The present leadership aside, there is nothing very new about the special relationship. The George W. Bush administration maintained close ties to Riyadh, despite the involvement of fifteen Saudis in the September 11 attacks and the pervasive influence of Saudi-funded Islamism on jihadist movements around the globe. The Obama administration was even more assiduous in courting the Saudis. According to a Congressional Research Service study, between 2010 and 2015 the US concluded a record $111 billion in arms deals with the Kingdom, notwithstanding a Saudi crackdown on peaceful protesters in neighboring Bahrain and a Saudi-backed military coup against Egypt’s first democratically-elected government.
And it was during the Obama years that MBS and his father, King Salman, ascended to power. Notably, the Obama administration did not flinch when MBS launched the disastrous Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen in March 2015, apparently without consulting the White House. Sustained by US arms sales, the brutal Saudi-led offensive has killed tens of thousands of civilians and pushed millions of children to the brink of starvation, creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. In August, UN investigators issued a report accusing the Saudis and other parties in the conflict of possible war crimes. Even as the UN findings were coming out, the Republican-led Senate rejected a measure to cut off US military support in next year’s defense appropriations bill. [...]
America’s failure to take a stand against the ruthless treatment of reformers like al-Qahtani and al-Khair has increasingly put us on the wrong side of history. Even aside from our moral standing in the world order, US support for Saudi adventures like the invasion of Bahrain or the campaign in Yemen have done nothing to serve American strategic interests. In his recent book Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States Since FDR, Riedel argues that Washington would do better to treat the Saudi monarchy like Russia and China in the late phases of Communism: engage on areas of common interest, but push back on reform and call them out for human rights abuses.
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