Biden’s MBS fist bump is just one example of our compromised moral authority.
Biden’s MBS fist bump is just one example of our compromised moral authority.
W e can’t have moral equivalence. Not with a nation-state that has subjected its neighbor to a frozen, stalemated conflict for the better part of the last decade — a conflict in which it has, disgustingly, bombed multiple hospitals. Not with a regime that murders journalists and funds disruptive political movements elsewhere in its region. Some people would like to forget these facts, but we shouldn’t.
One would expect the foreign-policy idealists — the people who argue that American ideals of freedom should guide our foreign policy — to agree with this simple position. And they do — so long as it’s Russia bombing hospitals and murdering journalists. When Russia does these things, we funnel billions of dollars and matériel to their victims. But when Saudi Arabia does them, we give its tyrannical leader a fist-bump and refuel his jets — and suddenly our foreign-policy idealists say we have to get real, cut our leaders some slack, and recognize the strategic importance of our allies. After all, it’s just a fist bump (plus whatever Biden promised MBS in private).
In other words, even our most self-righteous “idealist” hawks can turn on a dime and become cold-blooded realists when the need arises. After all, we’re fighting the dictator Putin, who, they hasten to remind us, falsely casts himself as a defender of religious conservatism in furtherance of his self-serving, authoritarian political vision. So to stand up for freedom, we have to go and do a little bit of image rehabilitation for Mohammed bin Salman, who . . . falsely casts himself as a defender of religious conservatism in furtherance of a self-serving, authoritarian political vision. It makes perfect sense when you do everything possible not to think about it.
To deal with a Russian foe that bullies Europe with its energy policy, we need a diversity of allies, from heavily armed Turkey, which bullies Europe with its migration policy, to our northern neighbor Canada (though not Canada’s oil, because that’s not environmentally sound), to Azerbaijan, with which the EU just reached an energy deal despite the fact that it, too, is embroiled in an on-again-off-again war of expansion with one of its neighbors.
Maybe Viktor Orbán could learn some lessons from MBS. Orbán merely stopped his government from funding the old socialist newspapers the previous government had funded and let his friends buy up Hungary’s other big media outlets. In response, the U.S. and its ideological cut-outs in the NGO world are declaring open season on him, despite Hungary’s being a NATO ally. If only he’d undertake an ethnic-cleansing campaign along the Hungarian border, as Turkey has along its border, or run bone-saws through journalists like MBS’s goons, then he could be just like the other key allies in the global struggle for freedom and democracy.
You could say I’ve gotten quite cynical about foreign-policy idealism. Maybe it’s the fact that the War on Terror, which was launched with utopian idealism, led to so much predictable, needless bloodshed and geopolitical instability. If you’re a Christian, a Shia Muslim, or a member of some other religious minority in a Sunni country, the Saudis and the United States have probably funded your local “moderate” beheader, so long as he had the right position on Iran or Bashar al-Assad. If you live in Europe, the Saudis have also probably funded the radical mosques that have contributed to terrorism in your country. Our foreign-policy “idealists” like to talk about accountability, but there is never any accountability for the House of Saud, or for the handlers of our gallant beheading allies at Langley and the Pentagon.
So, yes, I have grown quite cynical about those who claim to want a morality-driven American foreign policy. If America wants to protect freedom at home and abroad, I think it should instead consider husbanding its resources, focusing on the major threat to the world order (China), and committing its honor and credibility only to fights the American people are willing to see through to the end. Let the idealists call this xenophobic isolationism if they must. For the rest of us, nothing does more to discredit the appeal of American ideals than American idealism.