“One of the unfortunate and largely unspoken tragedies of the 20th Century was the dismemberment of the British Empire. It held in check a lot of evil forces that have become problems for the US since the end of the Cold War.”
Wahabbis were brought into power by the empire. Now the wahabbis rule the middle east.
The British had backed the Hashemite rulers of the Hejaz, propping them up in Jordan and Iraq, right after WWI, to reward them for revolting against the Turks. The House of Saud took power over the Arabian peninsula in 1932 after a good many years of war, and Ibn Saud himself avoided the Arab Revolt to pursue that end. The Saudis began to become US clients when ARAMCO started developing their oil in 1941. If anything, the US chose poorly, not the British....