There are many adjectives one can use to categorize Tuesday’s statement from President Trump strenuously defending the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Take your pick: disturbing, inaccurate, pathetic, false, outrageous, terrifying, idiotic. I, however, would go with “weak,” for it exposes Trump as a desperate man all too willing to bow at the altar of the Saudi royal family.
Evidently there is no crime Riyadh can commit that is heinous enough for Trump to condemn. Murdering a Washington Post columnist in the Saudi consulate and chopping his body into pieces? Don’t worry about it, golden boy Mohammed bin Salman can be excused. Destroying an entire country by targeting its food storage facilities, grain warehouses, residential neighborhoods, and ports, thereby leaving two-thirds of Yemenis on the brink of starvation? No matter: at least the U.S. will be making billions of dollars in defense contracts and keeping oil prices stable.
If Trump could make the final call, Crown Prince Mohammed could very well shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
[Read more: Mitt Romney denounces Trump’s response to Saudi murder of Khashoggi]
Democrats on Capitol Hill are screaming at the rafters about the tone-deafness and apathy for human rights that the president has exhibited to the entire world. Fair enough. But his comments also demonstrate how stale Trump’s thinking is on Saudi Arabia, as if Riyadh can simply cut off the oil tap in order to throw the U.S. economy into a recession. Never mind that, while Saudi Arabia is still an important supplier to the international energy market, Riyadh needs Washington to buy its oil more than Washington needs to consume it.
For a man who presents himself as a strongman defending America from countries that take advantage of American generosity, Trump is surprisingly docile with the Saudis in general and Crown Prince Mohammed especially. Riyadh has been exploiting American goodwill for years, and the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been foolish enough to go along with it. U.S. diplomats defend the kingdom at the United Nations with regularity, excuse or pretend not to be aware of their systemic human rights abuses, and up until a week ago refueled their bombers in a war where no U.S. national security interest was at stake. U.S. policy vis a vis Saudi Arabia has been skewed for a long time. What Trump has done is skew it so undeservingly that this reality is now in the public consciousness.
The United States has managed its relationship with Saudi Arabia like a bad parent manages their spoiled son: Walk on eggshells when we are near him, hope bad behavior corrects itself, and justify poor decisions until we turn into enablers. Washington treats Saudi Arabia as if Riyadh is the senior partner in the relationship rather than the other way around.
Trump may truly believe Crown Prince Mohammed is the future of Saudi Arabia and that the U.S. is better served by staying on his good side. But at what point does the support become unconditional, and how would this affect Washington’s flexibility?
If only somebody in the administration could enter the Oval Office and tell the president what is likely happening in Riyadh right now: grinning, laughing, and celebrating about how they got away with the murder of a journalist while turning the U.S. president into one of the kingdom’s most high-profile spokesmen.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
