Seize the Day

The proprietor of The Scholar’s Stage has produced a typically exquisite essay that takes a somewhat divergent position on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The murder, in which the Saudi Crown Prince is obviously implicated, provides an excellent opportunity for severing our relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, indeed, reducing our involvement with the Middle East more generally:

The Khashoggi incident is a gift. By refusing to extricate ourselves from the region we have put optics over interests. But Khashoggi’s death now makes the optics of withdrawal and alliance termination easy. It will still be a hard thing to do. The American defense community has strong psychological, emotional, and financial commitments to the Middle East, and to the Saudis in particular. But this is all the more reason for cutting these ties as fast as we can. The Saudi security relationship is a quicksand trap. We must be free of it. Every dollar, soldier, and diplomat that is sent to shore them up is a dollar, soldier, and diplomat who should be engaged in what will soon be be recognized as an existential conflict with the Chinese Communist Party.

The challenge in, as he puts it, “extricating ourselves from the region” are less likely to be military or economic than political. Our primary interest in the region is Israel which punches above its weight in our foreign policy thought. I wish the Israelis well but our interests are not synonymous. They need to come up with a modus vivendi with their neighbors and our aegis is merely delaying the inevitable.