For Trump it’s all about US interests
US President’s transactional ‘bottom line’ on Saudi Arabia triumphs over human rights, Anne Gearan writes
President Donald Trump’s declaration that he won’t hold Saudi rulers accountable for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi distilled his approach to foreign policy to its transactional and personalised essence.
Nearly two years into his presidency, Trump is unswerving in his instinct to make everything — from trade to terrorism, from climate change to human rights — about what he sees as the bottom line.
“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said in an oddly brisk statement.
It laid out that the US business and security relationship with Saudi Arabia, and with its designated next leader, is paramount.
He cited arms sales with the kingdom, its role as a bulwark against Iran and the threat of higher oil prices as risks to the US if his Administration ruptured the relationship over the Khashoggi killing.
The statement was issued as Trump prepared to head to his golf resort in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday and in the wake of the CIA’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the October 2 killing of Khashoggi, a
Washington Post contributor and US resident.
The nothing-to-see-here tone, the fractured syntax and falsehoods and the abundance of exclamation points were pure Trump.
“It’s ‘America First’,” Trump told reporters before departing for Mar-aLago in Palm Beach, Florida. “For me, it’s all about ‘America First.’ We’re not going to give up hundreds of billions of orders” for military equipment that he claimed Russia or China would vie for.
Trump said Saudi Arabia had helped him keep oil prices down, and that without those efforts, “oil prices would go through the roof”.
As with US intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, he overrode his own advisers and downplayed their findings in favour of his own priorities and interpretation of events. “King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s clannish management style is also a factor in the Saudi decision. He has entrusted the relationship to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has built a close partnership with MBS, as the young Saudi heir is known. Kushner has argued within the Administration that the Crown Prince is crucial to assisting White House policy against Iran and in providing backing for a USsponsored Mideast peace package expected soon.
Telling reporters later that there is no “definitive” proof, Trump washed his hands of the matter. “I think that statement was pretty obvious, what I said,” Trump said, as reporters shouted questions above the din of the presidential helicopter blades. “I’m not going to destroy the world economy,” or harm US interests in the Middle East or elsewhere, over this case, he said.
The Trump Administration has applied sanctions on 17 Saudis allegedly involved in the killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, but Trump appeared to be effectively writing off the possibility of larger consequences. Those might have included sanctions or a rebuke against the royal family, cancellation of weapons sales or a boycott.
Trump has also bucked convention and the advice of Cabinet and career government officials in pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, and in deploying punitive tariffs against allies and foes alike.
The President always places himself at the centre of events and decides what to do from that standpoint, said Ross Kennedy, a history professor at Illinois State University.
Saudi Arabia’s lavish welcome in Riyadh for Trump in 2017 set the tone. “He really personalises his interactions, not just with people in domestic audiences or in business, or with people he meets” at the White House. “He does it with foreign leaders, and he bases much of what he does by how they treat him personally. The Saudis really laid it on thick.”
Past administrations have prized a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and sometimes tempered criticism of human rights abuses that include religious persecution and the jailing of dissidents. But President George W. Bush also argued that US national security interests were served by defending human rights abroad, and his Administration claimed to raise particular cases each time US officials met leaders of countries with poor human rights records.
Riyadh has leveraged Trump’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal reached under former President Barack Obama, appealing to Trump’s impulse to reverse his predecessor’s policies and giving Trump additional diplomatic footing to pull out of the deal, Kennedy said. Trump’s statement begins with an indictment Iranian activities.
Samantha Power, who was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, called the President’s statement an “abomination that will define the ignorance, corruption, cruelty and recklessness of this presidency for generations to come”. And Senator Lindsey Graham, (R), said that there is “strong bipartisan support” for serious sanctions against Saudi Arabia and members of the royal family.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not attempt to wrap the Saudi decision in diplomatic niceties.
“So, it’s a mean, nasty world out there, the Middle East in particular,” he said when asked whether the Trump Administration is excusing murder. “The United States will continue to have a relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia . . . That is the commitment that the President made today. It’s that straightforward.”