Beyond petroleum.

• Author: O'Hanlon, Michael
• Position: Thicker Than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia - Book review

Rachel Bronson, Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 384 pp., $28.00.

RACHEL BRONSON'S new book, Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, is a gem. Along with George Packer's Assassins' Gate, it is one of the more informative and path-breaking books on the region of the last three or four years. It is a solid and readable history, and a compelling analysis, done at just the right level of detail (about 350 pages) and with just the right balance between policy pragmatism and idealism.

Bronson gets off to a great start before the reader even opens the book. It is usually an accomplishment, in a short tide, to find something that either sounds clever or conveys one's thesis. Bronson does both. Her main point is that that the U.S.-Saudi relationship has been based on much more than oil for security, is unmistakable at first glance. At the same time, her subtitle points to the difficulties in this relation of two very different kinds of countries with two hugely different views of the world. Saudi Arabia may be America's most unnatural ally, in terms of political system and cultural affinity--and with the Cold War over and the anti-Soviet agenda no longer linking Riyadh and Washington closely, that fact also makes the U.S.-Saudi partnership quite vulnerable.

This thesis is driven home compellingly in the book's prologue and first chapter--for those who don't have the time or interest to read a full tome on the U.S.-Saudi relationship, much can be gained from the usual "Washington read" of these opening pages plus the last couple chapters and jacket material. When you think about it, Bronson's thesis is not so radical to anyone who remembers their Cold War history. But the relationship has been so scrutinized and polemicized since 9/11

that a clear-eyed book about its past and its future can do a great service without reaching to establish and prove a radical thesis.

However, any reader should be encouraged to read the whole book. It is an excellent history of not only the informal U.S.-Saudi alliance but also of Saudi Arabia itself. The style of this book leans in a slightly academic direction, but it reads more like enjoyable history than tortured political science prose. Bronson is indeed a political scientist and a very sophisticated one, but she has remembered to write for a general public policy audience. The book is rock solid in footnotes and...