Right up to and including the time of President Bush’s most recent visit, King Abdullah and his senior half-brothers were content to leave oil policy in the hands of Ali Naimi, where it has resided for years. There didn’t seem to be any reason to get alarmed, because in the past, oil prices have usually gone back down after a while. And after all, it was true, as Ali Naimi kept saying, that there was no fundamental imbalance between supply and demand, so there was no reason for the Saudis to take strong action.

Now, having heard from Bush, the Spanish, the Pakistanis and others about the problems the oil prices are causing, the king and the princes have taken oil policy back into their own hands (as King Khalid did when OPEC split on prices back in the 1970s). This isn’t about oil supply and demand any more, it’s about global politics and about the long-term threat to Saudi interests posed by the rush to alternative fuels. People have begun to recall Ahmed Zaki Yamani’s famous line: the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil. In other words, the time will surely come when we find some other way to power our vehicles and trains and aircraft, and when that happens, too bad for Saudi Arabia. So why accelerate that day?

Hence the dusting off of the old “producer-consumer dialogue” formula long articulated by Hisham Nazer, Naimi’s predecessor. I don’t think it’s about Iran, and I don’t think the Saudis would prefer McCain over Obama. Everyone I saw in Riyadh was looking forward to an Obama presidency because, if nothing else, it won’t be a Bush presidency.

Thomas W. Lippman is adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, and the author of Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia.