Donald Trump: US gets nothing in return for backing Saudi Arabia

To hear Donald Trump tell it, the United States is not getting its money's worth in Saudi Arabia. Mr Trump, who has repeatedly portrayed Mexico, Japan, and China as "ripping us off", shifted his focus to Saudi Arabia in an interview aired on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.

"They should pay us," Mr Trump said of the oil-rich nation. "Like it or don't like it, people have backed Saudi Arabia. What I really mind, though, is we back it at tremendous expense. We get nothing for it." Mr Trump portrayed the US financial relationship with Saudi Arabia as outdated.

"The primary reason we're with Saudi Arabia is because we need the oil," Mr Trump said. "Now we don't need the oil so much, and if we let our people really go, we wouldn't need the oil at all and we could let everybody else fight it out."

The US imports more than a million barrels of Saudi Arabian oil a day, according to the US State Department's website. Despite his critique of the relationship, Mr Trump stopped short of calling for the U.S. government to simply walk away from the Saudis, who he said would soon find themselves as a "major target" of Islamic State terrorists.

"Saudi Arabia is going to be in big trouble pretty soon and they're going to need help, because if you look at Yemen and you look at that border, you don't have to be an expert to know that is one long border, and they're not going in for Yemen. They're going in for the oil, they're going in for Saudi Arabia, so Saudi Arabia is going to need help," Mr Trump said.

Throughout the interview, Mr Trump asserted US leaders had, for years, routinely cut bad deals with foreign governments across the globe. In the case of Saudi Arabia, that had helped the Arab nation "make a billion dollars a day", he said. "Saudi Arabia, if it weren't for us, they wouldn't be here," Mr Trump said. "They wouldn't exist."