The Jamal Khashoggi Double Standard Is Bad for American Business
American and other Western business and financial magnates returned to Riyadh last week for a public display of willingness to continue to invest and trade with Saudi Arabia. This followed six months of disruption of commerce following the gruesome assassination of prominent Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi in his country’s consulate in Istanbul last October.
U.S.-Saudi political relations remain unsettled, as the Khashoggi affair has driven a wedge between the Trump administration and a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate, including Republicans who practice a strident form of virtue-signaling employing threats of sanctions and regime change.
In October, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, fairly enough, that the buck stops with the de facto Saudi ruler, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He went on to call the ruler “toxic” and a “wrecking ball” who “can never be a world leader on the world stage.” Graham added: “Saudi Arabia, if you’re listening: There’s a lot of good people you could choose, but [the crown prince] has tainted your country and tainted himself.” The Palmetto State solon said the U.S. should “sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia.”
That’s right, Graham wants to cripple the economy of America’s most powerful ally in the Middle East, destabilize the world energy markets and drive U.S. gasoline prices sky-high.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in December called the crown prince “reckless and ruthless” and said “he’s gone full gangster.”
Meeting in Ankara with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in January, Graham said that U.S.-Saudi relations could not progress until Prince Mohammed is “dealt with.” A month earlier, Erdogan’s Islamist authoritarian regime was named the world’s worst violator of journalists’ rights by the international Committee to Protect Journalists. “Worst” means worse than Saudi Arabia, worse than Russia, even worse than North Korea. Graham passed on an opportunity to threaten to sanction his gangsterish host.
As the month of May arrives, Mohammed remains in power while Saudi Arabia’s international business dealings return to more or less normal. The grandstanding senators have satisfied their appetites for publicity, but the rift between the Senate and the Trump administration remains confusing to both allies and adversaries. Attention-seeking antics by Graham and Rubio and their like do incalculable harm to U.S. economic and national security interests.
Who and what was Jamal Khashoggi, anyway?
In life, he was unknown outside of the Middle East except to a tiny elite of area specialists. In death, he was presented by much of the Western media and political class as a martyr for the causes of freedom of the press, human rights, and democracy. But that is not the truth.
Unlike most people who purport to report on Khashoggi’s life and death, I actually made his acquaintance and had an informative conversation with him. From 2009 to 2015, I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia. I had a ringside seat for the Arab Spring convulsions as well as the regional monarchies’ moves to retain power.
My position as a speechwriter to the top executives of the Saudi national oil company Aramco put me on the company’s delegation to the Public Relations World Congress in Dubai in March 2012. At a conference luncheon I took the last available seat at one of the round tables. Seated next to me on my right was Khashoggi. He was one of Saudi Arabia’s few homegrown media celebrities; I was familiar with his writing, his media appearances, and his background.
Scion of a wealthy family of Saudi oligarchs, Khashoggi was a smooth operative in the Saudi intelligence establishment’s information and influence campaigns. There are no news media organizations in Saudi Arabia independent of state or royal family control; Khashoggi’s entire career had been in the employ either of the Saudi national intelligence agency, Saudi embassies, or state-controlled media.
He spoke expansively with me about his latest assignment, developing and managing what was to be a Saudi-controlled rival to Qatar’s enormously successful Aljazeera. This was to be a television channel called Al-Arab, financed by “super-investor” Prince Alwaleed and based just off the Saudi mainland in the island ministate of Bahrain.
Khashoggi and I understood one another. It was a given that the enterprise would be an influence operation, an effort in projecting Saudi “soft power.”
Al-Arab began broadcasting for the first time in early 2015, a few days after the death of Saudi King Abdullah, who had supported the enterprise. Before it had been on the air for even 24 hours, Bahraini security forces arrived to shut it down. The only possible explanation for this was mistrust on the part of the new Saudi King Salman, who had the power to cause such action by Bahrain.
When Crown Prince Mohammed detained his cousin Alwaleed and other Saudi billionaires on allegations of corruption in the fall of 2017, Khashoggi decamped for the United States and got a gig producing Washington Post columns denouncing the Saudi regime he had spent his entire past career supporting. Was he really doing this as a “lonely exile,” as Time magazine called him in naming him 2018 Person of the Year?
Even the Washington Post, which had invested much in the campaign to canonize Khashoggi for journalistic sanctity, by late December reported Khashoggi’s ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood and evidence that Khashoggi had written some of his columns under direction of Saudi Arabia’s hostile neighbor, Qatar.
Business favors stability. Despite Turkey and Qatar’s support for the revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood, President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo need to practice diplomacy and not needlessly disrupt relations with those countries. The United States has extraordinarily important trade and investment relationships with Turkey and Qatar. Turkey is a member of NATO, and Qatar is host to an American air force base, across a narrow straight from its hostile neighbor Bahrain, which is headquarters of the U.S. navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Saudi Arabia and its Gulf ally the United Arab Emirates now are forging ever-closer de facto relations with Israel, with formal recognition of the Jewish state not unthinkable in the context of the coming Trump Arab-Israeli peace initiative. Last week Israel accepted the UAE’s invitation to host a pavilion at the 2020 World’s Fair in Dubai.
During my six years in Saudi Arabia, I always had the sense that while the Saudis may not have any great love for Israel, they wanted to do business with the Israelis. Moreover, the Aramco executives constantly paid close attention to news about Israel’s success in technology and other business innovations.
Sanctions, disinvestment, and other ruptures in economic and political relations are hostile acts, not to be undertaken lightly. They are not simply easy-to-use instruments whenever a politician wants to get booked on a Sunday morning network show.
Re-imposing U.S. sanctions against Iran may have been the right decision for overriding geopolitical reasons, but it was not a simple calculation. Disrupting markets through sanctions can wreak damage not just on our foes but also on our own economy as well as on our international friends. Sanctions against Iran foster a regional zero-sum game where Saudi Arabia reaps the rewards of Iran’s reduced ability to sell oil.
Imagine, then, the idiocy of simultaneously strangling the economies of both our adversary Iran and our ally -- Iran’s mortal enemy -- Saudi Arabia. Yet that is what at least one leading Republican senator wants to do.
In 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” the essay that brought her to Ronald Reagan’s attention.
“Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies,” she wrote. “Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest.”
The Carter administration, she said, “finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s ‘true interests.’”
In a just world, Graham and Rubio would be required to wear dunce caps and choke on chalk dust until they have copied out all 10,000 words of Kirkpatrick’s essay.
