Disaster in the DesertNovember/December 2019 17murder o the Saudi dissident Jamal
Khashoggi by Saudi o
cials in the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Trump and
Netanyahu did their best to shield their
Saudi partner from international con-
demnation, and Trump even restricted
congressional access to intelligence about
the murder, sowing further divisions in
Washington. With Riyadh so dependent
on Washington and MBS momentarily
vulnerable to intrafamily rivalries, the
White House could have used the crisis to
insist that MBS take responsibility for the
murder and rein in his foreign exploits.
But Trump didn’t even try, allowing the
e
cacy o Saudi leadership o the anti-
Iran coalition to be further undermined.
Nor has Saudi Arabia helped much on
the peace process. Experienced hands
could have told Trump that the Saudis
would never get out ahead o the Pales-
tinians. But Trump had given responsi-
bility for the peace process to Kushner,
who was impressed by MBS’s refresh-
ingly open attitude to Israel and disdain
for the Palestinians and uninterested in
the lessons o past failures. In 2017, MBS
promised Kushner that he could deliver
the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas
to the negotiating table on Trump’s
terms. He summoned Abbas to Riyadh
and told him to accept Kushner’s ideas in
exchange for $10 billion in Saudi fund-
ing. Instead, Abbas refused and promptly
leaked the details o the exchange, causing
a furor in the Arab world.
MBS also promised Kushner that
Saudi Arabia would acquiesce in Trump’s
recognition o Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital and reassured him that any nega-
tive reaction on the Arab street would
die down in a couple o months. That
was enough for Trump to dismiss all
objections and announce his decision atfurther undermining its already limited
ability to counter Iran in the Gulf, while
driving Qatar into Iran’s arms, since it
had no other way o maintaining access
to the world except by utilizing Iranian
airspace, something which the Iranians
were only too happy to provide. This
asco has bedeviled the administration
ever since, with the Saudis blocking all
attempts at patching up the rift.
MBS’s war in Yemen has also created
the worst humanitarian crisis in the
world. Saudi Arabia’s atrocities against
Yemeni civilians, carried out with
U.S.-supplied aircraft using U.S. ord-
nance, have brought global outrage. The
damage to the United States’ reputation
has been so great that a bipartisan
congressional consensus tried to suspend
arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Trump
brushed aside the challenge, but only by
invoking executive powers, which further
infuriated Congress and has jeopardized
the sustainability o one o the pillars o
the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
MBS’s determination to seek a
military solution in Yemen has met its
match in the Houthis, whose dependence
on Iran has grown with their ambitions to
rule the country. Tehran is now supplying
them with ballistic missiles and armed
drones for use against Saudi targets,
including civilian airports and oil facili-
ties. (Hence initial suspicions o Houthi
involvement in a September attack that
took out almost hal o Saudi Arabia’s oil
production capacity. Although the disrup-
tion was short lived, Saudi Arabia’s once
stalwart reliability as the world’s largest
oil exporter has been put in doubt by the
unintended consequences o its Trump-
encouraged adventurism.)
The outrages continued to pile up
when MBS apparently ordered the04_Indyk_Blues.indd 17 9/23/19 3:56 PM