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.