This clash of interests has been brewing for some time. In 2011, during the early days of the Arab Spring, the Saudi royals expressed their alarm at Obama’s refusal to rescue Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from his street-demanded ouster (as if any American president could, much less should, have saved Mubarak’s skin). This past summer, the Saudis were once again enraged by Obama’s less-than-full support for the Egyptian generals’ overthrow of the elected president, Mohammed Morsi—and even more flummoxed by his calls for them not to ban Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party.

Since then, from Riyadh’s vantage, the picture has only worsened. First, Obama called off his much-threatened cruise missile strike against the Syrian government. Then, perhaps most serious of all, Obama made diplomatic overtures to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, and is now engaged in formal negotiations to retract economic sanctions in exchange for a drastic cutback in Iran’s nuclear program.

All these actions must be viewed in the context of the Sunni-Shia conflict that is gripping the entire Middle East and that, if tensions escalate, could plunge the region into war. The Saudi royal family sees itself as the leading Sunni power in this faceoff and the Egyptian regime—first under Mubarak, now under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—as its most stalwart ally. The royals see the Iranians as their major rival and the Syrians as the Iranians’ ally in support of Shia groups in Lebanon, Gaza, and beyond.

In this framework, President Obama is declining to support Sunni leaders and declining to bomb—when not outright cozying up to—Shia leaders.

For Riyadh, this amounts to perfidy. The Saudis want to fight the Sunni-Shia war. They want to see the Muslim Brotherhood wiped out, Assad’s Syria pummeled, and, though they can’t so say openly (in part because the unmentionable Israel, or its interests, would be involved), they would like to see somebody blow up Iran’s nuclear sites and, if possible, its government, too.

Prince Bandar is upset, in short, because Obama doesn’t want to fight this war. But the problem—and Bandar must know this—isn’t just Obama. No American president—not even the Bushes, who had warm relations with the Saudis—would want to fight this war, because US interests dictate a very different view of the region. We wouldn’t fit on either side of a Sunni-Shia war; we have allies and adversaries on both. The terrorists of al-Qaeda and its affiliates are Sunni (Takfiris) (and, by the way, they’ve received much support over the decades from the Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas). The government of Nouri al-Maliki, which George W. Bush helped install in Iraq, is Shia. The Shia authorities of Iran share an interest in helping keep the Taliban or al-Qaeda from retaking power in Afghanistan. And then there’s Israel, which is another matter entirely.

In other words, the chief US interest in the Middle East—and it resonates with US values as well—is to dampen the fever for war. To the extent the Obama administration has threatened or taken military action, it has been for limited aims, which have little to do with the Sunni-Shia divide.

At times Obama and his aides have made policy in incredibly ungainly ways. But the policies themselves have wind up grounded in US interests. Prince Bandar has discovered something that was masked by the Cold War, when all politics were viewed in light of the US-Soviet standoff and the two superpowers helped suppress the odd eruption of internal chaos: Our interests don’t always coincide with his.

So are the Saudi rulers going to walk away from this decades-long alliance? Not likely. First, they have nowhere else to go. The Saudi army and air force are structured along the lines of the American military, which provides them with tremendous amounts of weaponry, support, and training. The French and Russians could offer some assistance, but not nearly as much—and their political interests and alliances wouldn’t align so neatly with the Saudis’ either.

In fact, Bandar’s stratagem may reflect a growing awareness of Saudi weakness. Figures released earlier this month reveal that the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest supplier of petroleum. To put it another way: The Saudis need our arms more than we need their oil.

Even Bandar’s most stunning signal of disenchantment with Washington—his announcement that the Saudis will not accept a seat on the UN Security Council, after years of lobbying for the honor—may be more an acknowledgment of this equation. Had Saudi Arabia joined the UN’s highest body, it would have been seen as part of the US voting bloc, and whenever it voted differently from the United States, the difference would be dramatized. Perhaps Bandar, recognizing that there might be frequent differences, would prefer that they not be highlighted.

That doesn’t mean that the United States will, or should, shrug off Bandar’s diatribe. Obama has already dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to assuage Saudi concerns, noting that we still value the strategic relationship, that the emerging détente with Iran is tentative, and that, when it comes to a nuclear deal, we regard a bad agreement as worse than no agreement.

The storm will probably soon blow over. Meanwhile, it may be a good thing, an acknowledgment of new realities, for Saudi Arabia—for all the countries of the Middle East—to pursue more flexible diplomatic arrangements. It would be good if the region’s leaders neither relied so heavily, nor blamed their own ailments so conspiratorially, on the United States.

By Fred Kaplan for www.slate.com