WARSAW, Poland — President Trump’s administration, gratified by the public show of Israeli-Arab unity against Iran at a U.S.-led summit on Middle East peace, brushed off congressional criticism of its reaction to the murder of a dissident Washington Post columnist by elements of the Saudi Arabian monarchy.
“I think it’s obvious that it goes back to what the president told us he wanted to do, which was: Continue on the policies that we had set from the beginning of the administration towards Saudi,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “He thought they outweighed an individual ruler and an individual act, and so we have continued on.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has worked to maintain the U.S.-Saudi Arabia alliance in the face of congressional outrage over the administration’s response — or lack thereof — to the October killing of Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. The writer’s gruesome death, orchestrated by advisers of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, provoked calls for sanctions on the young royal and a reassessment of the alliance from lawmakers in both parties, including some of the staunch Iran hawks. Pompeo passed over those concerns and remained focused on brokering an Israeli-Arab partnership against the rogue regime of Iran.
“It’s undeniable that Iran’s aggression in the region has brought Israel and Arab states closer together,” Pompeo told reporters in Warsaw Thursday at the closing press conference of a two-day Middle East peace summit hosted by Poland and the United States. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held nearly unheard-of public meetings with Arab leaders at the event. “What I think was even more remarkable is that it didn’t feel all that historic. It felt right, it felt normal, because we were working on a common problem,” Pompeo said.
That display of unity might be one reason the State Department last week ignored a deadline Congress imposed on the Khashoggi case. Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, coordinated with his Republican counterpart last fall to start a 120-day clock for the administration to identify the people ultimately responsible for Khashoggi’s assassination and impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act for human rights abusers.
Pompeo angered lawmakers when he sent them, on the day of last week’s deadline, a two-paragraph letter avoiding all comment on the administration’s view of the crown prince’s role in the incident.
“Your letter exacerbates the fears that this administration continues to hide something when it comes to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi,” Menendez wrote Pompeo on Thursday, as the conference was winding down in Warsaw. “This administration has been conspicuously reticent to hold senior officials and senior members of the Royal Family accountable.”
The New Jersey Democrat doesn’t cut much ice with the Trump administration. “Last time I looked, nobody elected Bob Menendez president, and we don’t take our foreign policy advice from him,” the senior administration official said. “I would actually see what he recommends as a negative indicator.”
Pompeo announced sanctions on 17 people involved in the Khashoggi killing in November but stopped short of punishing the Saudi crown prince. “To the extent we continue to develop facts that implicate others in the terrible act, the terrible murder of Jamal Khashoggi, we will continue to hold all of the people connected to it accountable,” he told Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo last week.
That agnosticism might have helped pave the road to Warsaw for Netanyahu and Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, who met at the summit, but it takes a toll on Pompeo’s credibility — especially when he touts the Saudi commitment to investigating the crime.
“All along the way, the Saudi story has been one step behind,” a European diplomat observed to the Washington Examiner.
Pompeo’s pleasant meeting with the crown prince on an emergency trip to Riyadh after Khashoggi’s murder in the fall didn’t help his image as an assiduous investigator. The all-smiles public encounter contributed to the administration’s reputation for conviviality with authoritarian regimes, as has President Trump’s warmth toward North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “Don’t get me started on Trump,” the European diplomat said.
Still, the diplomat acknowledged that Trump has limited options for a more abrasive policy. Sanctions on Saudi Arabia’s crown prince would mean “destabilizing the regime,” the diplomat said, with the understanding that the United States and Western powers “almost certainly” would fail in any attempt to force the Saudi monarchy to find another heir-apparent. “The Saudis — and the family in particular — would rally around their leader, so, arguably, that would be counterproductive,” the diplomat conceded.
That leaves Western powers hoping they can influence the crown prince’s decision-making.
“Or you could say that his mistake has been surrounding himself with bad advisers (taking the view that MbS is a fact of life),” the diplomat said, using the customary acronym for the crown prince.
The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on one of the crown prince’s key advisers, Saud al-Qahtani, in the wake of the Khashoggi killing. King Salman also fired the man, who is widely regarded as a hidden hand in several of the crown prince’s controversies. “I don’t think we’ve ever been enthusiastic about Qahtani,” the senior administration official said. Neither the United States nor the king has succeeded in forming a real barrier between the crown prince and his disreputable favorite, however.
But the administration is pleased with the anti-Iran policies it’s developed over the last year and the partnerships built to advance them. Netanyahu and Jubeir dramatized their concord at the Warsaw ministerial, front and center, stage-crafted by the Pompeo team.
“Israel prizes a free press and has a very vibrant press, and it has remained extremely quiet on this,” the senior administration official said. “And nobody’s given Netanyahu a hard time.”
