Why No One Believes American Rhetoric About Democracy
American foreign policy often highlights the gap between the values-based story that the United States tells about itself and the reality of how a superpower pursues its interests. The size of that gap will be impossible to straddle when President Joe Biden travels to Saudi Arabia to repair his relationship with the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Biden is by no means the first American president who has struggled to reconcile a declared commitment to human rights with a more utilitarian definition of American interests. George W. Bush enlisted Saudi Arabia as an ally in the War on Terror even though 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, the wellspring of the Wahhabism that helped create the conditions for the attacks. Barack Obama offered tentative support for a Saudi-led intervention in Yemen to avoid a rupture in the relationship, a decision that many Obama officials (myself included) regretted as the war devolved into a humanitarian catastrophe. Donald Trump, unburdened by the pretense of supporting human rights, embraced the kingdom so thoroughly that it was hard to tell where Riyadh’s policies ended and Washington’s began.
