Trump keeping Saudi Arabia close to serve Big Oil interests: Analyst

US President Donald Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia are aimed at serving Big Oil by keeping the global petroleum market stable.

Speaking to Press TV on Sunday, Keith Preston, the Virginia-based director of Attackthesystem.com, said Trump’s recent remarks that he made Saudi King Salman pay more for Washington’s military services was just him being “candid.”

Addressing a large “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said on Saturday that he would like to keep Saudi Arabia as a close partner because of the Riyadh regime’s extravagant purchases from American companies.

Trump boasted to his supporters about a bizarre phone call with King Salman, where he made the monarch pay more money in exchange for the military support that the kingdom receives from Washington.

“For about 70 years, the United States along with a number of other Western countries has propped up the House of Saud as the ruling family of Saudi Arabia and the purpose for that is simply so that the Western petroleum firms are able to engage in the development of Saudi oil,” Preston said.

By controlling Saudi Arabia’s oil exports Washington is in fact trying to stabilize the oil market while keeping America firms’ profit high, he added.

“This relationship is very important to the petroleum industry in the United States which is a very very important sector of the American ruling class,” Preston added, noting that the “big oil” has infiltrated both the Republican and Democratic parties.

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The top example for this was Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state who first served as the CEO of the American energy giant ExxonMobil, the analyst said.

“So Trump is simply talking about the relationship that exists between the American state and the petroleum industry Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Preston argued that Trump’s extensive arms deals with Riyadh were no surprise either as the gun lobby in the US were among Trump’s main sponsors and one of the Republican’s party’s main constituencies.

The influence was so strong that, according to Preston, the US was passing off the weapons deals as aid to Saudi Arabia so it was the American taxpayers who paid the price for the deals.

“Trump is unusually candid for an American president,” Preston noted. “There are timesthat he goes off-script and doesn’t really try to camouflage what’s going on as much as a lot of American politicians do.”

“He is simply explaining that this is the nature of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia,” Preston concluded.

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