Sahar Zeki, an activist and a friend of Khashoggi, attaches a picture of him on the barriers blocking the road leading to Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2018. | AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis Washington And The World How Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder Shook the World Saudi Arabia didn’t calculate that one man’s death could have such geopolitical impact.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a regular contributor to CNN.com and a weekly columnist at World Politics Review.

The second most startling aspect of the drama surrounding the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi—second only to the heart-stopping brutality of the act—has been the sheer enormity of its impact. Much to the perpetrators’ alarm, the assassination of a man whose name most people had never heard before has sent shockwaves across the world, rocking geopolitical alliances, uniting unlikely foes, and outraging observers in the United States and around the world.

Tuesday’s speech by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calling the killing a “ferocious” and planned murder, rather than the accident claimed by Saudi Arabia, and his demand that the perpetrators be tried in Turkey, ratchets up the tension even more in an international crisis unlike any other in recent memory. Erdogan, who has come under attack for his assaults on democracy and journalists, remains determined to push the case forward. As we have previously noted, he views the killing as an opportunity to strengthen Turkey’s regional position and to burnish his deeply tarnished image, describing Turkey as “a representative of humanity’s shared conscience.”


Amazingly, the Khashoggi case remains in the headlines a full three weeks after the Saudi columnist walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul and disappeared. Efforts by the president of the United States and the government of Saudi Arabia to quiet the global obsession with Khashoggi’s fate are failing spectacularly. Why is that? Why, in an era when shocking news stories gush out firehose-style, relentlessly pushing the previous ones aside, is this one proving impossible to wash away?

The overriding explanation is that Khashoggi’s killing contains the essence of all the fears that surround us in this era of political uncertainty: It’s the era of Donald Trump; of rising authoritarianism; of increasingly amoral, transactional politics; of leaders who lie without hesitation or remorse. In short, Khashoggi’s gruesome ending looks like the dramatized, personalized version of our fears: evidence of the collapse of the liberal world order.

Khashoggi, as Riyadh finally admitted on Friday, was killed by the Saudis. And there is no question that Erdogan has cleverly exploited the case, having Turkish officials and a pliable Turkish media tantalize the world with a continuous stream of gruesome information, aiming to maximize his political advantage.

Early on, critics bemoaned the fact that one man’s death received so much more attention than the deaths of thousands. It’s true: The Saudi-led war in Yemen, a massive humanitarian catastrophe that is affecting some 22 million people, has received little attention. Others quickly replied with the Stalinesque observation that the death of a single person has the power to move us more than that of anonymous thousands. But there have been other individuals who have died in egregious circumstances without capturing global attention.

The world is full of horrific crimes perpetrated by governments and others against sympathetic victims. None of them has compelled our attention this way. Not the journalists who have “fallen” out of windows in Russia; not Giulio Regeni, the 28-year-old Italian student kidnapped and murdered in Egypt; not Meng Hongwei, the Chinese head of Interpol, who disappeared after flying home from France, whose wife now fears has been killed by authorities; not Kim Wall, the freelance journalist murdered and decapitated by a Danish inventor. There’s something about Khashoggi’s death that seems to have provoked extra passion and revulsion.

More than any of the scores of journalists killed this year, Khashoggi’s assassination happened at the intersection of a number of troubling trends unfolding across the world. And, even though it was a Saudi operation, it ignited concerns about what is happening in other increasingly authoritarian countries, and worries surrounding Trump, including his continuing disparagement of and incitements against journalists. (Just last week, he repeatedly praised a Montana congressman who had violently assaulted a reporter—not despite but because of the attack.)

Khashoggi’s killing has rattled governments across the West that had placed their hopes in the young Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and surfaced latent questions about whether the United States should re-evaluate its relationship with the kingdom. For many in the foreign policy community, including Trump, the answer has been that the relationship should be preserved.

Yet, with every effort Trump has made to help his Saudi friends get out of a mess they created, he seems to make matters worse for Riyadh.

First, there’s the fact that Prince Mohammed has occupied such a key position in Trump’s foreign policy—organizing the president’s first trip abroad last year, befriending his powerful son-in-law Jared Kushner, and closely consulting on sensitive regional issues such as Israel and Iran. Fairly or not, many Trump critics view Khashoggi’s murder as reflecting on Trump’s policies and judgment.

Trump’s handling of the crisis blew a hot wind on that growing brush fire. He vacillated between showing concern about the killing and dismissing it as someone else’s problem, pointedly noting that Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, wasn’t actually an American citizen. Even if Trump exaggerated the economic impact, he made clear that billions of dollars in arms sales matter to him more than the killing of one man. He even appeared to test-drive a cover story for Riyadh—“rogue killers” —and sounded disappointed when the world refused to ignore the crisis. “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately,” he told the New York Times.

Unusually, it was private businesses that showed more concern for humanitarian values than the American president, with many companies canceling their participation in a Saudi investment conference and suspending planned projects in the kingdom.

When the Saudis finally acknowledged playing a role in the killing, claiming Khashoggi had died in a fistfight as part of an operation that Prince Mohammed did not know about, Trump was asked if he believed them. “I do, I do,” he answered, breaking with U.S. intelligence agencies, which are reportedly increasingly convinced of the prince’s involvement The next day, after U.S. senators in both parties and world leaders declared the story not credible, Trump again reversed course. “Obviously there’s been deception,” he allowed, “and there’s been lies.”

None of this has served the White House well. Already Trump had come under withering criticism for his cringe-worthy embrace of autocrats and tyrants. He has described his relationship with North Korea’s brutal dictator as a love affair. He has refused to criticize Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, heaped praise on China’s increasingly repressive President Xi Jingping, and waxed admiringly about autocrats from Cairo to Manila. All the while, he has described America’s closest friends in the West—the ones that share America’s values and ideals—as foes. Trump’s tepid reaction to Khashoggi’s death seems to fit a pattern.

We’re in an era when norms of political discourse seem to be changing. Tolerance for diverging opinions is eroding. Some view critics as enemies. Trump famously calls journalists the “enemy of the people.” It all adds up to a penumbra of uncertainty about where this will all end. Khashoggi’s killing gave a gruesome shape to our worries. Whether the world can emerge from this crisis with a sense of justice, with the consensus that the extrajudicial murder of a political critic is not an acceptable way to deal with political differences of opinion, will determine whether the legacy of this murder is an even more frightening world, or one that has scared itself back to its senses.