Friedman Writes Another Love Letter to Mr. Bonesaw

The push to lock the U.S. into a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia is deranged, and it needs to be opposed at every turn.

Tom Friedman just can’t stop shilling for Mohammed bin Salman:

The crown prince wants as peaceful a region as possible, and a Saudi Arabia as secure from Iran as possible, so he can focus on making Saudi Arabia a diversified economic powerhouse.

The Saudi crown prince is a “corrupt psychopath,” as Matt Duss accurately described him, and he has spent most of his time at the top of the government for the last nine years wreaking havoc and destabilizing the region. His ridiculous Neom project has been a colossal waste of resources. Mohammed bin Salman has made an already brutal authoritarian state even worse than it was when he ascended to high office.

Mohammed bin Salman’s atrocious war in Yemen was a monstrous failure, and he drove tens of millions of people to the brink of famine in the process. Almost everything that he touches has turned to garbage. The people of Saudi Arabia have the misfortune of living under his repressive rule for decades to come, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. needs to continue indulging him. This is the war criminal leader that the Biden administration wants to do a deal with, and this is the despot that Friedman still wants to shower with praise.

It was embarrassing and disgusting when Western pundits, politicians, and journalists embraced Mohammed bin Salman seven years ago. Friedman wrote what I called a love letter to a war criminal in November 2017 when he gushed about what he called an Arab Spring “led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince.” At the time that he wrote that, Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for waging an indefensible war in Yemen that ended up claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, and he had just rounded up dozens of his domestic enemies and shaken them down in the name of “fighting corruption.” No one has ever accused Tom Friedman of having good judgement, but this was terrible even for him.

Friedman’s latest love letter to Mr. Bonesaw normally wouldn’t be worth talking about, but the president reportedly takes his columns seriously and Friedman uses those columns to put forward arguments that the administration wants people to see. His claim that the crown prince wants to make Saudi Arabia “more like the best of the old Israel” is either something that the president wants people to buy, or it is something that Friedman is trying to sell to the president. It is nonsense any way you slice it.

Mohammed bin Salman wants to offer just enough superficial changes in social policy to keep his people in line and to keep foreign investment flowing. He is determined to repress the slightest hint of dissent no matter how many innocent victims there are. The U.S. should want to have nothing to do with him.

The push to lock the U.S. into a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia is deranged, and it needs to be opposed at every turn. The Saudi government does not deserve a U.S. security commitment and it should never get one. The U.S. has no good reason to go to war for Saudi Arabia under any ruler, and it definitely shouldn’t pledge to defend a kingdom ruled by someone as reckless and cruel as Mohamed bin Salman.