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Peter Beinart: What is really hiding behind Trump's giggle in Saudi Arabia?
In the United States, the Trump administration announced that it would revoke the visas of the perpetrators it identifies and that it was considering sanctions, demanded by Republican and Democratic lawmakers as well as by other harsher penalties. This is a harsher preliminary answer than that of other world powers like China and Russia, and pretty much in tune with the real actions (as opposed to the outraged words) of Washington's European allies.
But the president, who has recently proclaimed himself "nationalist" rather than "globalist … who wants the world to be well," has devoted much of his public comment on this incident to the harsh limits of US retaliation.
Asked about the price to be paid by the Saudis, Donald Trump said that Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post, was a permanent resident of the United States rather than a citizen and that he had disappeared in Turkey rather than in the United States. The implication was that assuming non-US journalists on foreign soil simply deserved some form of US retribution at a discount. After all, the president is not a globalist.
Trump also pleaded passionately against the United States stopping billions of dollars worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia for fear that rivals like China, Russia or France will drop out contracts and enrich their economy at the expense of the American people.
"This is a very competitive market," said the president this week, just days after announcing plans to pull out of a Cold War-era arms control treaty, partly to prevent China and Russia to compete with the United States on nuclear weapons. "I know that from a certain point of view you can also say," It does not matter "because [what happened to Khashoggi] is a terrible thing. But we would really hurt … our businesses; we would hurt our jobs. "
And Trump said the Saudi-US alliance must survive this ordeal, even though Khashoggi did not, partly because the Saudis were key partners in cracking down on Iran's nuclear prosecution, supporting militant groups and increase influence in the Middle East.
"What are you watching [the Iranians have] made to people – vicious, horrible. And it's not an excuse for what happened to Saudi Arabia, "he says, clinically describing the extrajudicial killing of a human being as" a very bad original concept "that" has been poorly executed " and hidden even more. "It's a bad part of the world," observes the president.
Read: Why the disappearance of Khashoggi is a test for Great Britain
The Russian government, which allegedly poisoned a former Russian spy with a military-grade nerve agent in the UK earlier this year, and the Chinese government, which disappeared last month, has removed a Chinese leader from the United States. International Police Organization Interpol. familiar territory of the Khashoggi affair. Both remained remarkably silent on the incident, in an apparent effort to avoid disrupting the flourishing relationship with the long-standing US strategic ally in the Middle East.
