‘For me, it’s all about America First. We’re not going to give up hundreds of billions of (Saudi) orders’ for military equipment, Trump told reporters
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s declaration Tuesday that he won’t hold Saudi rulers accountable for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi distilled the president’s approach to foreign policy to its transactional and personalized essence.
Nearly two years into his presidency, Trump is unswerving in his instinct to make everything – from trade to terrorism, from climate change to human rights – about what he sees as the bottom line.
“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Trump said in an oddly brisk statement laying out that the U. S. business and security relationship with Saudi Arabia, and with its designated next leader, is paramount.
He cited arms sales with the kingdom, its role as a bulwark against Iran and the threat of higher oil prices as risks to the United States if his administration ruptured the relationship over the Khashoggi killing.
The statement was issued as Trump prepared to head to his golf resort in Florida for the Thanksgiving holiday and in the wake of the CIA’s conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the Oct. 2 killing of Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor and U. S. resident.
The nothing-to-see-here tone, the fractured syntax and falsehoods and the abundance of exclamation points were pure Trump – and as far from the massaged, nuanced products of past White Houses as one could imagine.
“It’s ‘America First,’ ” Trump told reporters Tuesday before departing for Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. “For me, it’s all about ‘America First.’ We’re not going to give up hundreds of billions of orders” for military equipment that he claimed Russia or China would vie for.
Trump said Saudi Arabia had helped him keep oil prices down, and that without those efforts, “oil prices would go through the roof.”
As with U. S. intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, he overrode his own advisers and downplayed their findings in favor of his own priorities and interpretation of events.
“King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump wrote.
Trump’s clannish management style is also a factor in the Saudi decision. He has entrusted the relationship to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has built a close partnership with MBS, as the young Saudi heir is known. Kushner has argued within the administration that the crown prince is crucial to assisting White House policy against Iran and in providing backing for a U. S.-sponsored Mideast peace package expected soon.
Telling reporters later that there is no “definitive” proof, Trump washed his hands of the matter.
“I think that statement was pretty obvious, what I said,” Trump said, as reporters shouted questions above the din of the presidential helicopter blades. “I’m not going to destroy the world economy,” or harm U. S. interests in the Middle East or elsewhere, over this case, he said.
The Trump administration has applied sanctions on 17 Saudis allegedly involved in the killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, but Trump appeared to be effectively writing off the possibility of larger consequences. Those might have included sanctions or a rebuke against the royal family, cancellation of weapons sales or a boycott.
Trump has also bucked convention and the advice of Cabinet and career government officials in pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, and in deploying punitive tariffs against allies and foes alike.
The president always places himself at the center of events and decides what to do from that standpoint, said Ross Kennedy, an American history professor and presidential scholar at Illinois State University. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s lavish welcome in Riyadh for Trump in 2017 set the tone, Kennedy said.
“He really personalizes his interactions, not just with people in domestic audiences or in business, or with people he meets” at the White House, Kennedy said. “He does it with foreign leaders, and he bases much of what he does by how they treat him personally. The Saudis really laid it on thick.”
Past administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have prized a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and sometimes tempered criticism of human rights abuses that include religious persecution and the jailing of dissidents.
But President George W. Bush also argued that U. S. national security interests were served by defending human rights abroad, and his administration claimed to raise particular cases each time U. S. officials met with leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia and other countries with poor human rights records.
On Iran, Riyadh has leveraged Trump’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal reached under former president Barack Obama, appealing to Trump’s impulse to reverse his predecessor’s policies and giving Trump additional diplomatic footing to pull out of the deal, Kennedy said. Trump’s statement Tuesday begins with an indictment Iranian activities in the Middle East.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded by mocking Trump on his English-language Twitter feed, including a reference to the U. S. president’s false claim that Finland spends “a lot of time raking” its forests to prevent wildfires.
“Mr. Trump bizarrely devotes the FIRST paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse IRAN of every sort of malfeasance he can think of,” Zarif wrote. “Perhaps we’re also responsible for the California fires, because we didn’t help rake the forests – just like the Finns do?”
Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did not attempt to wrap the Saudi decision in diplomatic niceties.
“So, it’s a mean, nasty world out there, the Middle East in particular,” Pompeo said when asked whether the Trump administration is excusing murder. “The United States will continue to have a relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
