Saudi Arabia should not labor under misconception that a free pass from Trump for MBS is a free pass from the US. Not only does it seem possible the Congress will penalize them, their behavior will make our relations with them an issue going into the 2020 campaign.
Further, it will not simply be that Democrats will attack Trump & the GOP for coddling the brutal regime and particularly MBS who is behind the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Subsequent abuses--like the torture of the women dissidents reported in the WSJ--will be added to the mix.
In addition, it seems certain that both the Mueller investigation and the Democratic Congress will explore the nature of the Trump family financial ties to the Saudis and. Saudi efforts to work with the Trump campaign or transition to influence outcomes.
Further, Congressional and journalistic investigations into what the Trump team knew about Saudi plans to murder Khashoggi and track down, murder, imprison and punish other dissidents, when they knew it, and what they did about it will also compound the damage.
Trump's bizarre, embarrassing, and indecent free statement of a free pass to the Saudis yesterday is therefore not, as the Saudi's might hope, the end of this chapter. Nor will be Trump's likely upcoming nauseating embrace of the murderous Crown Prince in Argentina at the G20.
This is just the beginning of a coming chill in which the debate over the nature of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia will be more central, penalties against the Saudis will be more likely, and pressure on them to renounce MBS will grow.
Trump and Kushner may be "in their pocket." They may have no consciences or sense of America's real interests in the region. They may condone murder and torture. They may be bought. But America will not be.
It would therefore be a massive error for the Saudis or other gov'ts w/similar inclinations to consider that Trump's immoral, transactional, fabulist foreign policy is a license to carry on w/their worst plans or a guarantee that they will not be penalized for what they've done.
This is not because the US is full of moralists or that we do not sometimes condone bad behavior in our allies. Rather it is because it is not in the US interest to allow tyrants to murder US residents with impunity, not in our interests for them to abuse their peoples...
not in our interests for them to be opponents of democracy or human rights, not in our interests for them to be so odious that their wrong-doing taints us and limits our options, not in our interests to send a message to the world the we may be bought.
Trump's what's-in-it-for-me-ism, his Trump-centric approach, his affinity for authoritarians, are grotesque and indefensible on a moral basis. But, more importantly, they are not in the interests of the United States of America.
Neither is the behavior of this brutal, arrogant regime in Saudi Arabia. And that is why the worst is yet to come for the relationship and ultimately why a price will be paid by the Saudis--and perhaps by Trump and those close to him--for their crimes.
