The president is continuing his Saudi First foreign policy:
When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrives at the White House on Tuesday, it will mark the first such visit since he was implicated in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
And he will be feted as one of the United States’s closest allies, expected to receive significant economic and national security wins.
Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington is a disgrace, and it is outrageous that he will likely leave with new U.S. pledges of support and more arms deals. The crown prince is a war criminal and a murderer in addition to being an increasingly repressive despot. He is the de facto leader of one of the world’s worst governments, and he ought to be treated like a pariah. Welcoming him to the White House is an affront to American interests and basic human decency. Trump defined his first term with his abject servility to Saudi and Emirati interests. It seems that he wants to outdo himself in the second term.
According to the report, Trump is “considering a bilateral security agreement pledging to defend Saudi Arabia in the event of any attack.” Formally pledging to defend the Saudis was a terrible idea when Biden was obsessed with it, and it remains so now. Trump’s arbitrary security guarantee to Qatar was a horrible mistake, and doing the same with the Saudis would be even worse.
There are reports that Trump is considering supplying the Saudis with F-35s. Providing more weapons to the Saudis will enable them to commit more acts of aggression against their neighbors in the future. We have every reason to believe that they will use those weapons to massacre civilians just as they did during the war on Yemen. The U.S. shouldn’t be rewarding the war criminals in Riyadh with advanced fighter jets or anything else.
We should remember what the Saudis have already done with the weapons and jets they received from the U.S. Beginning in 2015, they intervened in Yemen and waged a brutal, indiscriminate air campaign that killed many thousands of civilians. They escalated what had been an internal conflict into an international war. As defense minister and crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman was the driving force behind the Saudi intervention, and he has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands.
The Saudi coalition also imposed a blockade and waged a pitiless economic war on the country that reduced many areas to near-famine and famine conditions. Before the Israelis deliberately starved the people of Gaza, the Saudis and their allies did the same to the people of Yemen. The estimated death toll from the war at the end of 2021 was 377,000 people, and that is a conservative estimate.
