Just a suggestion, but is this really the best the “greatest country in the history of the world” can do for allies? If it is, maybe we aren’t as great as some would like to pretend we are.
The majority of them already stopped. And it was never even that big of a deal to anyone other than those who wanted to be terrified/enraged by the xenophobic rhetoric Trump was spewing right before an election.
Tries to do what exactly? Normalize the absolute worst dictators in the world as long as they say nice things about him or he has business interests in their countries?
Remember how crazy some Jihadi went over the Mahumet cartoons in Paris? That is the hornet nest crazy you have to be willing to jump on. SA is home to Mecca and represents much more than just SA.
We are already entangled with our worst ally Turkey pretty deeply and that is not going to change any time soon.
There is also a failure in a dichotomous view that slapping down the Saudis will be a win for Iran. The two foreign policies, even though linked are also separate in expected outcomes.
There were 110 billion reasons Trump did what he did. It’s a shame but out there in the real world, beyond feelings, comes the reality that…money talks.
But we are taking a stand. We aren’t passively observing from a distance.
We have been tacitly supporting repressive butchers in that part of the world for generations because we valued the cheap, steady supply of oil more than we do human life. And that has come back to bite us in the backside time and time again.
Can we at least get a consistent amount that Jamaal Khashoggi’s life was worth to the Trumpists? One minute it’s 12.5 billion and tens of thousands of jobs. The next it is 400 billion and millions of jobs. After that it’s somewhere in the middle.