https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-31/pittsburgh-killings-should-galvanize-a-jewish-muslim-alliance?srnd=opinion

Toxic white nationalists are targeting both religious minorities.

What if the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last weekend could produce something constructive: a new Jewish-Muslim partnership in the U.S.?

Not a dialogue — we’ve had plenty of those — but an organized alliance to defend the civil rights, legal standing and communal safety of both religious minorities from the toxic white nationalism of the Donald Trump era.

The 11 murdered victims at the synagogue were Jewish, but there’s not a single Muslim-American who doesn’t know that the next casualties could be Muslim. The accused killer, Robert Bowers, said so himself when he wrote on a social media platform that serves as a safe space for the nationalist right, “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

White supremacy has always been aimed at African-Americans, though bigots have also targeted Irish, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Slavic and other immigrant groups at various times in U.S. history. Today’s jingoist panic focuses on Latino immigrants, who are supposedly invading the country and creating a post-white, “minority-majority” America.

Where do Jews and Muslims come into it? In the front and the back, as it happens.

Bowers was obsessed with the immigration-related hysteria that characterizes the paranoid style of contemporary U.S. politics and has been shaped by Trump’s talk of foreign “rapists” and “animals” coming to “infest our country.”

Trump’s allies on social media and Fox News have cynically and falsely accused the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros of funding illegal immigration, notably the caravan of bedraggled would-be refugees from Central America that is slowly working its way north through Mexico. Soros, who is Jewish, has long been a target of anti-Semitic slurs. Now he’s become a central figure in Republican political advertising that resurrects classic anti-Semitic stereotypes of the sneaky Jewish plutocrat.

And the Muslims? Trump himself tweeted that the caravan was dangerous because “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” to it.

In other words, Jews are behind the caravan, pulling the strings. And Muslims are at the front, sneaking in to wreak terror.

That’s the bizarre fantasy Bowers was invoking in his rant about Jews and Muslims. And it appears to be what incited him to shoot worshipers at the synagogue.

American Jews and Muslims face an intertwined threat. It’s an understatement to say that they need each other now.

Which brings us to Israel and Palestine. There can’t be an effective U.S. Jewish-Muslim coalition as long as Middle Eastern politics divides the two camps.

The key to making the alliance work is for each side to stop demanding agreement from the other when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, Jews and Muslims should be able to acknowledge that each has a fact-based narrative about the past 100 years that makes both perspectives legitimate.

In the end, Israelis and Arabs will have to shape their own futures. American Jews and Muslims won’t be drawing the lines in the Middle East. But they will determine their own fates and the fate of their children.

That should give them plenty of incentive to work together to defend their interests even while disagreeing about Israel.

And the mainstreams of both communities need to do more to cleanse their own ranks of Islamophobes and anti-Semites.

Several Jewish groups have been at the forefront of opposing the Trump administration’s ban on travel from seven countries, five with Muslim majorities. Muslim groups raised $180,000 in three days for victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings and have become increasingly vocal about rising anti-Semitism.

That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. Islamophobia is essentially the same narrative directed against Muslims. Jews and Muslims can fight both more effectively together than separately.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-doesn-t-believe-in-anything-but-the-recent-bomb-attempts-highlight-the-danger-of-people-believing-in-him-1.784720

The US President has repeatedly diagnosed liberal society as sick and corrupt, and prescribed violence as the cure

It was inevitable. A Donald Trump fan has been arrested for sending bombs to more than a dozen of the US president’s most prominent liberal opponents, and CNN, his most hated news organization. The only real question is why did it take so long?

Mr Trump obviously doesn’t take his own words seriously. He’s a huckster who leapt from reality television into politics, not because he wanted to achieve something, but simply because he discovered he could.

Friend and foe alike agree that he doesn’t really believe in anything and only responds to whatever he thinks makes him look good.

Mr Trump’s whole presidency has been an elaborate ego trip, increasingly unmoored from anything resembling reality, as his proclivity for lying has spun wildly out of control.

Most recently, he was painting bizarre fantasies about whole towns of Americans rapturously applauding as their neighborhoods were liberated from rampaging Latino gangs.

It’s all a game to him. But what is anyone who really believes him supposed to think and do?

Recently, he’s been telling his followers that Democrats are “evil” and operating with impunity, a lawless, angry mob intent on filling the country with violent street gangs and Middle Eastern terrorists in a deliberate attempt to destroy American society. They despise the United States and, according to him, are determined to “turn it into Venezuela”.

The media is “the enemy of the American people”; its reporting “so bad and hateful that it is beyond description”. It is also, according to Mr Trump, responsible for “a very big part of the anger we see today”.

Mr Trump doesn’t have political opponents or critics, only truly evil, destructive, dangerous enemies.

There is little sincerity here and lots of his supporters are entertained by his hyperbole. Many mistake his lack of filters with honesty and his lack of decency with a refreshingly blunt refusal to sound “like a politician”.

But some believe every word of it.

Mr Trump wants everyone to place their trust in him, and give him complete, unwavering political obedience and unfettered authority. But can that really be enough, if the dangers are as extreme as he insists?

He has suggested, many times, what kind of response he favors.

At his campaign rallies, Mr Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to physically attack protesters or hecklers, saying that his critics should be “carried out on a stretcher”, and promising to pay legal bills for anyone willing to make that happen.

He strongly implied that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, “Second Amendment people” (gun fanatics) would have had to stop her. Recently, he praised a congressman for assaulting a reporter, saying: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”

In his comments regarding world leaders, Mr Trump seems particularly impressed with murderous ruthlessness. He remains an advocate of torture and an unapologetic proponent of intentional police brutality.

So, in addition to cultivating a supposedly righteous rage in his supporters, he has consistently promoted an atmosphere of violence.

Of course, most of his followers know that he is at least exaggerating, and that he is usually not to be taken literally, and sometimes not seriously either.

Most of the rest will be inhibited by moral qualms, or a sense of self-preservation, and won’t lash out.

But some people, often loners with little left to lose, will fully embrace both Mr Trump’s alarming diagnosis and his prescription of therapeutic violence, and decide that they have to act.

It’s the same syndrome that the paranoid and chauvinistic demagogues of Al Qaeda and the so-called “Islamic State” count on, especially when urging lone-wolf terrorist acts.

More than anything else, Mr Trump has been upset that these attempted bombings have distracted attention from his new drug price initiative and, along with many of his strongest supporters, suggested the whole thing was a stunt by liberals to discredit him. In a tweet, he dismissed the bombs innocuously as “packages and devices”.

In addition to suggesting that media organizations such as CNN deserve such hatred, and leading a crowd in chants of “fake news” and “lock him up” − referring to one of the bomb recipients, philanthropist George Soros − Mr Trump has refused to tone down his rhetoric.

When questioned, he said, “I could really tone it up.” He also rejected any suggestion of his own responsibility, insisting: “There’s no blame. There’s no anything.”

But Mr Trump paints a picture of absolute evil and depravity on the part of liberals and Democrats in general, the media, and any other potential or real opponents. Anyone who takes even a small percentage of what he says as truth is guaranteed to feel enraged and besieged.

Mr Trump and his supporters have occasionally hinted at the possibility of mass violence and civil unrest throughout the country if he were ever truly thwarted. Is anyone confident that, as a last resort to save himself, he wouldn’t at least be tempted to try to unleash widespread mayhem?

Now one unhinged individual has taken his words literally, seriously, and to their logical conclusion. He is unlikely to be the last, especially if Mr Trump’s presidency is ever genuinely threatened by scandal or potential electoral defeat.

https://agsiw.org/how-the-khashoggi-affair-is-straining-turkish-saudi-relations/

With Erdogan trying to exploit the Khashoggi affair and Riyadh in damage-control mode, the controversy is inflaming the Saudi-Turkish geopolitical and ideological rivalry.

A much-anticipated speech on October 23 by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has further strained, but carefully avoided anything that would categorically rupture, Turkish-Saudi relations. Since Khashoggi disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, an exchange of angry accusations and mutual recriminations has characterized the biggest crisis between the two countries in many years. But both sides have also been careful not to go too far and neither party wants to allow their rivalry to deteriorate into enmity or a confrontation. That careful calibration is likely to continue, particularly with Washington now fully engaged in the process of defusing the diplomatic crisis.

Erdogan emphasized two key points. First, he insisted that, contrary to Saudi accounts, the incident was a premeditated murder rather than an accident or a botched abduction or interrogation. Second, while Erdogan did not mention Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by name, several parts of his speech clearly pointed in his direction. Instead, he addressed all his questions and demands to King Salman bin Abdulaziz, rather than his son, Mohammed bin Salman. This kept the conversation at a more formal, head-of-state, level. But it also may have been subtly calibrated to isolate Mohammed bin Salman, and exploit any real or potential divisions between the monarch and his heir apparent. Therefore, the effort to keep up pressure was intentional and calibrated.

Through a series of questions about the incident directed toward the Saudi government in general, Erdogan adopted the role of a prosecutor laying out an indictment. From the outset of this affair, Erdogan and the Turkish government have presented themselves as neutral arbiters simply trying to determine the truth. But, of course, they have actually been pursuing a complex set of political and national objectives and taking advantage of an unanticipated opportunity to make significant headway on a number of crucial fronts.

Most important, perhaps, is the effort to utilize this crisis to aid the international rehabilitation of Erdogan himself. The widespread crackdown on political opposition in Turkey since the failed coup of July 2016 has prompted a growing chorus of global criticism. But Erdogan presents himself to the Turkish public and the world as a champion of order and legitimacy pushing back against the forces of chaos and violence. The Khashoggi affair was tailor-made to advance this perception not only in Turkey, but internationally. But to produce this effect, Erdogan has had to appear measured in most of his public pronouncements, leaving the more incendiary charges to his subordinates, usually anonymously quoted in Turkish media.

Second, Erdogan and Turkey are using the crisis to advance broader claims of global religious and cultural Islamic leadership, particularly in the Sunni Muslim world. In that regard, Saudi Arabia is one of Turkey’s most formidable competitors. On October 15, Erdogan proclaimed that “Turkey is the only country that can lead the Muslim world.” Saudi Arabia, of course, claims exactly such global Islamic leadership on the grounds of its history and geography, particularly as the birthplace of Islam and the site of the two holy sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina.

But this rivalry isn’t merely religious and national. It also has a powerful ideological dimension. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and others argue that the Middle East isn’t just divided between those aligned with and against Iran, an avowedly theocratic Shia power. They hold that there is a third ideological camp of Sunni Islamists, led by Turkey and Qatar, which includes Muslim Brotherhood movements. In effect, there are now two key strategic and political fault lines in the Middle East: support or opposition to growing Iranian power and a struggle for predominance in the Sunni Muslim world between pro- and anti-Islamist forces. Turkey is the most prominent and influential of what amounts to a Sunni pro-Islamist camp, while Saudi Arabia effectively leads an anti-Islamist one. In the Turkish-Saudi relationship, this contemporary ideological schism builds on long-standing suspicions that date back to the Ottoman Empire and Saudi efforts to establish and maintain national independence despite Turkish imperial opposition.

The boycott of Qatar is, perhaps, the most dramatic example of how this struggle is being waged in the Arab world at the moment, with Riyadh leading the effort to squeeze Doha, while Ankara serves as Qatar’s most committed ally. Indeed, the growing Turkish military presence in Qatar was an important part of the boycotting quartet’s complaints against Doha and removing it was among their core demands for ending the impasse. One of Riyadh’s key foreign-policy goals in recent years has been curtailing Turkey’s efforts to reassert regional influence, especially in the Arab world, as Ankara has turned its attention away from Europe and toward the Middle East, as well as fending off Turkey’s ambitions to lead the Sunni Muslim world. The Turkish alliance with Qatar in Saudi eyes combines both themes – countering the growth of a Sunni Islamist bloc in the Middle East and limiting the spread of Turkish influence, particularly in the Gulf region.

Erdogan’s reaction to the Khashoggi affair has been significantly shaped by this rivalry. The slow drip of allegations was designed to keep the story in the public eye and steadily increase the pressure on Saudi Arabia but without leading to a total break in relations. Turkey does not want a full-blown confrontation with Saudi Arabia and its allies and must be cognizant of nonpolitical factors such as extensive Saudi investments in the Turkish real estate market.

The leaks were also designed to bring the United States into the mix. Turkey did not want to face Saudi Arabia entirely on its own and wanted and needed U.S. help. Moreover, by forcing Washington to make this a three-way conversation, Turkey was also able to gain leverage over the United States as well as Saudi Arabia. From Saudi Arabia, Turkey will want financial benefits (or at least no cutoff of Saudi investment in Turkey) which it will probably secure. Turkey will also ask Saudi Arabia to pull back from supporting Kurdish groups in Syria, which is a taller order, and possibly to ease the boycott of Qatar, which is extremely unlikely. Any prospects for those more ambitious goals may depend on the quantity and quality of whatever evidence Turkish authorities are holding in reserve. Ankara will also try to ensure that Saudi Arabia won’t retaliate in any significant manner for the extreme embarrassment and discomfort resulting from Turkish accusations in recent weeks. Finally, by bringing the United States into the conversation and releasing the jailed American pastor Andrew Brunson, Erdogan is hoping to advance his own international rehabilitation.

Erdogan doesn’t want a total rupture of relations with Saudi Arabia, and particularly not another crisis with Washington. But he does see Saudi Arabia as a key rival that he would like to weaken as much as possible without instigating uncontrolled instability. So, from the outset he has seen this episode as a golden opportunity to weaken and corner Saudi Arabia, and thereby the entire Sunni anti-Islamist camp, to Ankara’s advantage. Moreover, he’s trying to stoke maximal international outrage toward Saudi Arabia and, especially, Mohammed bin Salman, including by pointedly not naming him in his speech even though other Turkish officials have gone to considerable lengths to link the crown prince’s inner circle to the suspects they identified.

The Turkish president’s primary goals are to render the Saudi crown prince personally and politically toxic, while promoting his own image and international rehabilitation. Both the Saudi government and Mohammed bin Salman are in damage-control mode and may have to calculate what they will be willing to offer Erdogan to stop him from publicizing additional damaging allegations or, especially, evidence, and to move past the incident. As usual in the contemporary Middle East, it’s nearly impossible, on both sides of this standoff, to untangle the leaders’ personal and political concerns from the broader national interests at stake.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/khashoggi-killing-erdogan-s-balancing-act#gs.TjRtIKQ

It’s clear that a speech Tuesday morning by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t break much new ground about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. What’s less obvious is why Erdogan decided not to deliver on his promise to expose the “naked truth” about the killing, especially whatever he knows about the extent of involvement by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The answer lies in the nature of Turkey’s fraught relations with both Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Turkey is not only navigating its longstanding rivalry with the Saudis, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Bobby Ghosh wrote on Tuesday, but with Washington as well, and is calibrating how far it can go without overplaying its hand.

Turkey’s response to the Khashoggi killing should be viewed against the backdrop of tensions between Ankara and Riyadh.

Erdogan has recently strengthened his claim on global Muslim leadership, something the Saudi royal family has long considered its own cultural birthright. The Saudis view Turkey as the head of a hostile regional alliance of Sunni Islamists that includes their Qatari adversaries and an antagonistic Muslim Brotherhood movement.

To the Saudis, Turkey’s embrace of Khashoggi represented a challenge: He was preparing to establish a Turkish-based TV station, a series of websites, and a political group based in the U.S. to urge a bigger role for the Brotherhood in the development of Middle Eastern democracy.

That made Khashoggi’s murder an opportunity for Turkey to meet the Saudi challenge by discrediting the crown prince.

But Erdogan faces constraints. This week’s arrival in Turkey of the chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel — ostensibly to examine intelligence that CIA operatives have no doubt already thoroughly reviewed — raised the ante for Erdogan.

Haspel was plainly sent to warn the Turks not to go so far as to try to unseat the Saudi crown prince. Doing so would complicate the U.S. balancing act between defending American values and preserving U.S. interests in the kingdom.

Erdogan also needs U.S. cooperation if he intends to secure a financial windfall from Saudi Arabia in exchange for holding back evidence of involvement in the killing. And Erdogan needs U.S. help to ensure that Saudi Arabia doesn’t retaliate for the embarrassment Turkey has inflicted in recent weeks through a campaign of lurid leaks about the details of Khashoggi’s apparent murder.

Most importantly, Erdogan wants to advance his own international rehabilitation. Since a failed Turkish coup in July 2016, Erdogan has cracked down on political opposition and secured virtually dictatorial powers, wiping out the more democratic and institutionalized Turkish political system he inherited and replacing it with his own, individual authority.

Erdogan’s Turkey became notorious for political repression and human rights abuses, including against journalists like Khashoggi. Now Khashoggi’s death gives the Turkish government a chance to present itself as a responsible actor. Erdogan’s domestic and international narrative casts him as a champion of order and legitimacy. The Khashoggi killing is an unearned opportunity to push that line and encourage the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to back his demands for international acceptance as a responsible regional actor.

Erdogan’s restraint on Tuesday reflects his understanding that even if he pushed hard to bring down the crown prince, he would sacrifice other, more important goals. Backing off a bit, by contrast, prevents a complete breakdown with Saudi Arabia and preserves leverage with Washington. At the same time, he can hope to embarrass Saudi Arabia and weaken the crown prince enough to blunt Saudi Arabia’s effectiveness as a regional rival.

As for the crown prince and the Saudi government, they are entirely in damage-control mode, and their main audience right now is Trump.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-latest-blow-for-palestinians-shows-washington-is-committed-only-to-dismantling-the-framework-of-the-oslo-process-1.782481

The closure of the US consulate in East Jerusalem is an attack on the very notion of Palestinian sovereignty and hopes for a Palestinian state

Hardly a week goes by without the Trump administration taking another swipe at Palestinians. Two days ago it was announced that the US consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, a de facto American embassy to the Palestinians, will be closed.

The separate closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington last month was clearly aimed at Palestinian leaders. But the shutting of the consulate is dismissive of an entire people and sends four terrible messages.

First, this will make it considerably more difficult for ordinary Palestinians to access US consular services like applying for visas. Like so much of what the Trump administration has done over the past year, it reflects a considerable hostility towards all Palestinians.

That was already fully articulated in the decision to strip Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem of US funding, among other gratuitous cruelties.

It effectively says that Palestinians are not a people worthy of dedicated consular relations.

To the contrary, if they want to deal with American diplomats, Palestinians can try to get to Israel to go to the US embassy in West Jerusalem, if they possibly can (but will often be unable to). And if not, the obvious corollary is that they must only have themselves to blame.

Second, this strongly consolidates the idea that, as Donald Trump keeps saying, all of Jerusalem is “off the table” in any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations because it essentially belongs entirely to Israel, and, as he recently added, “we don’t have to talk about it anymore”.

Having a US consulate in occupied East Jerusalem might have been misconstrued, after all, as suggesting that there was some kind of independent Palestinian status in the city. It might even have been interpreted as suggesting that Palestinians could still aspire to base their capital in East Jerusalem.

This is an idea that Mr Trump’s “Middle East peace team”, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, has been striving to eliminate.

Closing the consulate for the Palestinians is a kind of epilogue or annex to the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the moving of the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Just in case anyone still held any hopes that Washington remained open to brokering, let alone committed to, a compromise on Jerusalem, this plainly signals that it is not.

Third, this move alarmingly consolidates the authority of David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, who will now also be in charge of consular services for the Palestinians.

Mr Friedman has played a key role in driving US policy in the Trump administration firmly into the arms of a “greater Israel” and settler movement, of which he is a major proponent.

Most ambassadors don’t play a role in shaping policy. But Mr Friedman is the highest-ranking State Department official to take any interest in Palestinian issues and, in partnership with Mr Kushner, he has effectively dismissed Palestinians, their human rights and national interests.

As long as there was a consulate in occupied East Jerusalem dedicated to serving the Palestinian population that was independent of Mr Friedman’s control, a remnant of balance in US diplomacy might have persisted. But now all US diplomacy in Israel and the occupied territories is under the direct control of this ardent backer of settlements and avowed opponent of any form of two-state outcome.

Fourth, this latest move reinforces the growing – and by now virtually inescapable – conclusion that Mr Trump, Mr Kushner, Mr Friedman and those working with them have an overriding goal, which is the destruction of any diplomatic and negotiating framework inherited from the two decades-old Oslo Accords.

With no negotiations or any progress for a long time through the Oslo process, a fresh approach was undoubtedly necessary, just as Mr Kushner argued.

But rather than building on what already existed, Mr Kushner and his team have instead been frantically destroying the structures that produced the limited gains of the Oslo framework, ones which at least kept alive the prospects for an eventual peace accord.

It’s become clear that their main goal is to wreck the existing diplomatic and political architecture so thoroughly that even if their own “peace plan” goes absolutely nowhere – as now seems inevitable, thanks largely to their anti-Palestinian vendetta – no successor administration would be able to resuscitate the two-state-orientated Oslo formula.

The real target, then, is the very notion of Palestinian sovereignty and any remaining hopes for a Palestinian state.

The Trump administration’s intervention has thus far been utterly destructive, aimed at wiping out Jerusalem and refugees as issues, impoverishing and humiliating ordinary Palestinians, granting Israel endless victories without asking anything in return and making US commitments that will be very difficult to reverse but which ensure that no meaningful negotiations can proceed.

There are no longer any grounds for attributing this nihilistic rampage to naïveté or ignorance. It’s cynically, willfully and unforgivably destructive of any hopes for progress towards peace. And when despair over negotiations leading to increasing spates of violence, as is already emerging on the Gaza border, the authors of this policy will bear a heavy responsibility for the lives needlessly lost.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-18/mbs-is-both-saudi-autocrat-and-genuine-reformer?srnd=opinion


Westerners see a link between political, economic and social liberalization. Mohammed bin Salman doesn’t.

A growing body of evidence links the suspects identified by Turkey in the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi government led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Suspicions about the prince’s involvement threaten to strain relations with the U.S., which had embraced his efforts to modernize Saudi Arabia’s society and economy and to play a strong regional role in Middle East affairs.

That explains why many prominent Americans eager to strengthen Saudi ties have cast him as a progressive, modernizing reformer. And that’s why it’s so significant that influential members of Congress are now talking about him as though he’s just another power-hungry autocrat.

Which is he?

When it comes to social change, the prince is unquestionably a major reformer and a largely progressive one.

Women are now allowed to drive and have many more chances to interact with men at work, in school and in public places. Saudi Arabia remains a very conservative country, even by Arab and Muslim standards, but in many ways its mores would be unrecognizable to a traveler who last visited, say, five years ago.

MBS, as the crown prince is known, has dragged Saudi Arabia into the 20th century, but not the 21st. As long as Saudi women suffer the guardianship laws that force them to secure the consent of a close male relative for many basic life decisions, it will remain a suffocating patriarchy. But with women driving and other gender-related transformations, one can sense that those guardianship codes are likely to be modified or eliminated in the foreseeable future.

On religion, too, MBS is spearheading major changes. The crown prince is trying to ensure that government-sanctioned interpretations of Islam are more tolerant, less literal and less extreme than in recent decades. The once-dreaded religious police have been stripped of enforcement powers, and the government is pushing Saudi Islam in a progressive direction.

At the economic level, MBS plainly wants to be a transformative reformer. But he’s not there yet. The effort to wean the Saudi economy off its near-total reliance on energy is still largely happening on paper. Two years after the prince raised the idea of selling shares in the state-owned oil producer Aramco to investors, a planned initial public offering seems only to be receding further into the future. The same goes for plans to curtail government handouts.

That’s not to say that economic reforms won’t take place. The prince sees his social changes, including unleashing the economic power of women, as crucial to securing Saudi Arabia’s economic viability by creating a new social compact that turns dependent subjects into productive citizens. So his ambitions to be an economic reformer shouldn’t be dismissed.

But politics are a different story. MBS is transforming some aspects of the Saudi political system, but not by liberalizing it. To the contrary, the political changes he’s enforcing are concentrating power in the royal court and within his inner circle, restricting the number of decision-makers and cracking down on even mild disagreement.

As a result, many Western commentators have dismissed the idea that MBS should be considered a reformer at all, even suggesting that he has conned Western sympathizers.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. He just doesn’t accept the Western notion that political liberalization has to go hand-in-hand with social and economic progress.

The crown prince is aware that reforms have the potential to undermine his power. That’s doubtless the lesson he takes from the experience of modernizing 20th-century monarchs like Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Shah of Iran, who were violently overthrown after unleashing change in traditional societies that they ultimately could not control.

So while the Western instinct is to see political repression in Saudi Arabia as a threat to the social and economic changes underway, MBS almost certainly sees it as a way to protect his reform project.

This explains why he has arrested the women who campaigned for the right to drive at the very moment he granted that right. The dual message tells conservatives that change is here to stay whether they like it or not, while warning liberals not to get the wrong idea about challenging authority. Even if the government concludes that an activist is right, he or she can still be arrested for complaining.

But the power to have it both ways when it comes to reform is not completely in the prince’s hands.

The political crackdown has already spooked foreign investors and created domestic capital flight, and the Khashoggi affair has discouraged economic engagement by the Western private sector.

Maybe MBS thinks that’s a temporary problem as it was, for example, for the Communist Party in China as it cracked down on dissent while setting off reforms that produced an economic boom starting in the late 1980s.

The Chinese experiment in centralized control of socioeconomic liberalization continues today. Can a Saudi version succeed? The specter of Jamal Khashoggi is whispering, “no.”

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/nikki-haley-was-no-voice-of-reason-that-s-why-she-could-be-the-next-face-of-the-republican-party-1.780116

In the Middle East, she is widely believed to be the worst-ever US ambassador to the UN, but that only strengthens her politically

At the outset of the Donald Trump administration, it seemed his most likely successor was his vice president, Mike Pence. However, it quickly became apparent that his UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who resigned last week, was at least as plausible.

She has used the UN post with consummate skill to promote herself as a national leader on the American right. Indeed, Mr Trump passed her over for Secretary of State in part because she had become too prominent and popular.

Ms Haley and Mr Pence are both former governors, and hence considered well-qualified for the presidency.

However, Ms Haley has distinguished herself repeatedly from Mr Trump, including implicitly criticising him and robustly pushing back against his implied criticisms of her.

Mr Pence, by contrast, has basked in Mr Trump’s shadow. He is notorious for sycophantically praising Mr Trump and gazing at him with the puppy-eyed adoration Nancy Reagan reserved for her husband Ronald.

It is not clear when Ms Haley decided to resign, but there was virtually no advance warning from a White House that usually leaks like a broken bucket. But, whatever the proximate cause was, the obvious underlying reality is that Ms Haley is positioning herself for a presidential bid.

If Mr Trump continues to enjoy relative good fortune and virtually unchallenged support among Republicans, she will have to wait until 2024, when she will be just 52 years old. But, by leaving now, she is reserving the option of a 2020 bid, should one or more of the numerous potential crises on the horizon befall Mr Trump.

Leaving now is essential to preserving her viability as an alternative to Mr Trump, should he become embattled and weakened.

She would pose as a unifier in a post-Trump Republican Party, able to appeal simultaneously to the “America first” constituency because of her loyal service to his administration; to hawkish neoconservatives whose internationalist and engaged foreign policies she has supported; and evangelical Christians otherwise aligned with Mr Pence whom she has courted her entire career, beginning with a religious conversion to Methodist Christianity.

Ms Haley’s appeal will be considerable. Not only will she potentially be able to bring together the Trumpian, neoconservative and evangelical constituencies, she’s a potentially crucial symbol of diversity for a Republican Party now cripplingly identified mainly with white men.

She is also a relatively young woman of colour, an Indian-American of Sikh origin, and hence an important symbolic corrective to the Republican Party’s stronger-than-ever identification with older white males in a diverse society.

Americans generally look for a change after four or eight years, whether or not they’re switching parties, so Republicans probably need a striking contrast to Mr Trump to have a fighting chance after he goes.

And Americans may not relish following a white-nationalist President Trump with a Christian-nationalist President Pence, thus switching from ethnic to religious intolerance. Mr Pence’s Christian fundamentalism is very different to, and may be much less widely appealing than Mr Trump’s white ethnic chauvinism.

Ms Haley’s record on the Middle East is mixed but disturbing. Many Gulf audiences applauded her tough stance against Iran. In particular, she made the vital case that Iran is supplying the Houthis with the missiles being fired at Saudi cities.

Unfortunately, one way she used the UN post to further her political ambitions was by consistently and mercilessly bashing Palestinians. That pandered, at no political cost, to hawkish, neoconservative, evangelical and Islamophobic audiences.

Ms Haley scandalously blocked the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as the UN special envoy to Libya, simply because of his Palestinian identity.

She strongly backed all of Mr Trump’s endless, vicious anti-Palestinian actions, including recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the US Embassy there, and slashing US funding for Palestinian refugees

But the Palestinian view that Ms Haley was “the worst ever” American UN ambassador may not last long if the national security adviser John Bolton plays a key role in choosing her successor.

Mr Bolton will try to ensure that, unlike Ms Haley, Washington’s next UN ambassador is a relatively junior figure aligned with him. Indeed, if he can, Mr Bolton will even deprive her successor of full cabinet-member rank, which would both ensure his primacy and further denigrate the UN’s role.

But all of that would only underline how effectively Ms Haley has used her UN post to transform herself into a major national and international figure, and become extremely popular with the American right.

Even many “Never Trump” conservatives are bemoaning her departure and lauding her as one of the last of the “grown-ups” in Mr Trump’s administration.

She did help keep the US internationally engaged, but often in an extremely destructive manner. And she never challenged Mr Trump’s white nationalism or, as Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has, fought for better policies within her own remit.

To the contrary, Mr Trump and Ms Haley generally seem to have brought out the worst in each other.

Nonetheless, she is now, more than ever, the clear heir apparent, and even a potential rival, to Mr Trump at the very top of the Republican party.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-12/journalist-khashoggi-s-disappearance-must-change-u-s-saudi-terms

The accusation that Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey shouldn’t end Washington’s ties to Riyadh, but it cannot go unanswered.

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and writer for the Washington Post, is the biggest crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations in years. While the Trump administration is resistant, unless the emerging narrative about what happened changes, a clear American response will be inevitable and warranted.

But we need to be clear about what we want and why we want it, and to accept our own responsibility for the international climate in which this has occurred.

Everyone agrees that on Oct. 2, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The Saudi government insists he left shortly thereafter, but can’t substantiate that. The Turkish government says it is sure that he was killed by a team of Saudi agents; Ankara has released fragmentary and circumstantial evidence to back that up.

Bipartisan pressure is mounting for the administration to demonstrate U.S. outrage. Business leaders are pulling out of Saudi investment conferences and breaking off negotiations for new deals. And the Post and other newspapers are rightly insisting that an attack on one journalist is an attack on us all.

President Donald Trump would love to ignore this, but Congress and the media aren’t going to let him. The administration is going to have to take some action. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake outlined exactly what a smart but forceful response might look like.

But there is a big problem. The long-standing U.S. partnership with Saudi Arabia is entirely transactional. It’s certainly not about shared values.

Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are stuck with each other unless they want to completely rethink their strategic posture. The U.S. needs a local partner in the Gulf region, especially while Iran seeks to overturn the regional status quo that Saudi Arabia backs.

There’s is nothing much the U.S. gives Saudi Arabia we don’t need them to have, and taking it away for a long period of time would cause major problems for us too.

Therefore if Saudi Arabia can’t exonerate itself, the most likely scenario is some time in the doghouse. Weapons sales frozen or canceled. Technology transfers deferred. Investments postponed or abandoned. And diplomatic engagement greatly reduced.

But the essential aspects of the relationship – military-to-military and intelligence cooperation and work to stabilize the global energy markets – would continue as always because the price of not doing that is prohibitive.

After some period of penance and repentance, Saudi Arabia’s timeout would be lifted, and things would basically return to normal.

The relationship really is that indispensable. If it wasn’t shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the war in Yemen, then fate of any one individual, no matter how appalling, isn’t going to reshape it either.

But there’s an additional complication. As F. Gregory Gause III points out, while Saudi Arabia still shares our basic strategic goal of preserving the regional status quo, the tactics being recently pursued by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are increasingly disruptive and, in their own way, destabilizing.

The point of any sustained U.S. pressure on Saudi Arabia in response to the Khashoggi affair must be to convince the Saudi king and crown prince that the mutual U.S.-Saudi strategy of defending the status quo and regional stability can’t be effectively pursued by reckless and destabilizing tactics. Indeed, when the tactics directly undermine the strategy, the whole project becomes self-defeating.

In part, these misguided actions are the result of Saudi Arabia assuming a regional leadership role for which it is not fully prepared. The collapse of traditional Arab power centers in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad has left a vacuum that Gulf countries now attempt to fill. That’s exacerbated by the gradual pullback from the region by the U.S. And Saudi Arabia’s regional leadership learning curve appears steep.

Saudi recklessness is also partly driven by panic about the rising power of Iran, especially since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the proliferation of disruptive pro-Iranian nonstate actors in the Arab world.

Letting the Saudis know we’re serious about stability in the Arab world and defending our mutual interests is important, but part of that deal is insisting that Saudi policies don’t undermine the strategic goal of stability.

Finally, if Khashoggi was killed with Saudi involvement, that is a moral outrage. The U.S. can’t shrug at such conduct from anyone. But the laissez-faire attitude from Trump and his administration regarding human rights has encouraged friend and foe alike to disregard the most fundamental international norms.

We are not going to get very far in championing and protecting international norms and rules with friends like Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Turkey – or with adversaries like Russia, China and Iran – if our own president and policies derisively dismiss those standards. If Saudi Arabia has indeed “disappeared” Khashoggi, our own rhetoric and policies helped set the stage for that, and we, too, must change our ways.

The probable pressure, and likely period of relative estrangement, forthcoming between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is an important opportunity to reset some of the basic terms of the relationship. But it’s got to be done carefully and intelligently, and both sides are going to have to adjust their way of doing business.

https://agsiw.org/how-the-khashoggi-affair-may-affect-u-s-saudi-relations/

The disappearance of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi won’t completely upend U.S.-Saudi relations but will almost certainly have a significant negative impact on them.

The disappearance of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was living in self-imposed exile in the United States and writing for The Washington Post, is developing into a significant problem for U.S.-Saudi relations. The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is primarily transactional, and not sentimental or values-based on either side. Therefore, even if many Americans conclude that the Saudi government is responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance or death, the fundamentals of the relationship are unlikely to be re-evaluated and transformed. However, it is likely that there will be a significant impact on the political and foreign policy conversation in Washington regarding relations with Saudi Arabia that could lead to repercussions in both the near and long terms. Saudi Arabia may have to deal with much more opposition in Congress to weapons sales and other forms of cooperation and far more skepticism and criticism in the mainstream U.S. media. At the very least, the tone and tenor of the relationship is likely to deteriorate reflecting a growing anti-Saudi sentiment in American public opinion.

On the early afternoon of October 2, Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and he has not been seen since. Saudi authorities insist he left the building shortly after entering, but have not released evidence of this, and Turkish authorities, in a swirl of complex and often contradictory leaked statements, have accusedSaudi Arabia of his premeditated murder. The United States is drawn into the controversy because Khashoggi was a resident of Washington, DC and writing for a major U.S. newspaper. Pressure is rapidly mounting, particularly from Congress and the media, especially the Post, on President Donald J. Trump to use U.S. leverage to press both Turkey and, especially, Saudi Arabia for evidence corroborating their competing claims. And there is mounting pressure for some practical consequences for Saudi Arabia from Washington if it is concluded Riyadh was responsible for his disappearance.

But the nature of the U.S.-Saudi alliance in all probability strongly limits the impact this event could have on the fundamentals of the relationship. Each side fulfills a core strategic need for the other, and there are no plausible alternatives for both. The key bases of the alliance are strategic and military cooperation, stability and order in the world’s energy markets, and maintaining security and stability in the Gulf region and the strategically crucial waters of the Gulf itself. As long as the United States wishes to remain the predominant outside power in the Gulf region and the guarantor of stability, it must rely on a partnership with a key local power. That means, in effect, that Washington must partner with either Saudi Arabia or Iran.

As the administration of former President Barack Obama discovered in the months after the nuclear agreement with Iran was concluded, Iran is not prepared to act as a stabilizing power in the region and remains fundamentally a revisionist actor challenging the status quo. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is committed to maintaining most aspects of regional stability and the status quo, and therefore Washington and Riyadh are largely in accord on most long-term goals in the Gulf region and the broader Middle East. Saudi Arabia, too, must partner with a global power that can help ensure its own security needs, which it cannot protect entirely on its own. Russia and China are unable, and probably unwilling, to play that role, because they lack the power projection capability under the current circumstances and also maintain strong relations with Iran.

Therefore, neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia can radically alter the basic equation in this transactional relationship without fundamentally rethinking their strategic posture. No amount of tension that has arisen in recent years, including from the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the war in Yemen, has come close to prompting such a fundamental re-evaluation. It is therefore unlikely that even if Washington concludes that Riyadh was responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance or death, this incident would prompt a thoroughgoing reset, whether under the Trump administration or any potential Republican or Democratic successor.

However, if the narrative that is rapidly taking hold in Washington, that Saudi Arabia was responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance, becomes the received wisdom, the relationship will undoubtedly suffer negative impacts if not a total re-evaluation. It would be widely seen in most U.S. political and foreign policy circles as a serious transgression of human rights and diplomatic norms, and part of a disturbing growing worldwide pattern of attacks on journalists. That Khashoggi was a U.S. resident and a columnist for a major U.S. paper intensifies the sense of U.S. investment in this issue, along with the close U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. Trump has expressed concern but that is widely regarded as insufficient. Calls are already mounting in Congress for increased U.S. engagement and potentially pressure on Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, this issue plays into two existing political divisions in Washington, and will be used by anti-Trump forces in the Democratic Party to cudgel the president and the administration. This is already happening, and dovetails with major pressure on the administration regarding Saudi Arabia linked to the war in Yemen and other such criticisms. Republican critics of the administration’s foreign policy, such as Senator Bob Corker, or even those who try to nudge and harass the administration toward a more engaged and internationalist policy, such as Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, are already seizing on the issue as well.

The Senate and House of Representatives have many options for bedeviling U.S.-Saudi cooperation on a number of fronts. They can complicate and even, for a time, block weapons sales and other forms of military and intelligence cooperation and technology transfers, especially if Democrats regain a majority in the House or the Senate after the November midterm elections. Among the pending sales that could be interfered with to make such a point are thousands of precision-guided munitions needed for the war in Yemen and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system worth $15 billion. This last sale is especially sensitive given the spate of recent Houthi missile attacks on Saudi cities, which has refocused attention on missile defenses generally. There have already been several efforts to block or delay these sales in Congress, mostly linked to humanitarian concerns about the impact of the war in Yemen on civilians.

However, Democrats and friendly and unfriendly Republican critics of administration foreign policy understand the transactional and virtually indispensable nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Therefore, they will not push for a complete rupture or fundamental rethinking of the relationship short of a major political or strategic earthquake that prompts a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the bases of the U.S. strategic posture in the Gulf region. The fate of any one individual, no matter how distressing and disturbing, is unlikely to prompt that.

There is one final area in which the Khashoggi affair could reverberate and have a negative impact on U.S.-Saudi relations. The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act that was passed at the end of Obama’s second term, which allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments for alleged cooperation on deadly terrorist attacks in the United States (mainly prompted to allow 9/11 survivors to sue Saudi Arabia) is still in force. Several cases continue to wend their way slowly through the legal process. However, the working assumption has been that judges are most likely to refer the matter to the State Department, which can certify that the country in question is making a good-faith effort to resolve the issue and prevent the case from going forward.

However, if this incident is in the long run widely regarded by Americans as an assassination of a government critic by Saudi Arabia, the chances that a judge will use the authority provided by JASTA to try to allow a case to go forward to discovery without giving the State Department a chance to block it may be increased. JASTA continues to be a ticking time bomb in the back of the U.S.-Saudi closet, and it could explode at some point into a major diplomatic incident.

Therefore, while the Khashoggi affair, however it plays out, will not lead to a fundamental rupture or re-evaluation of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it is also unlikely to have no impact or be dismissed as an unfortunate incident. Congress can act on its own, and pressure from Congress and the media may prove irresistible, forcing the administration to take a stronger stance than it wishes. Finally, the reputation of Saudi Arabia, and especially Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is likely to be severely damaged if Americans conclude he ordered or permitted the abduction or killing of Khashoggi. A tremendous amount of time, effort, and money spent on generating goodwill in the United States for the Saudi government, and particularly the crown prince, and the major social and economic reforms currently underway in Saudi Arabia would be greatly undermined in a manner seriously deleterious to relations. Riyadh will find U.S. goodwill in general a lot harder to come by, to the extent that it’s going to be much more difficult in the coming months for Americans to even speak positively about the Saudi government without facing serious pushback.