Taking the Path of Least Resistance Is Not Realism
Caving to pressure from a client government and going to them as if you were a supplicant seeking favor are not proof of realism.
Andrew Exum makes a deeply cynical argument in defense of Biden’s expected meeting with the Saudi crown prince:
This might sound old-fashioned, but even if you beat up foreign leaders in speeches or tweets intended for domestic consumption, you can still endeavor to negotiate with them on friendlier terms in private. Why, I ask my progressive friends, can we not do that in Saudi Arabia? Why can we have an ambassador to China, or to Russia even, but not Saudi Arabia? Why can the president sit down with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—a man who fervently and loudly asserts that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—yet not MBS?
Like most defenders of maintaining the current relationship with Saudi Arabia, Exum does not even bother to make the case that Saudi Arabia is a valuable partner for the United States. He can’t give a good reason why the meeting should happen except for some handwaving about normalization agreements with Israel, and even here there is no clear benefit to the United States. In practice, these agreements have meant that the U.S. continues to give Israel a pass for its abuses while throwing more weapons and concessions at the other states. The U.S. facilitates these agreements, but has nothing to show for it except to be even more deeply implicated in the bad policies of all of its clients. The Saudi government is unlikely to normalize relations with Israel in the near term, and even if they did they would expect a large payoff from Washington that is not in our interest to give them.
Exum pretends that Biden’s critics want the U.S. to break off diplomatic relations with Riyadh, but that is just nonsense. By all means, deliver messages privately to the Saudi government, but make sure those messages convey our dissatisfaction. No one expects the U.S. to cut off all ties with the Saudi government, and no one is calling for broad sanctions against the country. Critics of the relationship do want the U.S. to stop arming war criminals to the teeth, and we think that there should be meaningful consequences when the de facto leader of a U.S.-backed government detains, tortures, and kills dissidents, as Mohammed bin Salman has done and continues to do. Exum prefers to shrug and engage in ridiculous whataboutism about Brazil.