Saudi Arabia’s king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, has recently undertaken a sweeping tour of Southeast Asia in what the media and analysts are claiming is a bid to firm up economic and political ties with Muslim-majority nations in the region.Cartalucci cites many examples of the Empire's increasing political use of Saudi Arabia's extreme, fundamentalist sect of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, in Asia as a weapon to contain China.
However, both the media and analysts are sidestepping or entirely omitting the role Saudi Arabia has played in fueling global terrorism, extraterritorial geopolitical meddling, and even divisive and terroristic activities the notorious state sponsor of terrorism has been implicated in across the planet including within Southeast Asia itself.
Saudi Arabia has long been useful to the US. First as a source of petroleum during WWII, and then in 1974 to prop up the dollar as an international reserve currency after Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard in 1971 because of the huge expenditures in the Vietnam War. Kissinger negotiated a deal with the Kingdom in 1974 in which Saudi Arabia promised to sell oil only in US dollars and agreed to buy US Treasury securities and other US investments with their profits in exchange for US protection.