A massive blow to Us-saudi relations

Is this the end of the “special relationship” between America and Saudi Arabia? For more than 70 years, this valuable alliance has endured, despite repeated attempts by outsiders to sabotage it, said Abdulrahman Al-rashed in Asharq Al-awsat (London). But it now faces a “difficult test”. Last week Congress overrode Barack Obama’s veto of a bill that will allow the families of American victims of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia for alleged complicity in the attacks: it will enable courts to waive claims to foreign sovereign immunity in cases involving terrorist acts on US soil. The vote was a personal humiliation for Obama, who has never had a law enacted over his veto. More importantly, however, it was a blow to the world order. The law will “damage the concept of the sovereignty of nations”, and undermine joint Us-saudi efforts to tackle terrorism.

A White House spokesman called the vote “the single most embarrassing thing that the US Senate has done” in over 30 years, said Paul Mcleary in Foreign Policy – and you can see his point. As the CIA director John Brennan has noted, no country has more to lose from undermining the global legal norm of sovereign immunity than the US. If Congress proceeds with this bill in its current form, it will unleash a flurry of lawsuits against Saudi Arabia, and open up the US to similar legal assaults from other countries, said Andrew J. Bowen in Arab News (Jeddah). “At a time when populism is rife and stifling globalisation”, this is the last thing the world needs.

We could conceivably end up in a situation where British victims of the IRA started suing Washington for failing to stop Irish terrorists fundraising in the US, said the FT. US legislators should think again before opening up this “Pandora’s box” of global lawsuits. Congress’s hardening anti-saudi sentiment is understandable. While there may be “no hard evidence of official Saudi support” for 9/11, the kingdom has certainly played a “toxic” role in promoting radical Islam, and its current brutal bombing campaign in Yemen has attracted growing condemnation. But this bill risks being perceived as a form of US “judicial imperialism”: it is bound to invite retaliation. There are “less self-defeating ways” to raise the heat on Saudi Arabia than by “outsourcing foreign policy to litigators”.