The Khashoggi story isn’t going away. Here is a sampling of commentary:

“This trend toward repression cannot be blamed entirely on the United States, but it cannot be entirely disconnected from the United States, either,” Max Boot writes in The Washington Post. “The only thing that matters to this intensely solipsistic president is how other rulers treat him; how they treat their own people or even their neighbors is irrelevant.”

So far, Trump’s reaction to the Khashoggi crisis mirrors his approach to domestic politics: it involves telling lies, writes The New Yorker’s John Cassidy: “Another receptive audience for Trump’s disinformation campaigns is made up of foreign despots.”

Eli Lake, who has sometimes defended Trump’s foreign policy, says the larger problem for Saudi Arabia isn’t even the implausibility of its emerging story of what happened to Khashoggi. It’s the crown prince. “These are not the decisions of a steady-handed leader,” Lake writes in Bloomberg Opinion.

If Congress wanted to punish Saudi Arabia, what are the options? Sanctions on oil, Saudi Arabia’s biggest export, are among them, says Amy Myers Jaffe of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The United States has shown on many occasions that it has many other values that supersede oil, including international norms of behavior, free democratic elections, and freedom of speech,” she writes. Samantha Gross of the Brookings Institution is more skeptical. “Trump can’t afford to have skyrocketing oil prices and rising gasoline prices at the pump going into the midterm elections,” she said on yesterday’s episode of the “5 on 45” podcast.

Finally, The Washington Post published what is likely Khashoggi’s final column, written before his disappearance, and it reads like a warning. Crackdowns on the media in the Middle East “no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community,” he wrote. “Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.”

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