The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi drives home the consequences of the Trump administration’s refusal to champion democratic values around the globe.
The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi has shocked many in the United States, but it should not come as a surprise. Indeed, it is a logical outgrowth of the policies that the Saudi leadership has been pursuing for the past two years, and the support that it has found for its approach in the Trump White House and parts of the American establishment.
In April 2016, President Barack Obama was making his final visit to Saudi Arabia. He sat opposite King Salman, a septuagenarian battling illness who tended to sit stoic and staid throughout meetings. Despite the king’s poor health, the two of them went back and forth on various issues, many of which included disagreements—on the Iran nuclear agreement, the counter-isiscampaign, Yemen, Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On several of these issues, Obama counseled the Saudis to pursue dialogue with the Iranians instead of sliding further into the sectarian war that was engulfing the region. Then Obama raised human rights.
The Saudis had recently executed 47 prisoners, including a prominent Shiite sheikh, and imprisoned a high-profile blogger critical of the kingdom. In blunt language, Obama protested these actions, and warned the king that Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record was going to bring greater international isolation, since the United States and Europe wouldn’t defend the Saudis’ actions internationally. The sustainability of the U.S.-Saudi relationship was potentially at stake. I was sitting in a long row of U.S. officials along one side of the room and noticed one of the Saudis opposite me stirring irritably in his seat. It was the deputy crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman—widely known by his initials, MbS.
I sat in hundreds of bilateral meetings during eight years in the White House, and I never saw anything quite like what happened next. Usually, no one speaks except the heads of state, unless they call on an expert to offer a particular view—this is especially true in protocol-conscious places like Saudi Arabia. But even though he was seated about halfway down the row of Saudi officials from the king, MbS stood up and began lecturing Obama. You don’t understand the Saudi justice system, he said. He argued that the Saudi public demanded vengeance against criminals, and those who had been beheaded had to be killed for the sake of stability in the kingdom. He dismissed any concerns about jailed bloggers and journalists. With condescension, he offered to arrange for Obama to get a briefing on Saudi justice.
By this point, MbS was already on a rapid ascent. When King Abdullah died in 2015, MbS’s father—King Salman—was a natural successor. Mohammad bin Nayef, a similarly older and experienced member of the royal family, was also an unsurprising choice for crown prince, next in line for the throne. But it was unusual for there to be a “deputy crown prince”—second in line to the throne—particularly one so young. MbS was rumored to be in his 20s, about a half-century younger than his father and Mohammad bin Nayef. It was obvious that Salman was maneuvering to make his young son king as soon as possible, which was going to roil the royal family.
At first, this was a source of obvious concern for American policy makers. MbS was relatively unknown and clearly making a power play that was out of character for the kingdom, where the ruling family likes to govern from some sort of consensus. But then Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), stepped forward. Bin Zayed—similarly known by his initials, MbZ—was a favorite of the American national-security establishment among Arab leaders, and particularly effective at convincing Americans that he was offering them useful advice rather than simply advocating for his own interests (which is what he was usually doing). He started praising MbS to visitors as a visionary, a reformer, a man of energy and action, someone to be trusted and supported. Implicit in this campaign was the assurance that MbS was like-minded, an extension of MbZ in strategy and outlook.
The Emiratis are particularly good at steering American opinion. In addition to direct lobbying of the U.S. government, they wage savvy influence campaigns by cultivating former high-ranking American officials and military officers, members of Congress, scholars at prominent think tanks, leading opinion journalists, and CEOs. Many of these Americans benefit financially from their ties to the Gulf, through business deals, corporate boards, think-tank contributions, or lucrative speaking engagements. Before too long, the word was everywhere, including in the internal meetings of the Obama administration: MbS was the man to watch. MbS deftly capitalized on this momentum, talking up his vision of much-needed reforms to the Saudi economy, and hinting at broader societal reforms. Modernization was the buzzword. And with MbZ’s backing, the message seemed to be that the desert kingdom was soon going to look like Abu Dhabi, where the economy was about more than oil, women could drive, and the authoritarianism was kept conveniently out of the sight of Western visitors.
But this was only part of the picture. MbS also came to echo MbZ in his belief in the twin evils of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood as threats to their rule, and in his loathing of Obama’s foreign policy. They resented the way that Obama had broken with Hosni Mubarak when he faced mass protests in 2011, perhaps seeing it as a harbinger for what would happen if protests of that scale came to their kingdoms. And they hated the Iran nuclear deal because it took the United States off a collision course with the Iranian government.
These critiques—while sometimes overstated—did speak to real differences, and we couldn’t simply subcontract our positions on democracy protests or the Iranian nuclear program to the Saudi and Emirati view. Instead, over the course of 2015, Obama worked hard to reassure the Saudi and Emirati leadership that we were committed to confronting Iran’s destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, while we were also waging war against isis—the most violent perversion of Islam in politics. Indeed, during that 2016 visit to Saudi Arabia, we were having a second summit between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, which was focused largely on strengthening their capabilities to confront Iran and wage war against isis.
But while the diplomatic niceties endured, the subtext was clear: MbZ and MbS were the ascendant voices in the Gulf, and they didn’t care for Obama or his policies. He was someone to be tolerated and waited out. You could also see this in the collection of people they were cultivating in the United States: opponents of the Iran nuclear deal; advocates for a more interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East; business leaders who had chafed a bit at Obama’s tax and regulatory policies; opinion journalists and members of Congress who had become disillusioned with Obama’s cautious approach to the conflicts roiling the Middle East.
Still, in the last year and a half of the Obama administration, we experienced firsthand the direction that was being set. MbS’s first foray into foreign policy as defense minister was a war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen—a war that seemed to have no clear objective other than confronting an Iranian-supported faction. Repeatedly, the Obama administration had to put restrictions on the weapons we provided in support of this effort or apply diplomatic pressure on the Saudis and Emiratis to show restraint, as the war escalated and civilian casualties continued to mount. In Libya, the UAE was backing a strongman in the East—Khalifa Haftar—who was similarly pursuing a more aggressive approach that was doing little to make the country more stable. We also had to intervene to restrain a Saudi and Emirati effort to isolate Qatar from the rest of the GCC based on Qatari ties to Islamist political movements across the region. Within Saudi Arabia, we were careful to engage Mohammad bin Nayef even as we built a relationship with the younger deputy crown prince who aspired to replace him.
