In this age of blaring, ever-grueling hyperpartisan warfare, it has become increasingly uncommon for an issue or decision to elicit howls of protest from members on both sides of the aisle. But with his Wednesday night veto of three bipartisan resolutions that block the Trump administration’s $8 billion emergency sale of weapons and defense services to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, President Trump has managed to do the impossible.
Last month, both houses of Congress voted on a bipartisan basis to block the defense sale out of a deep concern of what more munitions in the Saudi stockpile would do to next-door Yemen, already the source of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. Other lawmakers used the vote as a proxy to express their condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s premeditated murder of Washington Post columnist and U.S. permanent resident Jamal Khashoggi. Still others were apoplectic about how the administration decided to push the sale, by using a loophole in the Arms Export Control Act to circumvent Congress entirely. Even Sen. Ted Cruz, normally a staunch administration ally on the Foreign Relations Committee, was red with anger about the shortcut. The Texas Republican bluntly told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a July 10 hearing that “The process that the State Department followed for these weapons sales … was crap.”
“Crap” may have been a generous assessment. The Trump administration, in its desperation to sell these weapons to the Saudis and Emiratis, created a national security emergency where none existed. Yes, Iran was beginning to get more aggressive in the Persian Gulf by sabotaging civilian tankers and exceeding enrichment limits allowed in the 2015 nuclear deal, but this behavior was taken only after the White House pulled out of the agreement and started accelerating a maximum pressure campaign that aimed to collapse the Iranian economy. Let’s be honest — it’s not as if Iran was a paragon of stability to begin with.
Then there is the conflict in Yemen, which for all intents and purposes is one of the most unforgiving, merciless, graphic wars on the face of the earth. This is the war, you might recall, that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman confidently but foolishly believed could be won in a manner of months by pounding the Houthis into submission.
Salman’s judgment, of course, was dangerously wrong — as it usually is. Over four years later, Yemen is a broken society with poverty, cholera, land mines, and bombs (the same bombs that were included in the Trump administration sale) littering the land. With more munitions in the air and on the way to Riyadh, Yemenis will soon be seeing a lot more of those bombs falling on their homes and neighborhoods.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a strong statement after Trump’s veto, in which she wrote how “stunning” it was that the White House would proceed with the sale despite bipartisan, bicameral opposition. But Rep. Justin Amash said it best in a single tweet:
The president again stands with Saudi royals against Congress. This brutal regime should not have our military support. https://t.co/t4paGsrCw9
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) July 24, 2019
“America first” foreign policy is supposed to mean exactly that: defending U.S. interests should be goal number one, two, and three of U.S. national security policy. There is no U.S. interest whatsoever in being a one-stop shop arms bazaar to a Gulf Arab monarchy that is as entitled and unaccountable as it is reckless.
The Saudis are taking Trump’s support for granted, and he’s playing right into it.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
