Khashoggi Affair spells the end of Trump’s transactional foreign policy approach
The most consistent elements in the Khashoggi murder is the very inconsistency of the lines taken by the court in Riyadh and Trump in Washington. The Saudi government started off by saying nothing happened inside the Istanbul consulate, then the line was that Jemal Khashoggi had walked out, that he had been detained, that there had been a scuffle, a fist fight, and finally murder.
Now we have a direct accusation by Turkey that Khashoggi’s death was a carefully premeditated murder directed from Riyadh, with childish vindictiveness and sadism thrown in for good measure. They want the culprits to be tried in the city where the murder took place – but given where the trail of suspicion and accusation leads, that is unlikely to happen.
For his part Trump signaled at first that he was worried about news of the disappearance. He then went on to defend his close friends the Saudis. But now with an interesting burst of level-headedness he claimed that he isn’t satisfied by what the Saudi court has told him, and he wants answers.
The nearest historical analogy that comes to mind – and I have to admit other commentators have settled on this comparison too – is the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 CE. Like Khashoggi, Becket was an insider turned critic of the regime. Henry II, a Plantagenet with a notorious short fuse, doesn’t sound a million miles away from the hot-headed Saudi crown prince.
“Who will rid me of this turbulent priest,” Henry II demanded, though whether he said that or not is contested by historians. Indeed, the reports from Turkey that Saud al Qahtani, the crown prince’s enforcer, ordered the murder of Khashoggi by Skype seem rather more reliable.
Four knights, thinking they were executing royal command, cut down Becket in his own cathedral. Henry had to do penance and was rarely at peace for the rest of his reign. Within three years Becket was made saint, and his reputation soared. Within ten years his martyrdom was depicted in illuminated manuscripts and stained-glass windows across Europe from Bavaria to Bari.
As the evidence accumulates, the reputational damage to Mohammed Bin Salman is incalculable. He is seen more as tyrant than reformer, and all his works since assuming power two years ago are under increased scrutiny. As the whole Gulf region faces the impending crisis of peak oil, we may be now facing the crisis of peak Saudi.
What may have been missed in Europe and America is the sheer weight of social propaganda condemning Jamal Khashoggi following reports of his death and the involvement of the Saudi court. Most of the messages appear to be bots: algorithm generated multiple productions which create storms of tweets and messages and a large proportion of them seem to have emanated from either Al Sissi’s Egypt or the Saudi Arabia regime. They accuse him of being in league with the Muslim Brotherhood, and with the support of Qatar and Erdogan’s Turkey plotting against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One of the milder ones, this time from a known commentator Magdi Abdelhadi, says Jamal’s articles were “a rehash of pan-Arab and pan-Islamist ideas, sometimes dressed up in the language of civil and human rights… Like other supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood addressing the West, he’s mastered the art of double-speak, human rights and democracy in English, but we all know that the MB is not about either of these hallowed ideas.”
Jamal Khashoggi never concealed that he had briefly joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a student in America. He was a devout Muslim, but his life was spent as a journalist and critic, and for a short span he served as special adviser to Prince Turki al Faisal, son of King Faisal, interior minister and ambassador to the UK and US. His personal loyalties seem to have been as much an irritant to the crown prince MBS, as his writings. His columns in the Washington Post had lately won him new prominence as an interlocutor between the Arab Islamic world and the West.
The most significant short-term beneficiary of the whole affair is Turkey. President Erdogan is trying to exert maximum leverage against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, specifically over Syria. It is something of an irony that his team have been leaking gruesome details of the whole attack – the Turks seem to have comprehensively bugged the whole Saudi mission – to any journalist who will listen. This comes after rounding up hundreds if not thousands of journalists and writers on suspicion of associating with ‘terrorists’ and ‘subversives’ following the so-called Gulenist coup of July 15th 2016.
Turkey is in a standoff over the Sunni Islamic opposition and the fate of the Idlib enclave in Syria, the last rebel stronghold now hosting more than three million civilians, the majority refugees. Saudi Arabia has backed the Jabhat Fateh al Sham, the rebranded al-Nusra front, itself the rebranded affiliate of al Qaeda. They are the unacceptable face of Sunni militancy as far as Ankara is concerned, and their 10,000 supporters and allies are to be exported from Idlib under the current two-month ceasefire arrangement.
That truce was arranged by Turkey and Russia at Sochi last month. It allows Turkey to get on with its main agenda of fighting the Kurds of the YPG, the allies of the Kurdish Workers Party PKK, the Turks’ foes for more than 30 years. With help from the Russians, Syria is to be kept in its current nervous state of armed stalemate, with Bashar al Assad and his crew little more than probationers with an uncertain long-term future.
Turkey has to strike a delicate balance. It wants to be seen as a leading Sunni Islamic power, sharing the lead with Saudi and the Arab nations in prestige organisations like the Islamic Conference. But given the parlous state of the economy and the collapse of the lira, Turkey struggles to find the money to match its muscle. It will have to make a rapprochement with the oil rich Gulf powers, including Saudi Arabia, before long.
Mohammed bin Salman’s personal reputation is at the eye of the storm. Call this the Thomas Becket reputational factor. First there is the conduct of the war in Yemen launched by the prince three years ago, in the name of fighting Iran’s stooges the Houthi insurgents. The result to date is a humanitarian disaster with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed according to the UN. There are vivid reports of arbitrary Saudi air strikes, and at least 18 million near starving and dependent on aid.
He has shaken up the royal household and their rich business affiliates and even arrested the prime minister of Lebanon Saad Hariri, treating him like a recalcitrant minion for alleged links with Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian opposition groups in Lebanon. The French had to plead for his release.
Another less than successful foreign policy ploy has been the prince’s boycott of Qatar, who he accuses of harbouring Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and being too close to Iran. He demanded that the Al Jazeera television company based in Doha close, and appears to have contemplated military invasion, which even his new best friend Jared Kushner, Trump son in law and consigliere supremo would not swallow. Qatar remains rich, independent, supported by the UK, US and France and with garrison forces from Turkey.
The most important part of his reform propaganda was to shift the Saudi economy away from oil dependency. A Key element is the ‘Vision 2030’ for reform and privatization. This includes NEOM and the building of a development zone in the north of the country, abutting Jordan and Egypt, costed 500 billion dollars. To help launch investment in the project, he had called the ‘Davos in the Desert’ conference – which many have refused to attend in the wake of the murder in the consulate in Istanbul.
Among the economic reform plans was the projected flotation of Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest companies by revenue. The move has been criticized by MBS’s own father the ailing King Salman, and the IPO has been withdrawn. The King is also believed to be critical of his son’s tacit support for the Trump manoeuvre of moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is also understood to have been discussed with new best friend Kushner.
The Trump reaction and the Kushner-MBS tie could prove the most intriguing aspect of the case so far. Trump is disturbed – as he should be – because it raises serious questions about his whole transactional approach to politics and diplomacy, his ‘art of the deal’ and ‘buddy to buddy’ sensibility, which seemed to work with Kim Jong Un. The resignation of Nikki Haley from the administration and the obvious prospect that she will run for the White House in 2024 suggests that times are a-changin’ for the transactional politicians.
The meeting in Helsinki with Putin has left a stink and now the whole Kushner consigliere straordinario gambit with MBS appears to have sprung a leak. Perhaps after all politics and diplomacy are returning to well thought out plans, strategies and policies, and – who knows? – principle.
At the end the focus must return to Jamal Khashoggi himself, no turbulent priest or preacher, but a man of faith, who believed in reason and dialogue.
“The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed of global events,” he wrote at the end of his last article for the Washington Post. “More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices. We suffer from poverty, mismanagement and poor education. Through the creation of an independent international forum, isolated from, the influence of nationalist governments spreading hate through propaganda, ordinary people in the Arab world would be able to address the structural problems their societies face.”
These are hardly the words of a fanatic.