What spice? The US is a net exporter of oil, these days.

If the spice doesn't flow, Saudi Arabia can't afford US weapons.

Also the oil dependency graph can change during resource-intensive conflicts.

I always thought of America as the Harkonnens, but now that you said it I realize that we are the Imperium, OPEC is CHOAM and Saudi Arabia are the Harkonnens.

It's a reference to the 1984 movie Dune. I don't remember the exact details, but it's very similar to oil, in that it's a valuable natural resource that different factions go to war over.

The fictional Spice (Melange) is used by ordinary rich people to live longer. More importantly since their culture has rejected the use of AI they use much larger amounts of Spice to give the Guild Navigators sufficient foresight to be able to pilot Highliners through space-time, enabling the empire to cover a number of star systems.

Note: It’s “Heighliner”, not “Highliner”.

Given that the phrase doesn't appear anywhere in Frank Herbert's novels (the horrible dumpster fires by his son may have it, but I couldn't say), it's certainly a Lynch reference.

But my question wasn't what "spice" means, I assumed everyone on Hacker News knows that.

I was asking why Saudi spice is particularly relevant to US interests, when we're a net exporter of said spice.

It was admittedly a bit tongue in cheek; dramatically reduced Saudi supplies would impact energy markets in a bunch of second and third order ways we might not like.

But that doesn't mean we have to keep selling them guns.

Or a reference to the 1965 novel Dune, if you're lucky.

It's been almost a few years already, which few were you thinking of?