If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better?
There is a path to walk and it is not easy to find the right one when you have to deal with reality not just idealism. The natural resources in the middle east are important to the world and it is not so simple as an 'us vs. them' because there are many entirely separate interests in the region and we play them off each other.
Maybe it would be better to do a Star Trek style prime directive of completely cutting off countries until they have a certain level of social development, but you would have to come to terms with knowing bad things were happening and actively deciding to do nothing.
> If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better?
> There is a path to walk and it is not easy to find the right one when you have to deal with reality not just idealism. The natural resources in the middle east are important to the world and it is not so simple as an 'us vs. them' because there are many entirely separate interests in the region and we play them off each other.
> Maybe it would be better to do a Star Trek style prime directive of completely cutting off countries until they have a certain level of social development, but you would have to come to terms with knowing bad things were happening and actively deciding to do nothing.
If the US was friendly to all countries in order to exert pressure on them this might make sense, but in light of actual US foreign policy with respect to North Korea, Iran, etc. it's completely absurd to pretend that the US is being friendly to SA as a means to effect change.
In fairness, it was never about freedom for everyone, democracy, and mom's apple pie. That's just the nonsense propaganda we use to get people to agree to these sorts of things.
I lament the position of these women. I lament the position of a lot of men and women in the Kingdom. But the best I can do for them is to vote for politicians who won't support bloodthirsty tyrants like MBS. That's all that most Americans can do for those people. We're not a bad people, we're just ruled over by elites with no conscious. There's a difference.
> If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve.
People said the exact same thing with China 40 years ago. Nobody is pressuring on them to do anything and they couldn't care less.
Why do you think the royal family constantly panders to religious extremists? they are actively spreading the most orthodox version of Islam in every charity and mosque they finance.
They (the royal family) couldn't care less what the "west" thinks, they know western leaders are as corrupt as they are.
> People said the exact same thing with China 40 years ago. Nobody is pressuring on them to do anything and they couldn't care less.
hm? china went from the deaths of the cultural revolution to a working society which is now, in certain regards, miles ahead of others. the massive advance of this society is due in no small part to countries such as the US (trade) and the UK (HK).
The primary reason we care about Saudi is oil. US policy makers seem to view them as a necessary evil until we transition to renewable energy. No real effort is made to influence reforms. In fact, the more culturally isolated Saudi is from Europe and other countries, the better it is for the US, in terms of dependency.
At some point after “peak oil” SA seems likely to experience extreme social upheaval - perhaps even revolution or civil war. One hopes that this could serve as a catalyst to build a more tolerant and inclusive society.
"US policy makers seem to view them as a necessary evil until we transition to renewable energy."
This is false. There is nothing at all necessary nor evil, relative to the United States. We use the middle east to establish a protection racket on oil flows to the rest of the world.
The United States gets zero, or near zero, oil from Saudi Arabia. The same is true for the UK which gets oil, almost exclusively, from the North Sea. We don't need Saudi Arabia for anything - certainly not as a "bridge to a renewable future".
We choose to hold the rest of the world (particularly Europe and Asia) at gunpoint with a "nice flow of cheap energy you have there ... sure would be a shame if anything happened to it ..."
"At some point after “peak oil” SA seems likely to experience extreme social upheaval ..."
The us imports roughly 9% of its petroleum from SA, (it's second largest single-source after Canada)[0], which is significant. However, I think if you polled policy makers they'd emphasize security interests over oil. SA serves as a powerful Sunni counter-balance to the largely Shiite Iran. They are huge purchasers of western arms, and often (explicitly) support western interventions.
Yes, you're correct - I meant until the world transitions and oil is no longer such a strategic commodity to anyone, which could still be a hundred years away.
Yes. The world would be a better place if people did the right thing. It's not complicated, really. In this particular case: see a regime that dismembers journalists and hunts women who "run away"? Don't deal with that regime, or anything that is related to it.
To point out the obvious, invading other countries, bombing "terrorists" without due process, meddling in affairs of people across the globe, increasing oil production and doing nothing about the upcoming climate catastrophe should all be considered as "NOT the right thing to do".
Of course, with a statement like that, there will always be plenty of butsayers. "But..." [and here goes a list of various muddy reasons why everything is relative].
>Of course, with a statement like that, there will always be plenty of butsayers. "But..." [and here goes a list of various muddy reasons why everything is relative].
I'll start off by saying that in a world without Saudi oil, the world economy will collapse, and the economic prosperity implicitly assumed by our modern progressive values will evaporate, leaving us with a Stone Age economy and the Medieval values that come with it.
> I'll start off by saying that in a world without Saudi oil, the world economy will collapse, and the economic prosperity implicitly assumed by our modern progressive values will evaporate, leaving us with a Stone Age economy and the Medieval values that come with it.
Funny :-) This is 1) untrue, the world can do very well without Saudi oil, and in fact our future would be better without it given the upcoming climate catastrophe, and 2) exactly the kind of muddy scaremongering reasons I expected.
Just do the right thing. In the long term, we'll always be better off.
If you are friendly with SA you can put pressure on them to improve. If you declare them an evil enemy would the outcome be better?
False dichotomy, one could simply maintain distance. We do declare Iran to be an evil enemy despite the fact that Iran has considerably more in common with the US than SA does: it's quasi-democratic with an established religion, has considerably greater social and economic diversity, occupies a superior strategic position, and rests on a vastly more solid historical foundation.
How many decades of a horrendous human rights record and exporting terrorism does it take before we admit that making friends with horrible people doesn’t improve them?
> By supporting Saudi Arabia the West really shoots itself in the foot.
Well, the West went and took down the regime in Iraq, but some think that didn't go so well, either. SA is ruled by a clan and king, so it's not a full theocracy at least. If you go and perturb things, there is also room to make the situation worse.
Also different than selling them like 10Bil in arms. Europe, for example, has not invaded SA, but is not buddy buddy with MBS.
Also, it's clear that sanctions are a much more powerful weapon than invasion. Western sanctions (or embargo) on SA oil would certainly put them in a tight(er) spot.
True. And? While I understand the need for a level of competitive relationships, would it be so terrible to put the burden of selling arms to gross human rights violators on other countries?
Of course, it COULD be bad. Real bad. Hand-waving away such concerns is irresponsible. Having a major oil source friendly to an often hostile nation could have real, even deadly drawbacks.
But so too does always turning a blind eye. If we had gotten into this relationship and worked to reduce the threat (such as investing in other energy sources) we'd be in a better position, we could be at a point to change the relationship at reduced risk. We didn't, and we need to face the concrete realities we're supporting out of fear of hypotheticals.
Because now we may be safer, but we're supporting what we proclaim to be against. When we wield moral superiority, it's undercut. When we tell our children to be patriotic, we know the legacy we're leaving them.
Since the start of the cold war middle eastern states have balanced/played off against each other between the US (and the west) and Russia (previously USSR) when it comes to weapons and lots of other things.
I mean the Egyptians had soviet supplied fighters flown by actual soviet pilots fighting against the Isreali's in American and French supplied air craft.[1]
The US sold Israel better fighters, the soviets sold their potential enemies better SAM's.
The decision to let the arms keep flowing and to let SA to get away with a particularly vicious murder appeared to be made on camera by Trump during the Khashoggi saga. The episode was very depressing to watch.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/trumps-not-gonna-let...
I think the US handled the aftermath of the invasion quite poorly for a variety of reasons, one of which was the heavy exploitation of the sectarian divide.
Fwiw, the sanctions the US imposes on other countries often are brutal to their innocent population. One thing we could do is provide asylum for persecuted people, but appearently we don't do that anymore (and never have done it in great quantity).
>A lot of the early European settlers in the US were fleeing religious persecution.
What's your point?
Some of them turned around and treated people who didn't fit in with them even worse than they themselves had been treated when in Europe. I can think of a couple groups who, in retrospect, the natives should have killed on day 1.
My comment wasn’t clear - tehjoker stated that the US had never let in a lot of persecuted people. The early European colonisers included a lot of small groups fleeing persecution.
As you mention, formerly persecuted groups don’t seem to behave better when they get power.
Can you tell me what is worst between a theocracy and an absolute monarchy? In SA, the king is bound by no law not even the law of god. He wants you dead on spot, and then you die. Doesn't sound to me a better system.
Whereas in a theocracy, the Ruler is bound by the law of God. God wants You dead on the spot, and the Ruler is his instrument on Earth - and then You die.
The Ruler is now not at fault, because God told, and used, the Ruler to do the deed. The Ruler is absolved of responsibility - God's Will.
Approximately nobody is saying that we should invade SA and overthrow the government. But could we at least stop selling them weapons and giving them nuclear technology and giving them defensive cover from our military?
Iraq and Libya, both of which seemed moderate compared to SA (Saddam less so then Qaddafi). Neither Iraq nor Libya have, to my knowledge, ever been used as an argument for why "we" have to unconditionally support SA, though. Neither of them have been an ally before "spreading democracy", so they don't make good analogies either imho.
Also, "unwavering ally" and "we'll remove their state and let the country fall into civil war" aren't the only options on the table.
>I believe the point is that sometimes a tyrant is worse than cutting off the head and seeing the hydra.
If the last several dictators ousted from nations in the middle east teaches us anything it's that we do not want the hydra. It cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to dump all the crap out of the Iraq vacuum. Egypt was teetering on the edge for quite awhile after the arab spring. Libya is still in ruins. Syria speaks for itself. Afghanistan is slipping back into Taliban control. Every time we touch it it gets worse.
While I think we can all agree that totalitarian rulers are not the global maximum they seem to be a pretty clear local maximum in the middle east. The situations that develop in their absence are so much worse on a "suffering per time" basis that it's basically impossible to justify trying to oust them.
Sometimes that may be true. In these examples it certainly hasn't, and has destabilized the whole region.
Even a bad ruler is better than anomie, especially for local minorities. The yazidis may not have been happy with Assad or Saddam, but I'm pretty sure they preferred them to ISIS and similar groups.
I think the main reason is military cooperation. West supports dictator regimes and in exchange they allow to have military bases there. If USA doesn't support such regimes then they will turn to other countries who are not so picky like China or Russia.
They can, as they always had done. Foreign relations are about trade and military cooperation. Only after these things you use the ideological arguments about "fight for the freedom" to better convince the people about who are the enemies.
well the same should be said about China but we have many companies producing product there and I can guarantee most here have a phone, tablet, or computer, made there.
there are many undesirable countries to do business with, so what is the distinction to be made? To be honest businesses that work in either should be challenged both at investor meetings and online.
The fact is, the West (mainly talking about the U.S. here) doesn't care about freedom. They've made this clear many, many times. It's a buzzword, used when convenient.
It sounds better to say you're invading a country to bring freedom to its people then to say you're invading to take their oil.
