With the death of King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia finds itself in the midst of a critical transition. That change will be felt here in the United States as well because a key issue for the new ruler, King Salman, is an oil policy that will be aimed at putting pressure on oil producers here at home.

Saudi Arabia has always been a somewhat problematic relationship for the United States to maintain. Think of it this way, Saudi Arabia is that kid you grew up with that would burn ants with a magnifying glass and only wanted to play the games that he came up with and didn’t care what you said, but he always had the best toys and at his birthday party, the gift bags came with full size candy bars. So you just kind of tuned out the negatives and acted like there was nothing weird about him.

However, rather than having toys, Saudi Arabia has Ghawar. Christopher Helman of Forbes described the potential of the Ghawar “megafield.”

“… Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia … is thought to have had more than 100 billion barrels of recoverable oil in place. At 160 miles long and 16 miles wide it confounds even the most experienced geologists. With something on the order of 60 billion produced over the past 60 years …”

Needless to say, the black gold to be found in Saudi Arabia makes for a great gift bag. As the world’s number one oil producer, Saudi Arabia has most often been able to play whatever game they want by whatever rules they want.

Saudi Arabia, though it is one of the United States’ strongest allies in the region, is also a nation that enforces the ever demonized Sharia law. According to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia’s description, “its constitution is Almighty God’s Book, The Holy Qur’an, and the Sunna (Traditions) of the Prophet.”

This is a country that still performs state sanctioned beheadings, but arrests you if you dare to record it happening. When a Saudi blogger “criticized Islam,” he was arrested and made to suffer public beatings, but now the scheduled beatings have been postponed as dissent from the nation’s Western allies has been made known.

The excuses we make for our friends are rapidly losing their validity. The United States holds itself opposed to extremist religious actions in all of its various forms. However, the strict adherence to Sharia law, crackdowns on freedom of speech or speech against Islam, and the state sanctioned bigotry that prohibits the public practice of any religion other than that which the government deems acceptable are extremist sentiments.

We align ourselves with Saudi Arabia, but stand against nations with similar ideals like Iran. As the U.S. continues to stand on its principles, we are consistently given less and less ground to stand on because our principles are often applied hypocritically.

In the 1980s, our principle was to stop the advance of communism across the globe. This principle led to President Reagan secretly selling weapons to Iran in order to obtain funding for anti-communist forces in Nicaragua. Reagan thought that supplying Iran with arms in its war with Iraq would strengthen the relationship between Iran, Lebanon and the United States. In addition to being a treasonous undertaking, the act also failed to secure a lasting relationship with Iran. The lesson is as follows — friends and enemies to the United States often depend on time, place, and most importantly, what we stand to gain. This practice has failed again and again.

Supporting a government that holds itself in opposition to the very principles of the United States bastardizes our credibility and leaves us little room to protest against similar governments that we hold as enemies.

We say that we oppose groups that are not tolerant of the ideals of others, but the very laws of Saudi Arabia state that “consolidation of the national unity is a duty. The State shall forbid all activities that may lead to division, disorder and partition.” To publicly disagree with the regime is a criminal offense. What could be more intolerant?

When thousands were murdered in Nigeria by Boko Haram, intolerance was a key issue. When cartoonists were killed in France by Muslim extremists, intolerance was a key issue. When peaceful protestors and dissenters are jailed and beaten in Saudi Arabia, intolerance is a key issue. And finally, the key difference between these actions? The ones taken in Saudi Arabia were legal.

The idea of a high ruler, unquestionable in nature, that bases authority and governance in the idea that Islam is the only true and acceptable path are the same ideals that gives rise to extremist sentiment across the world.

While the less informed may believe that this is just the expected practice for an officially Muslim nation, nothing could be further from the truth. For details, look no further than the wisdom of Iranian-American intellectual Reza Aslan’s interview on CNN.

“You’re talking about a religion of 1.5 billion people and it certainly becomes very easy to simply paint them all with a single brush by saying ‘well in Saudi Arabia, they (women) can’t drive and so therefore that’s somehow representative of Islam. It’s representative of Saudi Arabia … Saudi Arabia is one of the most, if not the most, extremist Muslim countries in the world,” Aslan said.

There is no reason for the United States to allow the intolerant regime of Saudi Arabia to continue its single minded ways. Especially since Saudi Arabia may no longer have “better toys” than the United States.

The United States took over the top spot on the list of oil producing nations in 2014, so there is no better time to exert the necessary pressure to bring about changes in Saudi Arabian social policy. That is not to say that I wish to make Saudi Arabia or any other nation exactly like the United States — we are greatly flawed in our own ways as well — but I do want our government to stop providing an intolerant regime the tacit approval to continue its reign of terror by not making it clear that we are categorically opposed to its stranglehold on the social sphere.

The coming of a new Saudi King offers the United States an opportunity to establish a new set of expectations when it comes to the human rights of Saudi Arabian citizens. This opportunity has not been available for twenty years and King Salman has already expressed his wishes to maintain the policies of his predecessor, so if we don’t act now, we may have to wait another twenty years to have this chance again.