The President’s all-but-public scolding of the Saudis, in Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic cover story and elsewhere, has evoked yet another “me too-me too” choral descant of Saudi bashing. A case in point is Max Fisher’s March 21 essay in Vox. But alas, Mr. Fisher’s attempt to sing harmony sounds like a frog croaking in the key of F-sharp demented. He seems to think that by wandering around a certain section of town talking to those he identifies as Middle East experts he can say something both new and usefully true about U.S.-Saudi relations. He spends most of his effort writing in a common journalist tense, that of moneyed innuendo, only to come to the blinding flash of the obvious point that, well, actually, U.S.-Saudi relations have a basis other than lobbyist lucre. (And absolutely none of this is new.)

But Fisher still manages to get the conclusion wrong despite getting a smattering of facts right. Have the Saudis contributed roughly since 1979 to a major historical shift in the Sunni Muslim world toward a more literalist, less tolerant attitude toward non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims? Yes. Have Saudi schools in the Kingdom and Saudi financing of Wahhabi mosques and madrassas abroad been the means for this giant misdeed? Yes. Have the Saudis bribed Americans and Europeans with “endowment” funds here and there to mute objections to this knavery in the West? No doubt about it. Have they been playing essentially a double game for many years, buying protection against radical threats at home by bribing them into export, as it were? Sure, absolutely.

So this means that the U.S. government should break ties with these villains, treat them as enemies, and seek regime change if possible? No, no, and no.

I hesitate to use the following metaphor to explain the reality of the situation, because it is rather crude. And I would not do it were it not so perfectly apt, but it is. Now, it so happens that when dogs of different breeds copulate, they very occasionally get stuck together, making for a most painful relationship. That’s not a bad description U.S.-Saudi relations. Historically, the two sides have been attracted to each other for highly unromantic, base reasons: oil and protection, seasoned with a dash or two of anti-communist salt. As a result, the Saudis got stuck with a partner that was irremediably kafiri, objectively pro-Zionist, prone on many occasions to entreat its local foes (Gamal Abdel Nasser for a time in the 1950s and 1960s, for example), and not entirely reliably in a pinch to boot. We Americans got stuck with a partner that was feeble, primitive-minded, religious in all the wrong ways, and, as already noted, inclined to destabilize the entire region and beyond for reasons both selfish and sanctimonious. We also got stuck, just by the way, with an ally that, at critical moments, sought assiduously to undermine U.S. mediation in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

It has not been an alliance made in heaven—and it never will be. But neither side has had much of a choice. No protector besides the United States was both willing and able to vouch for Saudi security after 1945. And no oil producer besides Saudi Arabia was as large and critical to the world’s prosperity in the new age of oil.

Let us immediately suffocate, here and now—because I can already hear its clumsy footsteps approaching in retort—the utter nonsense of the mindless Left’s “blood-for-oil” argument, which holds that that U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia have been limited to corporate selfishness, succor for the Seven Sisters and nothing more. Sure, during the Eisenhower Administration in particular the business of America was still business to a considerable extent, but to maintain a global security commons and to sustain the postwar recovery of Europe and Asia in order to blunt the appeal of communism, the energy equation was paramount. When the price of oil has spiked, moreover, from instability or other reasons, which countries have been hurt the most? Answer: The poorest ones, of course, who on such occasions have often been forced to choose between importing energy or importing food and medicine. Lefties are supposed to care about the downtrodden victims of global capitalism, aren’t they? Well, yeah, when they’re not knee-jerking against U.S. policy by force of habit.

The gist is that we, most Saudis and most Americans, don’t really like each other. We have little in common culturally. But we still need each other, and, more important yet easier to overlook, the world at large has needed us to need each other. This remains true despite the fact that the United States is no longer a net importer of oil. The Saudis, as the market’s only serious oil swing producer, remains as important to the health of the global security and economic commons as ever. The market for oil is internationally integrated and denominated in U.S. dollars, so that, despite U.S. energy self-sufficiency, the price is still a function of global supply-and-demand dynamics. Unless you are into Fortress America thinking and could care less about the U.S. supply of global security goods, this still matters enormously for U.S. foreign policy.

Indeed, the importance of the U.S.-Saudi working relationship, for each side and for the greater good too, is arguably enhanced today in proportion to the growth of the menace posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Now, the Saudis clearly have a devil theory about Barack Obama, and it hinges mainly on Iran. They want to “cut the head off the snake,” as the late King Abdallah famously put it, whereas we, they think, want to drink tea, cuddle up to and dance the night away with the snake, if only the snake would let us. The President has said, both to David Remnick some years ago as well as more recently to Jeffrey Goldberg, that he prefers a balance of power between Sunnis and Shi‘a in the region short of a hot war—what he refers to as “sharing”—since that, in his estimation, is about the best that can be attained under current circumstances without a highly imprudent and likely futile long-term U.S. military intervention. The Saudis obviously don’t like this idea, which is a geographically circumscribed application of an offshore balancing mentality.

As the Saudis see it, Iran is a menace to the entire region and unswervingly hates the United States and all it stands for, whereas Saudi Arabia is a traditional ally that, in its view, has done a lot for U.S. interests over the years. The attitude of royal courts in the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and elsewhere isn’t much different.

In this, the Saudis et al. (not to exclude Israel, by the way) are basically right—not that the Al-Saud hasn’t been an occasional pain in the ass as well. Iran is today the third major revisionist power, along with China and Russia, trying to undermine the global security order led by the United States since the end of World War II. In every significant way they act like adversaries for the simple reason that they are adversaries. Trying to “engage” them, which amounts to propitiating or, to be more frank, appeasing them in hopes that they will restrain themselves was never a good bet. As Heywood Broun once said, “Appeasers believe that if you keep throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.”

There is an argument that, even if all this is so, U.S. policy over the years has nevertheless confused its interests in Saudi oil with the interests of the Al-Saud. Isn’t it true, many observers have asked, that any successor regime to the Al-Saud would sell oil to the world, because they have nothing else to sell to balance their ambitious budget? And that any necessarily Arab successor would be an objective ally against imperial-minded Persians?

The answer is probably, but not certainly. The idea that things could not get worse in Saudi Arabia following a fall of the House of Saud has never been true, and it’s less true now than before. In 1979, opposition to the regime, let’s recall, came from the religious Right, and it took French commandos to restore government control to the Grand Mosque. That has not changed. The idea that there are pro-Western liberals waiting in the wings to rule Arabia is moonshine sucked through a squiggly straw. Just as a plausible alternative to Vladimir Putin is a skinhead regime with nuclear weapons, a plausible alternative to the Al-Saud is something that looks a lot like al-Qaeda.

Besides, Saudi Arabia is changing. To most Westerners the pace is much too slow and the process is too opaque. Nevertheless, the President’s arc of history is bending in the Kingdom, too. People are now talking seriously about reforming education. The media is freer than ever, and fairly lively lately. Women are bolder, better educated, and are joining the workforce. Attitudes toward Israel in high places have been changing, too, not out of love but, it is fair to say, out of the sobriety of need and genuine respect. The establishment Wahhabi clerics don’t like any of this, and the Kingdom remains as ever an Al-Saud/Al-Wahhab condominium. But the clerics don’t as often get their way these days.

So as bad as they have been and still are inside the Kingdom, things could again be (and have been) much worse. Saudi bashing is a little like a drug high, with a purposeless sense of exhilaration quickly giving way to a serious headache. If you’re tempted, seek counseling.