American troops are coming back 16 years after they left Saudi Arabia, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud announced on Saturday. According to press reports hundreds of American troops are deploying to Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh as tensions spike in the region between Iran and its allies and the Donald Trump administration and Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia. The deployment of American troops in the kingdom has never been popular with Saudis. It was an early complaint of Osama bin Laden and comes as the Saudis' Arab allies are deserting the crown prince’s war in Yemen.

US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arranged the construction of the first American air base in Saudi Arabia during World War II at Dhahran in the kingdom’s Eastern Province. John F. Kennedy ordered the first deployment of combat aircraft to Dhahran to deter Egyptian air attacks on Saudi Arabia during the civil war in Yemen in the early 1960s. George H. W. Bush sent a half million Americans to defend the kingdom in 1990 in Operation Desert Shield and then to liberate Kuwait in Desert Storm.

US, UK and French airmen stayed in Dhahran after the cease-fire in 1991 and later enforced the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. Iranian-supported Saudi Shiite terrorists attacked the base's Khobar Towers housing complex in 1996, killing 19 American soldiers. Secretary of Defense William Perry decided to relocate the Americans to Prince Sultan Air Base.

As deputy assistant secretary of defense for the near east, I negotiated the details of the new deployment and Saudi funding for it. For the Americans, the air base offered tight security. The Dhahran base was in the middle of an urban area, heavily Shiite; this one is in the desert with a buffer of dozens of miles in every direction. For the Saudis, it meant the Americans were all but invisible to the Saudi population, especially the Wahhabi clergy. The Saudis publicly pretended they were gone.