People talking about the Gulf as if it’s held hostage by Washington don’t actually understand the Gulf. Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade, and pulled thousands of students out of Canadian universities in 2018, over a tweet about human rights. In 2016, the UN blacklisted the Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen. Within 72 hours, KSA called US president. threatened to pull funding, half a billion dollars, and threatened to pull other Arab states out of the UN entirely. The Secretary-General & US President caved and removed them from the list himself, called it one of the most painful decisions of his career. In Oct 2022 Riyadh pushed a two-million-barrel OPEC cut through weeks before theAmerican midterms, with Biden lobbying personally and then promising consequences. Nothing happened. They kept Russia inside OPEC+, took the BRICS invitation, and normalised with Tehran in Beijing, deliberately,with the Americans informed afterwards. Qatar was blockaded for 4 years and Trump was calling it a terrorist state, it got handed thirteen demands including shutting Al Jazeera and the Turkish base. It refused all thirteen, went on hosting Hamas political office, and outlasted the blockade.. None of that is what a hostage looks like. The reserves sit in dollar assets because the dollar is the deepest market on earth.. The security relationship exists because these monarchies calculated, for decades, that buying deterrence was cheaper than building a real independent military, one that could also turn around and remove them from power. That’s a trade they chose, and they’ve had the leverage to walk away from it this whole time. Calling it a prison does something worse than getting the facts wrong. It erases their agency in a way that actually flatters them, makes every choice look forced instead of deliberate. The real critique is that these rulers chose a trade that protected their own thrones and kept a stability in their countries at the cost of real strategic independence They chose this. They can leave and they donot. Dependence you select, pay for and renewevery year is a policy.