On Friday, the Biden administration released a U.S. intelligence community report about the October 2018 assassination of Saudi dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi was brutally murdered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The report confirms the U.S. assessment that Khashoggi was murdered on the orders of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The declassified report is sparse on detail, reflecting the fact that it has been washed of the corroborating intelligence reporting for its conclusions. But it does make public three supports for its assessment that the crown prince had Khashoggi assassinated. These being “the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”
The report will certainly generate media waves, but it doesn’t tell us anything terribly new.
As I noted on Oct. 22, 2018, a confident U.S. assessment of the crown prince’s culpability was quite quickly established following Khashoggi’s death. It centered on U.S. knowledge of the crown prince’s line-of-control authority and information gleaned from phone calls intercepted by the NSA, and CIA human agent reporting. As a side note, it’s worth noting that the Turkish government appears to know more about the specifics of what went on inside the Saudi Consulate than has yet been publicly released.
What follows?
Well, some will use this report to call for further separation of the United States from Saudi Arabia. That would be a huge mistake. As depraved as it was, what the crown prince did to Khashoggi is not a major U.S. strategic interest within the context of the broader U.S.-Saudi relationship. The crown prince’s treatment of former Saudi intelligence officer Saad al Jabri is a far more important U.S. concern, for example. So is Saudi Arabia’s conduct of its war in Yemen.
So while President Biden should be pressuring the Saudis to avoid a repeat of this kind of activity, something former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo privately emphasized with some success, he must balance that pressure with broader U.S. interests. As I see it, there are two top line U.S. interests with Riyadh. First, Riyadh’s sustained alignment under the U.S. alliance structure in the Middle East. Second, the crown prince’s continued advancement of his domestic social and economic reform program.
On the first point, we must recognize that the crown prince is being lobbied heavily and lured with great temptation from Vladimir Putin to reorient the kingdom into Russia’s geopolitical orbit. Were that to happen, it would give Putin vastly increased influence over global energy supplies and prices and a much-improved ability to play Saudi Arabia against Iran to its own advantage, causing increased regional instability. Put simply, the U.S. cannot afford to lose influence with the Saudis.
The U.S. also needs the crown prince to advance his reform program to improve human rights, especially for women, and to diversify the Saudi economy. These reforms are real and portend significant benefits for Saudi Arabia’s longer-term stability, prosperity, and eventual democratic transition. But more than that, if the reform program fails, Saudi Arabia will be left in a post-peak oil global marketplace without enough jobs for its very young population, without sufficient revenue to subsidize those young people, and with an existing cadre of Islamist extremist ideologues. This is a recipe for ISIS 2.0, and potentially, considering the Saudi-Iranian nuclear arms race, an ISIS 2.0 with nuclear weapons.
As Biden and his team rightly move to secure the crown prince’s improved compliance with international norms, they must remain attuned to these zero-sum U.S. interests. In part, that also means he cannot be pressuring the Saudis while giving Iran a free pass. If that happens, well, the crown prince will simply turn to Moscow.
Some will defend Biden’s fairness by pointing to the U.S. airstrikes taken on Thursday against an Iranian proxy militia in Syria. The timing of those strikes just one day before this report’s publication is probably not coincidental. Biden rightly wants the Saudis to know that he takes Iran’s threat seriously, too. Unfortunately, the nature of those strikes, which appear explicitly designed to limit the casualties to one person (the strikes were retaliation for Iran’s killing of an American and wounding of five more), suggests timidity about dealing with Iranian aggression.
That timidity bears a direct connection to Khashoggi’s fate and the broader issue of political assassinations. As Michael Knights and Hanin Ghaddar observed on Thursday, Tehran’s imperial apparatus continues to assassinate journalists and politicians who do things it doesn’t like. They do so with general impunity and to the significant detriment of Iraqi and Lebanese stability. The stability of those nations should concern Americans in that it shapes the power both of Iranian-led terrorists and Salafi-Jihadist groups such as ISIS.
What happened to Jamal Khashoggi was a human tragedy and moral disgrace for which Mohammed bin Salman was responsible. Publicizing this report is positive. But it would be a very serious mistake to make Khashoggi’s tombstone the centerpiece of America’s policy toward Riyadh.
