The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has always been a marriage of convenience, not affection. In a bargain cemented by President Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia's founding king in 1945, Americans gained access to Saudi oil, and the Saudis sent the dollars back with purchases of American planes, American weapons, American construction projects and American know-how that brought them modernization, education and security. The marriage has suited both sides. But how long can it last? In Inside the Mirage, veteran Middle East journalist Thomas W. Lippman shows that behind the official proclamations of friendship and alliance lies a complex relationship that has often been strained by the mutual aversion of two very different societies. Today the U.S.-Saudi partnership faces its greatest challenge as younger Saudis less enamored of America rise to prominence and Americans, scorched by Saudi-based terrorism, question the value of their ties to the desert kingdom. With so much at stake for the entire, ever-volatile Middle East, this compelling and absolutely necessary account brings the light of new research onto the relationship between these two countries and the future of their partnership.
Thomas W. Lippman is a Washington-based author and journalist who has specialized in Middle Eastern affairs and American foreign policy for more than three decades, and is an experienced analyst of Saudi Arabian affairs, U.S.- Saudi relations, and relations between the West and Islam. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Washington Post, and also served as that newspaper's oil and energy reporter. Throughout the 1990s, he covered foreign policy and national security for the Post, traveling frequently to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. As an independent writer, he has visited Saudi Arabia every year but one in the past decade.
Lippman is the author of numerous magazine articles, book reviews and op-ed columns about Mideast affairs, and of five books: Understanding Islam (1982, 3d revised edition 2002); Egypt After Nasser (1989); Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (2000); Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia (2004) , and Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East, honored as the best biography of 2008 by the Independent Publishers Association. He is also the author of the essay on Saudi Arabia's defense strategy and nuclear weapons policy published in 2004 by the Brookings Institution Press in The Nuclear Tipping Point, a book on global nuclear proliferation. His latest book, Saudi Arabia on the Edge, was published in January 2012.
A frequent television and radio commentator on Mideast developments, Lippman has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, CNBC, ABC and Fox News, and on radio stations in New York, Boston, Phoenix and San Francisco, as well as on television stations overseas. Several of his lectures on Saudi Arabia have been televised nationally by C-SPAN. He has also been a consultant on Middle East affairs to several U.S. government agencies, including the Air Force.
He is currently an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, where he serves as the principal media contact on Saudi Arabia and U.S. - Saudi relations. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was formerly an adjunct senior fellow there.
