Sitting with Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic in 2016, US President Barack Obama offered his frustrations with Saudi Arabia. Here was a theocratic state that repressed all dissent internally and exported a virulent ideology across the world. All this is paid for by petro-dollars.

Obama’s annoyance was highlighted by Saudi Arabia’s reticence to ‘share’ the Middle East with Iran. Both major powers had tentacles in the region. When Iran began to stretch out its arms after the US knocked out its adversaries – Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan – Saudi Arabia became apoplectic. It was furious when Obama pushed a deal on Iran’s nuclear energy program, which – in many ways – is an indication of surrender to Iran. The Western sanctions policy was never really about nuclear weapons, for Iran did not have such an agenda. It was always a political attempt to push Iran back to its borders. Saudi Arabia refused to join in the West’s capitulation to Iranian ambitions.

Goldberg said that Obama was ‘clearly irritated that foreign-policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally’.

No break in the special relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States seems possible. Obama’s irritation appears merely temperamental. Under Obama’s watch, the United States has sold Saudi Arabia billions of dollars worth of arms. In 2011 alone, the US sold Saudi Arabia $60 billion of arms. This money, Obama’s administration said then, would create at least fifty thousand jobs in all forty-four states. The economic benefits to the United States of the billions of petrodollars that funnel through the Western banks and into the military-industrial complex narrow the horizon of American liberalism.

Medea Benjamin’s new book – Kingdom of the Unjust – is an activist’s dossier of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and American complicity. She is like an accountant of suffering – lining up columns and columns of information about human rights abuses, denial of basic democratic freedoms and export of nastiness that borders on terrorism. The United States government is aware of everything in Medea Benjamin’s book – for, after all, she makes good use of US reports on these violations of basic questions of human dignity. Obama is also clear about the problems with the Kingdom. But, as he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in January 2015, ‘Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.’ In other words, the United States will do nothing to shake the Saudi regime. It will, for various reasons, uphold what Benjamin calls the Kingdom of the Unjust.

Indeed, it is cemented in US policy that the Saudi regime must be protected from all its enemies. The Carter Doctrine of 1980 promised to use US military force to defend the Persian Gulf states – not only Saudi Arabia, but also the Gulf Arab emirates that line up the eastern coastline of Arabia. These autocracies are to be under the US military umbrella. In October 1981, the Reagan Corollary extended Carter’s promise: now the US would not only defend the Saudi regime from external threats, but from internal ones as well. The United States government, in other words, will not only use its military to shield this autocracy from attack, but it will also safeguard it from internal pressures towards democracy. As Medea Benjamin points out, the US spent close to $8 trillion protecting the Gulf monarchies between 1976 and 2000. Obama’s dithering is the end-point of US liberalism, which coughs out platitudes but extends its arms firmly in friendship to its autocratic allies.