are cultivating a genuinely strategic relationship with the world's most important rising power, at least in part as a hedge against a further, precipitous decline in their relationship with the established superpower.

Do you see the Saudis playing an active role in US diplomacy in the region, through the Arab peace initiative or as an intermediary?

From a Saudi perspective, the kingdom has already ponied up a number of significant diplomatic efforts over the last several years, efforts calculated to help the United States achieve its stated goals in the region. The most important of these efforts, in my judgment, has been the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was subsequently adopted by the whole Arab League. But, in Saudi eyes, the United States has not taken these efforts as seriously as the Saudis believe was warranted. So, in the absence of effective US leadership in the region, the Saudis have launched more recent diplomatic initiatives -- such as brokering the 2007 Mecca accords between Hamas and Fatah and trying to mediate a new political settlement in Lebanon -- that are intended to minimize the damage to Saudi interests caused by dysfunctional US policy.

With the advent of a new US administration, the Saudis will give the United States another chance to show that it can and will exercise renewed leadership in the region, on the peace process, Iraq, etc. If the Obama administration meets that test, that will elicit significant cooperation and support from the Saudis. If the Obama administration does not meet that test, the Saudis will do what they believe is necessary to protect their own interests.

How do you see the issue of succession playing out in the Saudi royal family, and how could this affect US-Saudi relations?

I think that American observers of Saudi affairs often get too wound up about succession. Currently, one hears, in supposedly "informed" circles in the United States, the most extraordinary claims about Crown Prince Sultan's reported terminal illness -- how his passing would throw the line of succession into serious doubt and potentially destabilize the kingdom's political structure. This strikes me as self-dramatizing nonsense, for two reasons. First, historically, the Saudis have always managed the succession from one king to the next without sparking political instability. The royal family operates by consensus, and the various power centers in the family will not allow whatever personal ambition an individual prince might have to threaten the kingdom's security. Second, one of the many smart things that King Abdullah has done during his reign is the creation of a special council, which is empowered to name the next crown prince. Senior Saudi princes say that one of Abdullah's motives for creating this council is to manage the inevitable shift in the line of succession from the generation of surviving sons of Ibn Saud -- the founder of the modern Saudi state -- to the next generation of Ibn Saud's grandsons. This has already been thought out, and mechanisms have been put in place to ensure orderly successions in the future.