Why the US should stand by the Saudis against Iran

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi Arabian King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud meet aboard a U.S. Navy vessel near Suez, Egypt, Feb. 14, 1945. Photo:Associated Press

There is so much to detest about Saudi Arabia. The kingdom forbids women from driving and bars its doors to desperate Syrian refugees. For years its sybaritic leaders purchased their legitimacy by underwriting, and exporting, a bigoted and brutal version of Sunni Islam. Crude oil aside, it’s difficult to find much of value produced by the desert kingdom.

More recently, the Saudis have increased tensions with Iran by executing, over U.S. objections, a prominent radical Shiite cleric while waging a brutal war against Iran’s Shiite proxies in Yemen. So why should the U.S. feel obliged to take sides with the country that Israeli diplomat Dore Gold once called “Hatred’s Kingdom,” especially when the administration is also trying to pursue further opening with Tehran?

That’s a question that suddenly seems to be on Washington’s liberal foreign-policy minds, as if they’ve just discovered that we don’t exactly share Saudi moral values. Some on the right also seem to think that, with the U.S. leading the world in energy production, we no longer have much use for the Saudi alliance.

So let’s remind ourselves why it would be a bad—make that very bad—idea for the U.S. to abandon the House of Saud, especially when it is under increasing economic strain from falling oil prices and feels acutely threatened by a resurgent Iran. Despite fond White House hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Iran’s behavior, Tehran hard-liners wasted no time this week disqualifying thousands of moderate candidates from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, and an Iranian-backed militia appears to be responsible for the recent kidnapping of three Americans in Iraq.

No wonder the Saudis are nervous. The nuclear deal guarantees Iran a $100 billion sanctions windfall that will offset its losses from falling oil prices while doing nothing to stop its regional imperialism. Russia’s military support for the Assad regime in Syria, along with its sale of advanced weaponry to Tehran, means that Riyadh’s regional enemies now enjoy the protection of a major nuclear power. Armed Iranian proxies are active in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and dominate much of southern Iraq. Restive Shiite populations in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and neighboring Bahrain provide further openings for Iranian subversion on the Arabian peninsula.

Add to this an American president who is ambivalent about the House of Saud the way Jimmy Carter was about the Shah of Iran, and no wonder Riyadh is acting the way it is. If the administration is now unhappy about the Saudi war in Yemen or its execution of Shiite radicals, it has only itself to blame.

All this means that the right U.S. policy toward the Saudis is to hold them close and demonstrate serious support, lest they be tempted to continue freelancing their foreign policy in ways we might not like. It won’t happen in this administration, but a serious commitment to overthrow the Assad regime would be the place to start.

As it is, what’s the alternative? The House of Saud is not going to relocate en masse to its mansions on the French Riviera and leave a self-governing democracy behind. Instead, America’s distancing will bring them closer to the Russians or Chinese. They will also be tempted to repeat the mistakes of their past by drawing closer to Sunni extremists as a way of buying them off and as a counterweight to Iran.

Also contrary to the myth that the Saudis were somehow “behind” 9/11, the kingdom has been fighting al Qaeda for decades. It revoked Osama bin Laden’s citizenship in the early 1990s and pushed the Taliban to expel him from Afghanistan. Saudi intelligence has been vital in stopping major terrorist plots, including the 2010 al Qaeda plot to bomb cargo planes bound for the U.S.

The U.S. would not be safer without this kind of intelligence cooperation. Much worse would be a scenario in which the monarchy collapsed. The generally depressing results of the Arab Spring don’t inspire much hope of a peaceful democratic transition, and Saudi Arabia’s internal sectarian and tribal divisions could lead to an outcome similar to Syria’s. Islamic State and other jihadist groups would flourish. Iran would seek to extend its reach in the Arabian peninsula. The kingdom’s plentiful stores of advanced Western military equipment would also fall into dangerous hands.

Nor would such a civil war exhaust the region’s sectarian furies. As we’ve seen in Syria, Libya and Iraq, radical Islam flourishes in areas of chaos—the “management of savagery” is its explicit political aim. And a civil war in Saudi Arabia, population 30 million, could lead to a fresh refugee exodus that would further erode and overwhelm Europe’s borders.

So should the U.S. desist from encouraging the kingdom to reform? Of course not. Saudi women were allowed to participate as voters and candidates in municipal elections for the first time in December. That’s still a baby step, and the Saudis should use the city states of Dubai and Abu Dhabi as viable models for political reform. But it’s hard for the U.S. to urge such changes on a country that feels it’s being abandoned.

Foreign alliances are not like wardrobes: You cannot change them on the tide of fashion. America’s 71-year alliance with the kingdom is one we abandon at our peril.

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal’s “Global View” column. Write him at bstephens@wsj.com.