In the last month, Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the United States has dominated the national dialogue and painted President Donald Trump into an uncomfortable corner where he’s been hesitant to criticize the kingdom for their role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Critical to Trump’s argument to maintaining good relations with the Saudis is a $110 billion arms deal negotiated in 2017, and the fact that Saudi Arabia has consistently been the largest purchaser of American arms.
Little discussed, however, is what these American manufactured arms are used for. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has a led a coalition of other nations in an intervention on the Yemeni Civil War to suppress an uprising by Houthi rebels against the Yemeni government. Though the Houthis have consistently been fighting an insurgency in the nation since 2004, escalation of the conflict picked up dramatically in 2015 when the Houthis managed to take over the capital city of Sana’a, spurring the threatened kingdom to intervene militarily.
“Saudi Arabia sees its neighbor Yemen as a longterm ally and they always had great connections with the Sunni led government that was in power for so long,” WGBH News Analyst and CEO of the GroundTruth Project Charlie Sennott said. “So, it’s another one of these regional proxy wars where Iran [which is majority Shia] has exerted its influence and the Saudis are worried.”
War is inherently brutal and violent, but the Saudi led intervention has also resulted in an intense famine that has left over 3.3 million children and pregnant women malnourished according to the United Nations, and millions more food insecure. Despite attempts by groups like UNICEF, the Saudis have created an impenetrable blockade with the aid of the United States that has made it impossible for aid workers to get into the country, on top of the danger posed to these workers due to the refusal of either side to engage in a ceasefire to allow aid in.
If the Khashoggi crisis is indicative of President Trump’s failure to reconcile his own praise for authoritarian leaders with being the ostensible leader of the liberal-democratic world order, the famine in Yemen is indicative of the inherent hypocrisy of the entire U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. In 2015, even as President Obama sought to dampen the usage of military strength and lean more on diplomacy, his administration quietly allowed the Saudi regime to use U.S. supplied weapons to target radar equipment in Yemen along with supporting a deadly air campaign against the rebels. By the time Obama left office, more than 10,000 civilians had been killed, and reports started to filter out of the U.N. that the Saudis were using American equipment to target water systems in Yemen.
Inheriting the Saudi alliance with the U.S. is a macabre right of passage for new presidents and a litmus test of how far the kingdom can go before receiving a rebuke from the president. FDR and Eisenhower infamously turned a blind eye to the kingdom’s legal protections for slavery, while George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton paid more lip service to the Gulf War and negotiating a $4 billion contract for AT&T than King Fahd’s imprisonment of reformists. Now, it’s President Trump’s turn, but unlike many of his predecessors, he’s been openly uninterested in human rights violations as much as he is in the economic loss that could result from upbraiding the Saudi government.
“[Supporting the Saudi government is] fair criticism of the Obama Administration and every administration before it. This is a complicity with the Saudis around a lot of issues that goes over many decades and generations, but right now in this moment we are in an incredible moment of diplomacy by transaction,” Sennott said.
This transactional relationship is the major impetus for why America has not utilized its influence more with the Saudis, and has seemingly allowed a blockade against aid workers along with airstrikes against water systems to continue, and according to Sennott its a policy that most likely won’t be reversed anytime in the near future.
“[Saudi Arabia being the biggest importer of American weapons] has everything to do with why we look the other way when the Saudis carry out airstrikes like the one they did on the bus that killed so many civilians, or the ones they do every day, and this is a reality that [Americans] have to get [their] head around.”
