Exhausted and ill but enamored of kings, deserts and oil, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Ibn Saud, founder of modern Saudi Arabia, on his way home from Yalta in 1945. In 1974, Richard Nixon, the first sitting US president to visit both Israel and the Arab states, took what proved to be a farewell foray two months before he resigned the presidency.
And, in what was surely a president’s most consequential Middle East visit, Jimmy…
