WASHINGTON: The White House announced Monday that President Barack Obama will travel next month to Saudi Arabia, where he will hear from an ally anxious about developments that have transformed the Middle East and strained the kingdom’s relations with the United States.

Obama’s visit will be his first to Saudi Arabia since a series of popular uprisings across the Middle East — known collectively as the Arab Spring — overturned several autocratic governments. Some of those revolutions have had the Obama administration’s blessing.

Obama’s position, particularly his eventual support for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, shook the Saudi royal family and raised concerns that backing from the United States, despite its reliance on Saudi oil, could not be counted on.

The relationship has since deteriorated over the issue of Syria’s civil war, in which Saudi Arabia is arming rebel groups seeking President Bashar Assad’s ouster, and Iran’s nuclear program.

“Saudi Arabia is a close partner of the United States, and we have a bilateral relationship that is broad and deep and covers a range of areas,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday at his daily briefing. “And the president very much looks forward to the visit, where all of those areas will be discussed in his meetings.”

The visit, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, will mark Obama’s second to the kingdom. He stopped briefly in Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, on the eve of his June 2009 speech in Cairo, in which he asked for a “new beginning” with the Muslim world.