Biden's Embrace of a Despotic War Criminal

The crown prince’s legacy is mostly one of repression and destruction.

Max Boot shills for Mohammed bin Salman in order to defend Biden’s visit:

In truth, MBS is a more ambivalent figure than the cartoon villain that he is so often made out to be in media coverage. It’s true that he is cruel and repressive. He has created a climate of fear in Saudi Arabia, imprisoned dissidents and accumulated absolute power. But, while illiberal politically, he is liberalizing Saudi society. (I recommend Graeme Wood’s article in the Atlantic on the changes taking place.)

Western pundits have been making excuses for U.S.-aligned despots and dictators for a long time, and they usually follow the same script: yes, he’s brutal and repressive, but look at all the new and modern things he’s doing! The assumption is that as long as the cruel despot checks off a few boxes he can be credited with being a “modernizer” and “reformer,” and that effectively cancels out the egregious and worsening abuses that he commits as he concentrates more and more power in his own hands. Boot goes so far as to compare Mohammed bin Salman to Ataturk and the shah of Iran, though one would have thought he would avoid the latter comparison for obvious reasons. In most cases, when the U.S. bets on some young “reforming” authoritarian, it doesn’t take long to discover that the authoritarianism and repression overshadow and corrupt any improvements that might be made along the way. This kind of argument goes beyond the grudging acceptance that the U.S. will sometimes have to cooperate with unsavory governments into something approaching cheerleading and apologism.

Boot sets up the strawman of “completely isolating” Saudi Arabia as the alternative to what Biden is doing, but absolutely no one is calling for the total isolation of the kingdom. What Biden’s critics have said and will continue to say is that the U.S. should not be indulging and enabling the Saudi government’s abuses and crimes, and it should stop providing their government with the weapons, military assistance, and diplomatic cover that it needs to commit them. Biden’s critics also want the U.S. to a put an end to the impunity with which Mohammed bin Salman and other client states commit such crimes, and that means holding them to the same standard that our government would use with any abusive leader. This would certainly be better than the reflexive embrace of the status quo that Boot is defending.

A good way to identify something as a piece of pro-Saudi propaganda in Western media is to check it for references to Yemen and the war that Saudi Arabia and the rest of its coalition have been waging there for the last seven years. It will not surprise you to learn that Boot never so much as mentions Yemen even in passing, because it is that atrocious war and the many atrocities that coalition forces have committed during that war against innocent Yemenis that have made the crown prince so loathsome in the eyes of millions of Americans. While the current truce is holding, the war has not ended, and Yemen’s massive humanitarian crisis has not abated. Mohammed bin Salman bears a lot of the responsibility for the war and the humanitarian crisis, and that has to be included in any reckoning of what he has done since rising to power.

It is true that previous presidents have met and worked with even worse leaders than the crown prince, but in many of these other cases there was at least a compelling reason for cooperating with those governments. Contrary to what lobbyists and Gulf-funded think tankers will tell you, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is not that valuable to the United States and the Saudi government doesn’t do much of anything that advances U.S. interests. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is frequently justified as an ugly but “necessary” one, but the truth is that the U.S. doesn’t need it at all. It is just an ugly arrangement that policymakers and pundits defend out of habit or misguided attachment or because it seems useful for some other agenda.

Boot says, “There is no easy way to deal with such a complicated figure whose legacy is so mixed,” but there is no great difficulty here because the crown prince’s legacy is mostly one of repression and destruction. In the short time that he has been Saudi defense minister and then crown prince, he has inflicted misery and famine on tens of millions of people in Yemen, and he has had dozens of people put to death in mass executions after they were convicted on trumped-up charges of terrorism . As the architect of the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, he is one of the foremost war criminals of our time. The president’s decision to engage with him and meet him personally while largely keeping the U.S.-Saudi relationship unchanged deserves all the criticism it has received.