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US-Saudi relations, a bedrock of the American relationship with the Middle East since World War II, forged on the back of oil wealth and defense partnerships, have been put under unprecedented public strain over the past week.

In the past week, Saudi Arabia rejected a seat on the United Nations Security Council (which it said was intended as a message to the US) and its intelligence chief announced he would be scaling back US-Saudi cooperation on war-torn Syria.

The general consensus seems to be, "You should have seen this coming," as the two countries have been moving at cross-purposes on important regional issues for months.

The US has launched an unprecedented push to reach an agreement with Saudi Arabia's chief rival, Iran, while Saudi Arabia has undermined US efforts to punish Egypt's military for a July coup by filling Egyptian coffers with promises of more money than the US has yanked back. The US abruptly retreated from a full march toward a military strike on Syria – a move Riyadh strongly backed.

As a senior US official told The Wall Street Journal, "Our interests increasingly don't align."

Saudi officials have been quite blunt. Prince Turki al-Faisal, a member of the royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence, said in Washington that President Obama's Syria policy was "lamentable" and scoffed at the US-Russia agreement on Syria's chemical weapons deal, Reuters reports. 

"The current charade of international control over Bashar's chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people," said Prince Turki.

Foreign Policy's Colum Lynch explains the very public, abrupt shift:

Saudi Arabia has been quite clear about its opposition to US-Iran rapprochement, Bloomberg reports.

And on backing the Syrian rebels, an issue on which Washington and Riyadh were initially aligned, the divide is growing. An anonymous Saudi official told Bloomberg yesterday that Riyadh's support for Syrian rebels would not be "constrained" by US efforts to keep the money from Islamist groups.

The anonymous comments come on the heels of a London meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from countries backing the Syrian rebels. At the meeting, they agreed to send aid exclusively through the moderate Syrian National Coalition's armed wing to "curtail the influence of extremists."

"Syrian opposition factions backed by the US are disorganized and largely ineffective, so directing assistance only to them would be handicapping the fight against President Bashar al-Assad," the anonymous Saudi official said.

In a piece extensively detailing the decline in relations, the WSJ reports that the US was keeping Saudi Arabia in the dark on issues about which Riyadh was usually informed. 

Yet the anonymous Saudi official quoted by Bloomberg said that reports of a "major split are overblown," citing common interests in oil price stability and combating terrorism. Just last week, the US Department of Defense announced it would sell $10.8 billion in "advanced weaponry" to Saudi Arabia and ally United Arab Emirates.

A Western diplomat told the WSJ that Saudi Arabia's top priority is a more effective US or UN plan for helping the Syrian rebels.