But let’s examine the issues with Saudi Arabia that required this apologia. They are broadly divisible into three parts: (1) military, (2) economic, and (3) the assassination of the Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Read: Why the U.S. can’t quit Saudi Arabia

Trump begins with a foreboding message. “The world is a dangerous place!” he writes, at his most Churchillian. He characterizes the war in Yemen as a “proxy” war in which the American enemy Iran and the American ally Saudi Arabia have met on a field of battle. The Saudis, he says, have kept Iranian interests in check by fighting in Yemen. The analysis does not achieve greater granularity—the Houthis may be Iranian allies without being Iranian proxies—but it is broadly correct. The destruction and immiserization of Yemen, including the starvation of children and other civilians, is a price Trump regards as a good deal for the inhibition of Iranian interests.

American economic entanglements with Saudi Arabia go back many decades, and in this sphere, too, what Trump says is not entirely wrong, although he exaggerates well past the point of dishonesty. The Saudis, he writes, “agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States.” In other words: Our friendship is too sweet to spit out, no matter how poisonous it may be. Trump has a propensity to lie about the magnitude of these deals, and in any case he tends to speak of these deals as if they were grants, rather than mutually beneficial arrangements that should increase American sway over Saudi Arabia, rather than force the United States into permanent Saudi enfeoffment and automatic concession to the kingdom’s demands. If the Saudis have invested $450 billion, does not the United States have more sway over them, rather than less? (The Saudi role in global energy markets, of course, remains formidable, even if it is now proportionally smaller than that of the United States and Russia.)

And then, finally, comes the matter of Khashoggi. On October 2, a team of Saudis murdered Khashoggi, almost certainly in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. I have written previously about the possibility that Khashoggi was accidentally killed in a botched attempt to sedate and render him to Riyadh, and about the preposterous striptease to which Turkey has subjected the world, as it leaked out lurid unverified details about how the killing might have happened. (Was the killing immediate, or preceded by a Skype conversation with the Saudi adviser Saud al-Qahtani? Did the assassins cut off his fingers? Is there a recording of the whole grisly ordeal—or only of one of the assassins confirming, vaguely, that the “job is done”?) The Turks caught the Saudis in an evil and inexcusable plot, one that (perhaps even worse) was executed with all the grace and competence of a team of howler monkeys on methamphetamines.