Nice to know that we are pimping the lives of our military to the highest bidder...

Trump himself used to frequently rail against American support for the kingdom. He expressed the same disdain for Saudi Arabia as he did for all American allies — they were a bunch of leeches getting rich off American generosity:

Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won't, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth-$ trillion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2014
But now Trump has come around to a different line of thinking. The Saudis don’t owe America for defending them. Americans owes the Saudis for the privilege of selling them advanced weaponry. “They’ve been a great ally,” gushed the president,

They spend $400 billion in our country over the last number of years. Four hundred billion dollars. That’s a million and a half jobs. And they’re not ones that, unlike some countries, where they want terms; they want terms and conditions. They want to say, “Can we borrow the money at zero percent for the next 400 years?” No. No. Saudi Arabia pays cash.

It’s true that Saudi Arabia purchases weaponry from the United States, though the actual amount is nowhere near $400 billion (which would be more than half the Pentagon’s annual budget). But this transaction is not an act of generosity for hard-pressed American arms manufacturers. The Saudis are being given access to advanced arms that many countries would love to have.

The Saudis have been purchasing American weapons — with cash — for decades. That’s the nature of the relationship. It’s not clear why Trump has decided to stop seeing U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a favor to the Saudis and start seeing them as a favor to the U.S.

What makes Trump’s logic so peculiar is that it turns the mechanism through which the alliance works into its rationale. We used to sell weapons to Saudia Arabia because we needed to secure their oil. Now we supposedly need to defend them because they buy our weapons.