The Saudi Prince and 'Immunity'

Practicality versus principle

Outrage in Washington boils anew with the Biden administration determining yesterday that the de facto Saudi ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman (frequently cited as MBS), has immunity against prosecution in a case involving the 2018 assassination and dismemberment of Saudi-born journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. MBS’s alleged ordering of the gory, premeditated murder in Istanbul tests a Democratic administration’s commitment to basic human values versus the complexity of a Middle East where Saudi Arabia is instrumental in several issues the United States is pursuing.

Khashoggi was a journalist for the Washington Post who had lived outside of the Kingdom for years coincident with him publishing scathing criticisms of Bin Salman’s behaviour. No one saw him depart after video proved he entered the Kingdom’s Turkish embassy in 2018. U.S. intelligence and Turkish officials relayed later that operatives of the Saudi regime lured him in to accomplish tasks preparing for marrying a Turkish woman. Saudi agents then murdered the journalist one afternoon before removing his body in pieces. The grisly action required such equipment as to prove elaborate planning which stretches credibility for Riyadh’s suggestion these agents were ‘rogue actors’.

President Trump portrayed angre about the killing of a green card holder but disputed that evidence proved MBS as the instigator.Allie Malloy, 'Trump Says He is Extremely Angry About Khashoggi Murder, but Defends Relationship with MBS', cnn, 30 June 2019 The rapid-fire nature of the news cycle during the Trump administration meant the story drew much attention for Khashoggi’s colleagues and critics of the Kingdom but led to little effort to bring Bin Salman to account. The former president’s public dislike of the Washington Post may also contributed to the relative inaction on this scandalous event. The Trump administration ended in 2021 with no sanctions against the Crown Prince and little likelihood he would come to U.S. soil where inevitably public criticism would ensue.

President Joe Biden, along with many Democrats and Saudi critics, championed the Khashoggi case, discussing it on the campaign trail leading to the 2020 election. Yet Biden’s seemingly reversed of this stance in July 2022 by traveling to the Kingdom and sharing a ‘fist bump’ with the Crown Prince which became a controversial remnant from the trip. Biden’s visit also showed that Saudi Arabia preferred Trump with whom MBS seemed to have personal rapport rather some sort of enduring nation-to-nation respect. Further evidence of the special personal ties with the Crown Prince appears with news reports that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin both received lucratic financial deals from Riyadh upon their departure from U.S. Government service.Kate Kelly and David A. Kirkpatrick, 'Kushner's and Mnuchin's Quick Pivots to Business with the Gulf', NYT, 22 May 2022 The good will towards these individuals did not transfer into lowering petroleum prices at a time of skyrocketing inflation. The U.S. public would just have to tolerate the Kingdom sucking up higher profits as post-COVID energy demands rose along with prices at the pump.

By all rights, one would have expected the 2020 civil lawsuit by Khashoggi’s financee to advance in the U.S. courts. Yesterday the Justice Department corrected that assumption—no, the Crown Prince has immunity as the prime minister of a sovereign nation.A.L. Lee, 'Saudi crown prince granted immunity from lawsuit in journalist's killing', UPI, 18 November 2022

The Biden administration must have had deep heartburn over the choices it confronted. Undoubtedly, President Biden himself recognised the array of issues for which Washington needs Bin Salman’s help. Stephen Kalin and Summer Said, 'Biden Administration Says Crown Prince has Immunity in Khashoggi Trial', wsj.com, 18 November 2022 That list includes advocating for higher production output within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), concerns about how Saudi Arabia would interact with both Iran and Israel in the volatile Middle East, and where China would fit into a region should the United States break its almost century-old links with the Kingdom. Each of those alone is a huge issue for the globe but together they become potentially destabilising friction points for the United States over the long haul. Former President Trump may believe he could handle the situation far better because of his personal ties with the Crown Prince but that would never be a given, either.

Nations pursue their interests. Saudi Arabia’s interests here were several, including keeping MBS out of the U.S. legal system. This is one of the most basic realities for the world we live in. States with any sort of leverage, such as black sludge in the ground, can push their interlocutors into corners they don’t want to be in, as Biden and every other administration in U.S. history has found out. This harsh reminder of the brutality of trying to silence dissent was a tough one to swallow because we do not have a plausible way to bring Saudi behaviour to heel since they have things we want.

Human rights more frequently than we would like fail to win as our top priority in U.S. relations with other states. Biden’s plight in this case is not new nor do I give him a pass on it. Part of our problem is that we proclaim our commitment to human rights, the rule of law, and associated valued principles so loudly when they are discussed in the vacuum of a campaign or in a classroom. Governing and relating to other countries is hard, really really hard. Protecting human rights is most definitely a cherished principle. We often do not have the instruments, however, or even the political will to hold the sanctity of this principle above everything else in dealing with others. That is a disappointment to many at home but it is the reality of the world which every U.S. president operates in.

In thirty years at the National War College, we invariably addressed the question of what are the core U.S. interests? Usually we say two absolute interests are defending the nation against attack and advancing the economic status of our people. Those are usually pretty commonly agreed upon. Since 9/11, advancing our values increasingly appears for many on the list of core national interests. The Khashoggi/MBS case shows that sometimes we create a hierarchy even within those three interests with defending the homeland against a possible nuclear Iran and promoting access to petroleum to continue our economic growth outweighing protecting human rights.

That is tough for us to accept. Perhaps we can find a way to have them all three but this case did not show that way. I am not surprised by the Biden choice but am convinced it will occur again in some similar choice in the future. Aspiring presidential candidates would do well to take that into consideration as they verbalise their ‘redlines’ on various human rights questions. FIN