Geopolitical gurus generally regard as America's potentially greatest rivals some emerging world powers like China and India. Notwithstanding, it is a grave omission not to also focus on the Muslim Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and neighboring petro-sheikdoms. By selling us oil, they wield astronomical wealth, power and influence. They have increasingly been able to use and manipulate other powers, including the United States, for their own aims, national security, economic and global objectives. They generously fund the spread of the Muslim faith globally.

Their petrodollar billions have enabled them to own by now a huge proportion of U.S. Treasury-issued debt, U.S. private commercial, industrial and real estate holdings, as well as exerting increasing influence on legislative and executive political leaders, eager for campaign funding from any source. Saudi petrodollar economic strength is accompanied by immense diplomatic skills and capacity to hire top-notch, Western public relations agents, enabling them to influence and manipulate other powers, including formal governments as well as intra-national power groups such as terrorists.

It is widely believed that, using its wealth, the Saudi Royal family has achieved some time ago a secret understanding with al-Qaeda whereby the Saudi Royals spend billions to fund the Wahabi Muslim sect's fanatical Madrassa religious schools all over the Muslim world. This is bin Laden's militant Islamic sect. These are the schools where mullahs brainwash thousands of youths into hating non-Muslims and becoming suicide bombers. In return, according to the secret agreement, as long as Saudi Royal funding keeps flowing to those schools, al-Qaeda desists from committing terrorist acts inside the Kingdom, while it tries its best at blowing up every other corner of the globe. Not only the Saudis, using their wealth, enjoy relative immunity from al-Qaeda terror but another very shrewd geopolitical achievement of theirs has been to use the United States and its military strength to keep them safe from the other great menace to the Kingdom: The Iranian Shiite theocracy.

Like the Saudis, most Arabs are Sunni Muslims, engaged in a centuries' old conflict with the non-Arab, Persian Shiites of Iran. The Saudi Royals, by manipulating U.S. leaders into doing all the worrying about Iran and counting on U.S. military might to come in and save them, continue to enjoy in relative security their petroleum wealth. It should have been the other way around. It is they and their oil wealth who face the most imminent danger from Iran and it should have been instead Saudi wealth, military force and covert operations in the front line fighting, or at least de-stabilizing, those in power in Iran. Saudi petrodollars are used to promote the expansion of Islam in most of the Third World, in Europe, and including even the U.S. itself by funding countless Islamic centers, mosques and Muslim schools.

There are many examples. Just a few miles from the White House, in Northern Virginia, the Saudi Royal Embassy has constructed, funded, runs and supports two Islamic Saudi Academies, one in Alexandria and the other in Fairfax, with a total of 900 K-12 students. Translations of their curriculum texts reveal that students are taught fanatical Muslim concepts such as that it is the duty of Muslims to take the property and the lives of those deemed infidels. Unfortunately, even though the Secretary of State has the authority under the Foreign Missions Act to shut the academies down for teaching material harmful to the U.S., the Department of State's diplomatic bureaucracy has not taken any decisive action yet.

Saudi wealth has been buying influence in America's academia. In Washington, Georgetown University, a Christian, Roman Catholic academic institution ran by the Jesuit Order, has been offered and has accepted millions in grants from the Saudi Royal family to fund the creation of an Islamic Studies Center. It promotes the teaching of, and has published books on, the need to seek a peaceful, greater understanding of Islam and its similarities with Christianity rather than being hostile towards Islam. That university's School of Foreign Service, of which I am a graduate having specialized in diplomacy and international relations in both its undergraduate and later its graduate schools, used to be the primary source of reliable, patriotic career officers for the Department of State and the D.C. intelligence community. That was decades ago.

Today's graduates who have careers in federal departments and agencies, notoriously adhere to geopolitical theories that place the blame for the world's conflicts on America's perceived global aggressiveness and believe the solution rests in diplomatic negotiations and understanding rather than military preparedness. U. S. -Saudi relations have been underscored for decades by one single consideration: petroleum. The Saudis, in partnership with U.S. petroleum interests and while cultivating close relations with U.S. political leaders, particularly those who are always thirsty for campaign funding, are pursuing the objective of keeping the U.S. economy heavily dependent on Arab oil rather than alternative sources of energy or increased U.S. domestic oil production. As a result, by continuing to sell us oil, the Saudis have been accruing astronomical petrodollar royalties. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy and consumers suffer from skyrocketing oil prices and, worse of all, U.S. long-term national security and geopolitical interests--indeed our very survival--are jeopardized by our continued dependence on Arab oil. What we spend on gasoline may very well be eventually used to annihilate us.

One would hope that for the sake of our survival, those new leaders in Washington that are soon to be elected would happen to be cognizant of the urgency to undertake dramatic shifts in U.S. geopolitical policies. Foremost would be to reduce our reliance on Arab oil. Congressional bans on new drilling should be lifted. They are outdated, having been adopted when crude was only $15 per barrel and when major producers, like Iran and Venezuela, had strongly pro-American leaders who have now been deposed by fanatical haters of the U.S. The Saudis and other petro-sheikdoms should be forced to take a more active role in facing primarily by themselves, rather than relying on U.S. military might, the al-Qaeda menace and the threat to them by the Iranian theocracy.

Tax paying, voting citizens should be urged to write and pressure their Legislators for urgently needed, realistic policies to be adopted by our diplomatic and intelligence bureaucracies.