The World Is a Foreign Country

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia under Mohammed Bin Salman is a strategic liability to the United States:

The larger truth is that, with Mohammed bin Salman as its de facto ruler, the kingdom has become a strategic liability to the United States. The crown prince has destabilized the region with his reckless adventurism, including the abduction of the pro-American Lebanese prime minister and a boycott of neighboring Qatar, which hosts the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East. His disastrous intervention in Yemen has strengthened Iran while triggering what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. His boasts to White House counselor Jared Kushner that he would help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while forming an “Arab NATO” have proved empty.

When the Saudi government tried to push up oil prices this month in contravention of Mr. Trump’s public lobbying, it was a reminder that it will pursue its own interests in producing and marketing oil, not those of any U.S. president. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s vintage-1980s view of the kingdom is contradicted by the 2018 fact that the United States, as the world’s largest crude oil producer, is less dependent than ever on the Middle East for energy. Saudi Arabia has so far failed to move the oil price and cannot seriously threaten U.S. supplies.

I disagree with them in several particulars:

1. It isn’t new. Saudi Arabia has been a strategic liability to the United States for decades. They are the home and nurturing place for Al Qaeda. Most of those who participated in the attacks on the U. S. in 2001 were Saudis. The Saudis have dispersed Islamist Saudi imams who preach hatred for liberal values on a daily basis throughout the world. They are not our friends.
2. It isn’t just Saudi Arabia. Turkey is a strategic liability. The Gulf States are strategic liabilities.
3. The Iranians aren’t our friends, either, but the Iranian people are much more favorably disposed to us than the Saudis are.
4. Jamal Khashoggi wasn’t a liberal democrat, either. He was a supporter of a different faction of the Saud family than that of MBS. He was murdered as part of a dynastic struggle in Saudi Arabia with which we should have no truck.
5. Despite how awful the Syrian and Saudi governments are there are no better alternatives at hand.
6. Many people in the Middle East genuinely want a different sort of world than we do. They consider it a religious imperative. For them democracy doesn’t foster liberal values but provides a vehicle for them to promote their illiberal values.

Other countries really are foreign to us. I don’t know why the editors of the Washington Post think otherwise.