A spate of high-profile visits by US officials to Saudi Arabia underscores how ties have warmed amid talks over a potential deal that would see the Gulf kingdom recognise Israel, analysts say. Less than a year after US President Joe Biden warned of unspecified "consequences" for Riyadh during a dispute over oil supply, he is dispatching top aides to meet Saudi royals at a rapid clip. Over the weekend, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, landed in Jeddah for a summit on Ukraine –- his third visit to Saudi Arabia in just a few months.

While bilateral sessions –- including during a three-day tour by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in June -– have touched on topics from terrorism to Yemen, the prospect of normalising Saudi-Israeli ties has been a mainstay agenda item, fuelling rosier exchanges even if it is still seen as a long shot. "US-Saudi ties have warmed unquestionably in recent months," said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst close to the government.

"Dialogue has just gotten much more extensive and friendly and this subject is driving that." The hurdles to an actual deal remain high: Riyadh is reportedly bargaining hard for benefits like security guarantees and assistance with a civilian nuclear programme with uranium enrichment capacity. And Saudi officials have long vowed not to normalise relations with Israel before the conflict with the Palestinians has been resolved.

All the same, coordination between Washington and Riyadh is today "better now than at any point in the last two years", said Hesham Alghannam of the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences in Riyadh. "It's much warmer and closer. It's not perfect, but it's the best moment since President Biden came into office." - Familiar friction - The issues bedevilling the decades-old relationship are well-known, from flare-ups over human rights to Saudi concerns about Washington's reliability as a security partner.

Those concerns took on new importance after attacks on Saudi oil facilities in 2019, claimed by Yemen's Huthi rebels but widely attributed to Iran, temporarily halved crude output. Saudi officials were deeply disappointed by the tepid response of then-US president Donald Trump's administration, which they believed undermined their traditional oil-for-security trade-off. Growing cooperation with Moscow and Beijing highlights how, as Alghannam put it, Riyadh is no longer content to place "all the eggs in the American basket".

The Saudis also leaned on China to broker a landmark rapprochement with Iran announced in March, something the Biden administration was in no position to do. Yet it is important not to exaggerate any slip in Washington's status, Alghannam added. "No major power has a significant military presence in the region other than the US, and this will be the case for many years to come," he said, a point driven home by the recent deployment of 3,000 US military personnel to the Red Sea, part of a beefed-up response after tanker seizures by Iran.

 
Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)