Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud is in town, reportedly to plan President Donald Trump’s upcoming visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president is again exhibiting his affection for ruthless political leaders who have wreaked human carnage and destabilized the Middle East, with ill effects the world over. In doing so, he is sacrificing American national interests.
In fairness, the bizarre American love affair with one of the world’s most brutal regimes is longstanding. President George W. Bush allowed influential Saudis to flee America by the planeload after 9/11, avoiding any embarrassing questions about ties with Islamist terrorists. Bush showed his loyalties with his ostentatious royal handholding, while President Barack Obama earned contempt for his little bow to the king when visiting the KSA. Far worse was the latter’s decision to turn Americans into accomplices to aggression and war crimes, backing Riyadh’s invasion of Yemen. Apparently, Obama was desperate to demonstrate that negotiating the nuclear accord with Iran meant no loss of love for the Saudis, irrespective of the cost to Yemen.
President Joe Biden famously promised to turn the brutal crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, into a “pariah,” but quickly reverted to the usual Washington role of sycophant and supplicant. His infamous fist bump was a prelude to begging MbS to increase oil production, a request the latter contemptuously rejected. Biden ended his term offering to turn the U.S. military into a modern janissary corps, a foreign bodyguard for the Saudi royal family. This for a regime known as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers and military aggressors. The primary beneficiary of extending the so-called Abraham Accords to Riyadh would be Israel, with the U.S. paying another Arab regime to formalize its hitherto unofficial relationship with Israel and abandon Palestinians to the Netanyahu coalition’s abuse.
Trump’s first-term dalliance with MbS was even worse than those of his predecessors and successor. He made the Kingdom his first foreign destination as president. The Saudis bedazzled him with the famous “Sword Dance,” and partnered with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as future profitable deals, like sugar plums, danced in Kushner’s head. Trump intensified U.S. support for the Yemeni war and ostentatiously protected the crown prince from any consequences for murdering and dismembering Jamal Khashoggi, a regime critic and journalist living in America.
The president, in his second term, is picking up where he left off, escalating the illegal war against Yemen, which did so much to resist Riyadh and is now retaliating against Israel for its continuing depredations in Gaza, and threatening to start another illegal war, against Iran, long the bête noire of both the KSA and Israel. The Saudi royals’ status as Uncle Sam’s friends, clients, and dependents is a national embarrassment. Yet for the second time the president is extending to the Kingdom and its ruler the presumed honor of first hosting him overseas.
The Saudi royals are not merely bad on human rights—they help set the global floor. Freedom House ranks Saudi Arabia as bad as China, and worse than Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Vietnam. Explained the group: “Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and members of religious minority groups face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative.”
Amnesty International offers a similarly devastating assessment: “The authorities targeted individuals for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression or association, and some were sentenced to lengthy prison terms or death following grossly unfair trials. Human rights defenders continued to be arbitrarily detained or subject to travel bans following their conditional release from prison. Courts handed down death sentences following grossly unfair trials, including in cases of individuals who were children at the time of their alleged crimes, and people were executed for a wide range of crimes.” Another AI report listed 10 specific ways the regime abuses its people: increasing use of the death penalty, discriminating against women, torturing prisoners and fixing trials, mistreating migrant workers, punishing independent journalists as criminals, prohibiting free expression, association, and assembly, imprisoning and executing gays, banning travel, seizing property without compensation, and forbidding protests.
Nevertheless, the Kingdom was able to curry favor with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, publicly backing his promotion of unalienable rights at the UN. Evidently, Washington just wants the KSA to endorse human rights, not defend them, even for U.S. residents. American connections offer no protection from the anger of the killer prince, who dispatched a death squad to the KSA’s Istanbul consulate to eliminate Khashoggi. Dual citizens have been sentenced to years, sometimes decades, in prison for criticizing the Saudi regime while in America.
Although MbS’s crimes are many, he is buying influence and good PR with the Kingdom’s abundant resources. Explained Human Rights Watch: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has consolidated political and economic power, including as chairman of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a sovereign wealth fund that has facilitated and benefited from rights abuses. PIF investments in high-profile sports and entertainment events domestically and internationally are used to whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record. Migrant workers, including on PIF-funded projects, face widespread abuses under the kafala (sponsorship) system.”
In this campaign, outside support has been essential. Explained AI: “PR experts were hired to peddle an illusion of progress and reform and counter negative media coverage of the country. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund … built a multibillion-dollar foothold in the entertainment, sports, and tech industries. Businesses, sports and entertainment figures rushed to take advantage of Saudi Arabia’s financial bounty. Forgetting their earlier human rights condemnations, world leaders rolled out the red carpet for the Crown Prince.”
Unfortunately, American politicians and businessmen, and even Christian activists, have joined in. Among the Kingdom’s worst crimes is its repression of religious liberty. Not one church, synagogue, or temple operates in Saudi Arabia. Public demonstration of any other faith is forbidden. Concluded the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: “the government continues to implement particularly severe restrictions on [freedom of religion or belief] and imposes harsh penalties upon individuals who deviate from the state’s singular interpretation of Sunni Islam. Religious minorities and women are often the primary targets of these FoRB violations.” Yet MbS has cleverly used the strange affinity of some evangelical Christians for today’s modern secular Israeli state to moderate the royal family’s image. More than once he has met with evangelical leaders, hinting at future religious liberalization that has never occurred.
Of course, murderous aggressors are common among the world’s governments. As a result, foreign policy must be practical and prudential. Although human rights should limit and shape international practices, it is impossible to manage a foreign policy independent of national interests. Hence there is good reason to continue economic and energy relations with the Kingdom. However, most of those would occur naturally without Washington’s collective kowtow to the Saudi royals.
Moreover, Riyadh long has acted against important American interests. Unsurprisingly, the KSA’s foreign policy has always been centered on the interests of the royal family, not Saudi Arabia. The exploitative, corrupt, and avaricious regime—in the name of “fighting corruption,” MbS famously shook down rich Saudis by imprisoning and torturing them while negotiating their ransom—ensures a system without popular legitimacy and support. Hence the desire for American military protection to defend what the Saudi people will not, thousands of princes on ostentatious welfare funded by sale of the Saudi people’s resources. Western fears about the stability of the Saudi regime reflect its weaknesses, not the strength of Iran or anyone else.
Moreover, the Kingdom long had a lax attitude toward terrorism, at least toward private contributions to groups such as Al Qaeda. Successive administrations classified multiple reports and assessments about potential Saudi culpability, protecting Riyadh from scrutiny. Questions continue to be raised about the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. Only after the group foolishly targeted the royal family in 2003 did the regime take the issue more seriously, including by expanding intelligence cooperation with the US.
The KSA, especially after MbS effectively came to power, has behaved aggressively, even recklessly, toward its neighbors. In 2011 Riyadh intervened in Bahrain, sending in the military to sustain the oppressive, minority Sunni monarchy against Shia democracy activists. In the same year the Saudis first intervened in Syria’s lengthy civil war, assisting jihadist insurgents. In 2013 Riyadh underwrote the coup in Egypt, returning the country to military rule, only more intense than before. In 2015 the Kingdom began a multi-year campaign to restore a puppet regime to power in Yemen, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.
In 2017 Riyadh orchestrated the diplomatic and economic isolation of Qatar, another Mideast U.S. ally and host of a major airbase. MbS even planned to invade the emirate and impose regime change. He reluctantly backed off following opposition from Trump’s officials, if not Trump himself, and Ankara, which deployed troops and established a military base in Qatar. Then came one of the more bizarre episodes of Saudi “diplomacy”—kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister and forcing him to announce his resignation—which he revoked after escaping Saudi custody. MbS later joked about the episode.
Finally, like Netanyahu, MbS and other Saudi rulers promoted a U.S. war with Iran. However, Trump’s welcome refusal to retaliate against Tehran for the 2019 attack on Saudi oil facilities apparently convinced Riyadh that it should improve relations with Tehran. Since then Saudi Arabia has urged the U.S. and Israel not to ignite the Mideast.
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This is not the record of a kindred government and reliable ally. The KSA has never fought Israel and need not be paid to keep the peace. Indeed, the two governments have long had informal security ties. If the royals can’t defend themselves after filling their armory with pricey U.S. weapons, the fault is theirs, not America’s. Greater Chinese economic involvement in the Mideast is inevitable and no threat to the U.S. Russia lacks the means to meddle much in the region and wouldn’t much hurt America if it did.
If Washington wants to avoid the revival of terrorism, it should minimize official political and especially military ties with Riyadh. Antagonism toward American troops on holy Islamic soil led to the 1995 bombing of the Khobar Towers compound and encouraged Osama bin Laden’s attacks elsewhere.
Washington need not treat Riyadh as an enemy. They share important interests despite MbS’s tyranny, and maintaining a civil relationship with unlikable regimes is one of the enduring challenges of diplomacy. However, the president should drop any pretense of treating the KSA as a geopolitical soulmate, and bestowing special honors, including the first foreign visit, on the crown prince. It is one thing to reluctantly cooperate with malevolent regimes. It is another matter to enthusiastically do so. The president should choose another destination for his first foreign trip.
