There are no real ties, it's pretty much a relationship where the Saudi give American/Western companies fat contracts in return for being left alone. The whole country is pretty much built by American corporations. Even like Aramco was an American company until the Saudis bought it from them.

Like for instance from Wikipedia:

> In the backlash against Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism (after 9/11), the Saudi government was portrayed in the media, Senate hearings, and elsewhere as

> a sort of oily heart of darkness, the wellspring of a bleak, hostile value system that is the very antithesis of our own. America's seventy-year alliance with the kingdom has been reappraised as a ghastly mistake, a selling of the soul, a gas-addicted alliance with death.[60]

> There was even a proposal at the Defense Policy Board, (an arm of Department of Defense) to consider `taking Saudi out of Arabia` by forcibly seizing control of the oil fields, giving the Hijaz back to the Hashemites, and delegating control of Medina and Mecca to a multinational committee of moderate, non-Wahhabi Muslims.

You say there's no real ties, then you go on to describe several real ties.

I would not consider converging economic interests ties. As those can change at any moment. I guess the whole war racketeering thing is the same thing, you destroy a country to rebuild it. If they are already doing that, letting you build it then what's the point of destroying it.

I had assumed that in geopolitics the order goes:

1. Security interests

2. Economic interests

3. Shared values

You forgot:

0. Personal gain

(At least until they start enforcing anti-bribery laws against the first family.)

When did we start zero-indexing numbered lists?

You must be a Pascal programmer