When in July 2005 the Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal became ambassador in Washington, he hired a young Saudi "analyst" Nawaf Obaid as a "security consultant". Nawaf Obaid wrote policy papers for the Zionist lobbyists at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and worked with Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is something like a Saudi neoconservative.

In late November 2006 the Washington Post published an op-ed by Obaid in which he threatened a Saudi intervention in Iraq should U.S. troops leave. (This was shortly after the Iraq Study Group urged Bush to retreat from Iraq, an initiative which Bush answered with the "surge".) The King in Riad did not like what Obaid had written and he was immediately fired. Not coincidentally a few days later Turki himself was fired by King Abdullah. Even before the op-ed affair the King had preferred to work around rather then with the hawkish Turki.

Today the Washington Post published another op-ed by Nawaf Obaid: Amid the Arab Spring, a U.S.-Saudi split. Obaid now works for the King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies where the Chairman is Prince Turki.

From the op-ed:

For more than 60 years, Saudi Arabia has been bound by an unwritten bargain: oil for security. Riyadh has often protested but ultimately acquiesced to what it saw as misguided U.S. policies. But American missteps in the region since Sept. 11, an ill-conceived response to the Arab protest movements and an unconscionable refusal to hold Israel accountable for its illegal settlement building have brought this arrangement to an end. As the Saudis recalibrate the partnership, Riyadh intends to pursue a much more assertive foreign policy, at times conflicting with American interests.

The backdrop for this change are the rise of Iranian meddling in the region and the counterproductive policies that the United States has pursued here since Sept. 11. The most significant blunder may have been the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in enormous loss of life and provided Iran an opening to expand its sphere of influence.

It follows some ballyhoo of how mighty, stable and prosperous Saudi Arabia is, how treacherous Obama is and how dangerous Iran and it ends much like it started.

With Iran working tirelessly to dominate the region, the Muslim Brotherhood rising in Egypt and unrest on nearly every border, there is simply too much at stake for the kingdom to rely on a security policy written in Washington, which has backfired more often than not and spread instability. The special relationship may never be the same, but from this transformation a more stable and secure Middle East can be born.

Thoughts:

1. It is certainly a significant op-ed and it will make some waves in DC but the question is how official it is. Is Turki again out of his depth with this or was it sanctioned by the King?

2. In an interview with Der Spiegel in December 2010 Turki sounded much less hostile towards the United States: "Our ties are strong and strategic. They will continue."

3. What changed this was, I believe, the little support (from the Saudi view) Obama gave to Mubarak. They fear that in case of a threat to their regime, they would probably also get insufficient support.

4. The Saudis are certainly already in the process of changing their foreign policy. There has been recently a lot of travel by various Saudi ministers and princes to China, Malaysia and Islamabad to renew or extend their relations with those states. A new security agreement with Pakistan was said to allow the Saudis access to two Pakistani divisions if needed.

5. The Saudi led military alliance Gulf Cooperation Council just added Jordan and Morocco. It now, for the first time, includes at least some competent militaries. (They should rename the GCC it royal Sunni club of counterrevolutionaries.)

6. The op-ed is boosting about Saudi power but how much power do the Saudis really have?
— Their military has lots of modern weapons. But the Houtis in Yemen recently kicked its ass with much less resources.
— The Saudis have tons of money and freely spend it to buy allies. But it often comes with strings attached like the demand of acceptance of their suffocating Wahhabi ideology. That's not a global winner.
— Their global "soft power" sympathy factor is thereby zero if not negative.

7. The Saudis see Iran as their strategic enemy, but without big external support there is little chance they could win a (sectarian) fight against it. There are more Shia around the Gulf than Sunnis and while Saudi Arabia has an oil industry and some tourism it lacks food and other capabilities. Iran has an oil industry too, but is also grows its own food and it is reasonably industrialized in all other fields. 

In total the Saudis may well move towards a bit less dependency on the United States but if they really want to push against Iran and its influence there is little chance that they could win such a competition without serious U.S. involvement on their side. In this the special relationship will not change.