The Fist-Bump isn’t the Problem

If you followed the US media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, you might think the most consequential decision he faced was whether to shake Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s hand. Biden, according to reports, wanted to avoid being photographed touching palms with the despot who ordered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s dismemberment. So White House officials explained that, because of COVID, Biden would not shake anyone’s hands on his Middle East tour. But upon landing at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, Biden managed a few fist bumps and then promptly shook the paw of, all people, Benjamin Netanyahu. “Biden Adopts ‘No Handshake’ Covid Policy, but Not for Long” announced The New York Times. Bloomberg declared that, “Biden’s Fist-Bump Fiasco Muddles Bid to Avoid MBS Handshake.” In the end, Biden and MBS fist-bumped, awkwardly.

Amusing? Kind of. But also stupid because the obsession over whether Biden would shake bin Salman’s hand missed the point. The assumption underlying it is that America is so morally pure that the worst thing it does is allowed itself to be sullied by interacting with foreign leaders who kill innocent people. As if our government doesn’t. That’s exactly the wrong way to talk about American foreign policy and human rights.

But first a word about this Friday’s Zoom call. Our guest will be Northwestern University Israel Studies Professor Sara Yael Hirschhorn, author of City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, and a frequent critic (as you can see from her Twitter feed) of the American left’s view of Israel. As newsletter veterans know, I like talking to people who disagree with me, and Sara often does. She’ll explain why on Friday. As always, paid subscribers will get the link on Wednesday and the video next week.

Back to the fist-bump. Much of the commentary surrounding it suggested that Biden faced a choice between maintaining America’s virtue and tarnishing it in order to get Riyadh to pump more oil and take America’s side against Russia, China and Iran. Critics of Biden’s Saudi trip adopted this perspective, and so did supporters. Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan bemoaned the fact that “Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia erodes our moral authority” and “will signal that American values are negotiable.” By contrast, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass congratulated Biden for recognizing that “A pure, values-centered approach to Saudi Arabia – or toward China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, for that matter – is unsustainable.”

But the assumption underlying both Ryan’s criticism and Haass’ praise is wrong. The United States government is not a moral innocent whose greatest offense is its willingness, reluctantly, to break bread with those benighted regimes that violate human rights. America itself violates human rights on a massive scale.

According to a 2020 report by the Watson Institute at Brown University, America’s post 9/11 wars—wars that Biden supported, at least initially—have led to the displacement of roughly 37 million people. The US is by far the world’s largest cumulative contributor to climate change, which means it’s the world’s largest contributor to climate refugees and climate deaths. The United States is currently imposing sanctions against Iran that, according to Human Rights Watch, have contributed to “a lack of critical drugs for epilepsy patients” and “limited chemotherapy medications for Iranians with cancer.” Biden officials recently warned that if Tehran doesn’t accept a nuclear deal on America’s terms, the US will make those sanctions harsher. The US is currently holding $7 billion from Afghanistan’s national bank­—it’s Afghanistan’s money, not ours—which it refuses to release back to the Afghan government even though the UN Secretary-General says Afghanistan faces an “epic humanitarian crisis.” That’s theft, which will cause people to starve. Of course, the Taliban are horrific. Iran’s government is awful, too. But US policy is making the lives of already oppressed and impoverished people far worse. By the way, the detention center at Guantanamo Bay is now more than twenty years old. It holds fewer prisoners now than it did at the height of the “war on terror.” But most of the prisoners it holds have never been charged with a crime.

I’m not recounting this ugly litany to exonerate MBS. Far from it. My point is different. It’s that when Americans do a moral accounting of our behavior overseas we should focus less on whether we’re tainted by symbolic interactions with governments that do hideous things and more on the hideous things we do ourselves—tangible things like denying people the food and medicine they need to live, making the planet uninhabitable, waging immoral wars, and selling arms that governments use to maim and kill.

When it comes to Saudi Arabia, what matters most isn’t whether Biden grasps bin Salman’s palm. It’s whether he keeps selling him weapons. In 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a war in Yemen that has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. 370,000 people are dead, one million displaced. The Obama administration, thinking it must reward the Saudis for swallowing the Iran nuclear deal, helped make that carnage possible. It provided Riyadh in-air refueling and combat-search-and-rescue support and sold its reckless, thuggish regime a record $117 billion in weapons. Trump made US support even more unequivocal, even as a United Nations report accused Saudi forces in Yemen of war crimes. In 2018, in a rare act of public contrition, a number of top former Obama officials—including Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who are now Biden’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor—apologized for Obama’s support for the Saudi war. “The war in Yemen is a full-blown crisis,” declared their joint statement. “We unsuccessfully tried conditional support to the coalition…Now, we must cease support altogether.”

As president, however, Biden hasn’t lived up to that pledge. When he took office he stopped selling Riyadh “offensive weapons.” But he kept selling the kingdom “defensive weapons,” a distinction that the Quincy Institute’s Annelle Sheline has noted is “arguably meaningless, given that defensive capability converts directly to offensive advantage.” The Biden administration has, to its credit, worked hard to promote a cease-fire in Yemen, which has been in effect since April. Yet according to news reports, it’s now considering resuming selling the Saudis even offensive weapons, supposedly because those sales will nudge Riyadh toward ending the war altogether.

This is illogical and immoral. Yemen is Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam; it’s a brutal, senseless war that Riyadh is losing, and thus has every reason to extricate itself from. America should facilitate Saudi Arabia’s exit diplomatically. But paying off a government that has used American weapons to commit war crimes by selling it more American weapons is insanity. Even if MBS doesn’t use those arms to further bludgeon Yemen, everything we know about him suggests he’ll sooner or later put them to nefarious use somewhere else.

Why is the Biden administration doing this? If you read the American media, which often feeds the narrative of American innocence, you might think Biden’s actions are a regrettable response to the harsh realities of the world. After all, the Saudis feel threatened by Iran. China and Russia are threatening to swoop in and lure Riyadh into their geopolitical camp. The US would much prefer to remain virtuous but it doesn’t have any choice. The Middle East is a tough place.

Nonsense. The US doesn’t need to be browbeaten into selling weapons to odious governments. We peddle the stuff like mad. Uncle Sam accounts for almost 40 percent of the arms sold worldwide. Saudi Arabia alone accounts for a full quarter of those sales. And Washington—which is filled with think tanks and consulting firms that are funded by arms manufacturers and autocratic regimes—is organized to produce government officials who keep the spigot open. Before becoming Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin sat on the board of Raytheon, one of the weapons makers that has sold Saudi Arabia the bombs it drops on Yemen. As the American Prospect reported this spring, Biden’s deputy secretary of defense, and two of his assistant secretaries of defense hail from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which receives money from Saudi Arabia’s government-owned oil company. Antony Blinken spent his time out of government at a consulting firm, WestExec Advisors, which is now partly owned by a company that counts Riyadh among its clients. At least eleven top Biden national security officials have ties to the Center for a New American Security, the Washington think tank that receives the most money from weapons makers. When Saudi officials meet their US counterparts, they are not meeting innocents.

Last week, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, admitted on television that while in government he had tried to foment coups overseas. While his behavior was criminal, his honesty was refreshing. Bolton describes America as a self-interested quasi-empire that ruthlessly pursues global power. He’s right. The press can help make US foreign policy more benign—it can expose our government’s misdeeds and thus rally Americans to oppose them. But to do that effectively it must jettison the illusion that America’s leaders possess some inherent tendency to defend human rights. When the Crown Prince met the US president this weekend, he wasn’t the only one with blood on his hands.

Other Stuff:

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about how AIPAC’s unprecedented financial intervention in this year’s elections threatens not only the Democratic Party’s commitment to Palestinian rights but it’s commitment to progressive politics in general.

I was on MSNBC a lot last week. I discussed Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East with hosts Katie Phang and Mehdi Hasan, and on Morning Joe, I also talked about Bolton’s admission that he had instigated coups with Mehdi and Joy Reid. And I chatted about Biden’s failure to defend democracy at home with Sam Stein. 

I also moderated a longer conversation on Biden’s Middle East trip with the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Lara Friedman, the University of Richmond’s Dana El-Kurd, and the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi.

Instead of arming Middle Eastern dictators, Bernie Sanders spent last week listening to their victims.

See you Friday,

Peter