| Response to Khashoggi crisis typifies the Trump foreign policy doctrine | |||||||||||
“The Trump administration and the Saudi royal family are searching for a mutually agreeable explanation for the death of [Khashoggi] that will avoid implicating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is among the president’s closest foreign allies, according to analysts and officials in multiple countries,” Shane Harris reports. “But it will be difficult for the young ruler to escape scrutiny, as mounting evidence points not only to the Saudi government’s knowledge of Khashoggi’s fate, but also to a connection by Mohammed to his disappearance.” The effort to make it happen, however, speaks to eight elements of the Trump doctrine: 1. Trump is transactional and focused on the bottom line. “In days of private phone calls and Oval Office huddles, Trump has repeatedly reached for reasons to protect the U.S.-Saudi relationship,” administration officials and presidential advisers tell Bob Costa, Josh Dawsey and Phil Rucker. “Trump has stressed Saudi Arabia’s huge investment in U.S. weaponry and worries it could instead purchase arms from China or Russia. He has fretted about the oil-rich desert kingdom cutting off its supply of petroleum to the United States. He has warned against losing a key partner countering Iran’s influence in the Middle East. He has argued that even if the United States tried to isolate the Saudis, the kingdom is too wealthy to ever be truly isolated.” Trump defender Pat Robertson captured this mindset on his Christian Broadcasting Network: “You’ve got one journalist … You’ve got $100 billion worth of arms sales. … We cannot alienate our biggest player in the Middle East.” 2. Trump believes in spheres of influence. My colleagues on the White House beat report that Trump has repeatedly emphasized that, even though Khashoggi has been living in Virginia and writing for The Washington Post, he is a Saudi citizen — “the implication being that the disappearance is not necessarily the United States’ problem.” Respect for the “sovereignty” of other countries has become a Trump buzzword in foreign policy speeches, including at the United Nations last month. He’s said the U.S. shouldn’t meddle in another nation’s domestic affairs. Other times, he’s suggested that he adheres to an old-fashioned diplomatic view that great powers should be able to control events in their parts of the world. (Think Russia and Ukraine.) 3. Trump does not believe promoting human rights or democracy should be central aims of U.S. foreign policy. The president has been especially friendly with many authoritarian leaders over the past two years and resisted pressuring them on human rights. It’s a very different worldview than the one expressed by GOP internationalists like Sen. March Rubio. The Florida Republican took a hard line Tuesday on CNN. “Human rights is worth blowing that up,” he said, “and luring someone into a consulate where they’re thereby murdered, dismembered and disposed of is a big deal.” 4. Countering Iran trumps almost everything else in Trump’s eyes, and the Saudis are key to his strategy. “A new round of sanctions on Iranian oil exports are expected to take effect Nov. 5,” Ishaan Tharoor notes. “David Sanger of the New York Times reported that White House officials fear the Khashoggi imbroglio ‘could derail a showdown with Iran and jeopardize plans to enlist Saudi help to avoid disrupting the oil market.’ With almost comic timing, Foreign Affairs published a new anti-Iran manifesto by [Mike] Pompeo this week. The U.S.'s top diplomat heralded Trump’s ‘moral clarity’ and eagerness to confront ‘outlaw regimes,’ underscoring the vast double standard the White House applies to Riyadh and Tehran.” 5. Trump selectively believes people’s denials when he wants to believe them.
As the president of the Council on Foreign Relations puts it:
The Trump real estate business has sold properties to Saudis, and more Saudi visitors have been staying at his hotels since he became president, despite his denials this week that has no financial interests related to the country. As a candidate in 2015 and 2016, the president boasted about deals he’s made in the past with Saudi businessmen. Eleven Democratic senators sent a letter to Trump and his sons yesterday seeking a full accounting of any financial ties between the Trump Organization and Saudi Arabia. Remember, the president has never released his tax records and his business is privately held. 7. Foreign policy is a family affair. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had no meaningful foreign policy experience before the president put him in charge of trying to negotiate Middle East peace, is playing a starring role in this drama because of the close bond he forged with MBS, who he reportedly communicates with over an encrypted text messaging app. Trump also told reporters last week that he has heard Ivanka Trump’s name discussed as a possible ambassador to the United Nations, and that she’d be “incredible" but that he'd be accused of nepotism if he appointed her. Last year, the president had the first daughter take his seat at a G-20 summit of world leaders. The president’s sons have also continued to travel overseas while he was president to pursue business deals. 8. Trump is trying to limit the flow of intelligence that is unhelpful to his agenda. “Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said the administration had ‘clamped down’ on sharing intelligence about the Khashoggi case,” per Bob, Josh and Phil. “He said an intelligence briefing scheduled for Tuesday was canceled and he was told no additional intelligence would be shared with the Senate for now, a move he called ‘disappointing.’ ‘I can only surmise that probably the intel is not painting a pretty picture as it relates to Saudi Arabia,’ Corker said. Based on the earlier intelligence he had reviewed, he added, ‘everything points not to just Saudi Arabia, but to MBS.’” Restricting intelligence briefings for a GOP committee chair is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s broader move to crack down on leaks that belie the president’s public statements. A Treasury Department official was charged yesterday with leaking financial records related to the Russia investigation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also just issued a subpoena to an immigration attorney in an effort to compel him to reveal who shared an internal memo related to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s order to restrict political asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang crimes. 
Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a news conference in Manama, Bahrain. (Hasan Jamali/AP)
-- If you read only one thing today, make it Khashoggi’s heartbreaking final column for The Post about the need for free expression in the Arab world. “The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power,” he wrote. “During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe, which grew over the years into a critical institution, played an important role in fostering and sustaining the hope of freedom. Arabs need something similar. … We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”-- Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah received a draft of this column from Khashoggi’s translator and assistant the day after he was reported missing in Istanbul. “The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen,” Attiah explains in an editor’s note. “This column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for.” -- The Post’s Editorial Board notes that Khashoggi would have turned 60 this past weekend: “[He] held numerous positions during his career, including as an adviser to a Saudi ambassador to the United States. But he was first and foremost a journalist — one who relentlessly tried to push the boundaries of free speech. He was twice fired as the editor of the most progressive Saudi newspaper, Al Watan, in one case for publishing sharp critiques of Islamist extremists. A television news network he helped to found in Bahrain in 2012 was taken off the air after one day, after it broadcast an interview with a critic of that country’s authoritarian regime. “A turning point for Mr. Khashoggi came in 2016, when he warned the regime of King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, about ‘an overly enthusiastic embrace of then-President-elect Donald Trump,’ as he later described it in The Post. His column with the Saudi-owned international Arabic daily Al Hayat was canceled, and he was forced off Twitter. ‘I spent six months silent, reflecting on the state of my country and the stark choices before me,’ he wrote in his first Post column, published 13 months ago this week. Then he acted. ‘I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice,’ he declared. ‘I can speak when so many cannot.’” -- Additional commentary from the Post opinions page:
-- “The Donald Trump lecture series on ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” by editorial cartoonist Tom Toles:
-- Khashoggi was dead within minutes of entering the Saudi Consulate — beheaded, dismembered, his fingers severed — and within two hours the killers were gone, according to details from audio recordings described by a senior Turkish official to the New York Times’s David D. Kirkpatrick and Carlotta Gall: “After he was shown into the office of the Saudi consul, Mohammad al-Otaibi, the agents seized Mr. Khashoggi almost immediately and began to beat and torture him, eventually cutting off his fingers, the senior Turkish official said, describing the audio recordings. Whether Mr. Khashoggi was killed before his fingers were removed and his body dismembered could not be determined. But the consul was present and objected . . . ‘Do this outside. You will put me in trouble,’ Mr. Otaibi told the agents … ‘If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up,’ one of the agents replied.” -- Recordings from a Saudi dissident living in Canada demonstrate MBS’s extensive efforts to lure his critics back to Saudi Arabia to detain them. Loveday Morris and Zakaria Zakaria report: “Omar Abdulaziz hit record on his phone and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket, he recalled, taking a seat in a Montreal cafe to wait for two men who said they were carrying a personal message from [the crown prince]. When they arrived, Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi opposition activist, asked why they had come all the way to Canada to see him. ‘There are two scenarios,’ one of the emissaries said, speaking of Abdulaziz in the third person. In the first, he can go back home to Saudi Arabia, to his friends and family. In the second: ‘Omar goes to prison.’ Which will Omar choose? they asked. To drive home what was at stake, the visitors brought one of Abdulaziz’s younger brothers from Saudi Arabia to the meeting.” -- Bad optics: Saudi Arabia sent a $100 million payment to the United States the same day Pompeo arrived in Riyadh. From John Hudson: “Saudi Arabia publicly pledged the payment to support U.S. stabilization efforts in northeastern Syria in August, but questions persisted about when and if Saudi officials would come through with the money. The timing of the transfer … raised questions about a potential payoff as Riyadh seeks to manage the [Khashoggi blowback]. The State Department denied any connection between the payment and Pompeo's discussions with Saudi officials about Khashoggi.” -- More coverage from the mainstream media:
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