Opinion : The West will keep backing Saudi Arabia, it has to.
The death of Jamal Khashoggi, a former high-ranking Saudi journalist turned political dissident and democracy activist has raised many questions about the West’s close bond with Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler, Mohammad Bin Salman. Khashoggi was a man with more than four decades of journalistic work, giving him a special insight into the affairs of the Middle East region, and those of Saudi Arabia, as he was his country’s top journalist. Khashoggi, after leaving the country, travelled the world and wrote newspaper columns about the previewed dangers of “MbS” and the oppression of democracy in his country. As he entered the KSA’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain marriage papers, he was killed. While the Saudi Government’s official report claims he died in a fistfight, it is generally agreed through numerous pieces of evidence that Khashoggi was butchered inside the consulate by an alleged “hit squad” flown in from Saudi Arabia. One would think that the West, as the traditional beacon of democracy in the world, would be outraged at the killing of a man who was allegedly cut into pieces for supporting freedom of expression. But Trump’s America and other U.S allies have not condemned Saudi Arabia for its actions. This is not objectivity as some put it. It’s strategic. The West has to support Saudi Arabia to carry out any of its goals in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia’s effort to cover up Khashoggi’s killing was unkempt and done with minimal effort, having first claimed Khashoggi did in fact leave the embassy, but then claimed two weeks later he had died in a fight inside the consulate. The Saudi government, specifically Mohammad Bin Salman, a man who strategically worked his way up to essentially ruling Saudi Arabia would know how to make Khashoggi’s silencing more subtle. But at the end of the day, they would not need to do that. Firstly, the Saudis would not care about public opinion abroad because generally, (especially in the non-Muslim world), the public opinion regarding Saudi Arabia is almost never a positive one anyways, so the KSA wouldn’t bear in mind the repercussions of public opinion when deciding to carry out such an action. Furthermore, the West needs to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia because they are the only power in the region that would be able to challenge the ever growing power that is Iran. The U.S can no longer prop itself or Israel up as Iran’s competitor in the Middle East because those two countries are extremely unpopular amongst Sunni Arabs in the region. Thus, to support Saudi Arabia so immensely and advertise it as Iran’s resistance would make Sunni Arabs lean more against Iran rather than stay in the middle ground, because this way it’s no longer a question of choosing between the lesser of two evils (often, the lesser evil for Sunni Arabs is Iran), but rather, the Sunni Arabs have a powerful side they can call their own. It almost gives the Sunni Arabs a truly dominant role in the region.
One could point to Turkey, a NATO member, and a country far more democratic than the KSA as a power for the West to support, but this would simply never work. Erdogan, is an Islamic populist in terms of internal and external affairs. Whereas Saudi Arabia tends to avoid criticizing Israel, Erdogan does so every time Palestine is in the news. Erdogan came to power in part due to a popular awakening of the religious working class in his country, something most Arab autocracies (Egypt, KSA etc) actively seek to repress, as this is the gravest threat to their regimes. Despite being at odds with Iran and on good terms with Saudi Arabia on issues regarding Syria or Yemen, Turkey and Iran are still on generally decent terms. Iran is very Islamist and such a system was created through a popular rising led by the marginalized conservative people in that country. Their joint alliance with Qatar amidst the boycott of Qatar (Turkey’s alliance due to joint support of Hamas, Iran’s to agitate Saudi Arabia) is a source of ease in relations between Turkey and Iran. Turkey and Erdogan, although popular amongst Sunni Arabs, actively criticizes Western foreign policy in the Middle East, and unlike Saudi Arabia, has no reason to actively seek the removal of Iran from the region’s chessboard.
One must remember that America’s “alliance of convenience” system with brutal regimes is not a new concept, and in the past this strategy has almost always worked. American backing of far-right dictatorships in Latin America was and is the subject of criticism from observers, as regimes such as those of Chile’s Pinochet and Argentina’s Videla were known for extreme brutality that resulted in thousands of deaths of political opponents. The U.S would be expected to promote democracy in these regions, as it does at home and in other cases where it has helped them such as in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and Iraq in the 2000s. But democracy would never succeed in stopping the red terror in the LatAM countries, and these fascist dictatorships that America helped to keep in power kept socialism at bay for at least four decades in Latin America. America’s support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war assisted in distracting Iran from attempting to spread its “Islamic Revolution” to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf states. The war weakened Iran and the country had to focus on rebuilding after the war instead of exporting the Islamic revolution. This is why rather than pushing for Saddam’s demise when he first took power, America waited until Iraq was no longer of good use to them to stop supporting him. When America needs to turn a blind side to or even support methods of brutality displayed by allied governments, they tend to do so at times when their strategic position is at risk. America has done this successfully numerous times and is currently doing it with Saudi Arabia and MbS to maintain the American foreign policy necessity that is getting rid of Iranian influence and exerting dominance in Middle Eastern affairs.
