“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”
-President Jimmy Carter
There is a place where rulers publicly behead people, where any form of dissent is silenced with deadly force, where women are severely oppressed, where sectarianism is accepted and in fact, promoted, and where extremist, fundamentalist, rigid forms of Wahhabi Islamic doctrines are taught in schools. No, this place is not in the ISIS-occupied regions of Syria and Iraq. This place happens to be a close ally of the United States and ironically, the head of the United Nations Human Rights Council. This place is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Just last week, President Obama was in the kingdom, reaffirming the “historic friendship” between the two countries. The United States and Saudi Arabia have effectively had a “special friendship” historically. However, in recent times, this relationship has become, to a fairly significant degree, strained.
There are evidently, several significant reasons for this strain.
Firstly, the United States Congress might soon pass a bill which would allow American relatives of the victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudi government, due to the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Some of these relatives have even demanded that the Obama administration release 28 pages revised from a congressional report which analyzed the Saudi involvement in the attacks. Saudi Arabia’s response to this has been a threat to sell off $750 billion in US assets. Although many have called this an “empty bluff”, it is indicative of the current tensions between the two countries.
Secondly, increased US shale oil production have decreased American dependence on Saudi Arabia’s oil and its monumental influence over the global oil market.
Thirdly, Saudi Arabia is vehemently opposed to Washington’s amicable gestures to its archrival, Iran, gestures which eventually successfully concluded the Iran Nuclear Deal last year.
It may seem grossly astonishing that the United States continues to appease the Saudi monarchs and intentionally avoids confronting them about the kingdom’s appalling human rights violations and detrimental foreign policy. What this means essentially is that the monarchy’s archaic and inhuman policies are a veritable threat to global peace.
For instance, the Saudi-led bombing in Yemen has only empowered extremists such as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA). Saudi Arabia also backs extremists in Syria, which has ultimately contributed to the intensification of ISIS.
The human rights issues within the kingdom are nothing short of deplorable. Saudi citizens are treated no better than slaves to the royal family. The disparities in income, complete lack of political representation, flagrant abuse of migrant workers, etc. may very well be considered modern day slavery. Sectarianism and the barbaric, inhuman penal code contribute to making Saudi Arabia one of the most tyrannical nations in the world.
Some US Republican presidential candidates such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have been immensely criticized for their anti-Islamic rhetoric. Although this is in no way an endorsement for their line of thinking, Cruz and Trump do not even come close to damaging the image of Islam as does the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with its stringent practices of Wahhabi Islam, resulting in a complete disregard for human rights and gender equality.
During his visit to Saudi Arabia last week, President Obama attempted to “mend” relations but sadly, missed a historic opportunity to call out the Saudis on their human rights abuses. Furthermore, the US government continues to furnish Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars of weapons.
Logically speaking, the moral stance of the United states should be to seriously reconsider its relationship with Saudi Arabia, which ranks among the “worst of the worst” countries in democracy in Freedom House’s annual survey of political and civil rights.
Given that the values of the two countries could not be more divergent, the US-Saudi alliance undoubtedly depends almost completely on economic and national interest factors.
Eventually, US strategic differences with Saudi Arabia will only proliferate. In fact, it is important to ask whether the United States’ close association with Saudi Arabia is not actually compromising America’s role in the Middle East. This is a valid point particularly considering that the Saudis are on a continual path in assuming a destabilizing approach to regional politics.
The crux of the issue to consider strongly at this point is not what measures should be taken to repair the US-Saudi relationship. Rather, it would be more apt for the US to ask whether this relationship is at all worth repairing.
