The only surprise about Donald Trump’s response to the death of Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post columnist who was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate earlier this month, was how little Trump pretended to care. For decades, a succession of U.S. presidents have disguised the brutal realpolitik of America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia under a patina of moral superiority and willful ignorance. Trump dispatched with the illusion entirely. “This took place in Turkey, and to the best of our knowledge, Khashoggi is not a United States citizen,” he told reporters, computing the value of Khashoggi’s life in real time. “He’s a permanent resident.” On the phone with Fox News, when asked about the possibility of canceling an arms deal with Riyadh, Trump was similarly forthright regarding the hard economic calculus. “I think that would be hurting us,” he said. “We have jobs. We have a lot of things happening in this country.”

Inside Washington, foreign-policy experts hoping for a reset swiftly downgraded their expectations. And as the Khashoggi affair has played out, disappointment has morphed to cynicism within the diplomatic community. “It’s fairly clear that this administration is hoping this will blow over in some respect or another,” Peter Juul, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, sighed in an interview. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had made a perfunctory concession to critics by revoking the visas for some of the Saudi officials linked to Khashoggi’s death. But it was largely an empty gesture—18 of the 21 Saudi suspects were already under arrest, and likely fated to die in a Saudi prison. (At least one of the men involved in the “hit team” had already [died in a mysterious “traffic accident” upon returning to Riyadh.) “This was a perfect moment for Trump to step out and say, ‘We Americans reject this, because we believe in what we believe,” former U.S. ambassador Nicholas Burns, said, incensed. “He missed it, because he doesn’t think about these things . . . I think we’re seeing the hollowness of his presidency. Truly. There’s no moral center to it.”

Notably, many are sympathetic to the bind the Trump administration has found itself in. “To be fair, any administration of either party—Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton—would have found this challenging,” Burns told me. “I don’t think there’s anybody out there, a senior person who’s worked in government, saying we should end our relationship with Saudi Arabia over this.” After all, Saudi Arabia is a critical U.S. ally—from both a strategic and economic standpoint. The Saudis serve as an imperfect ally of Israel, and are seen as a check on Iranian hegemony in the Middle East. “To be honest, when it comes to tangible policy, another administration may not have been all that different than Trump,” John Glaser, the director of foreign policy at the Cato Institute, told me. “A typical administration would almost certainly have been more critical of the Saudis following the Khashoggi murder, but probably gently so. With the exception of some symbolic penalties—formal condemnations, calls for investigation, possibly a temporary suspension of arms sales—the U.S.-Saudi relationship would probably not be fundamentally altered.”

It is too early to tell whether Khashoggi’s murder has brought the U.S. establishment to a tipping point. Over the past weeks, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have voiced frustration with Saudi Arabia, its war in Yemen, and the Saudi regime’s apparent disregard for America’s multi-billion-dollar patronage. But Washington is also awash in Saudi money, which funds dozens of think tanks, P.R. and consulting firms, and provides sinecures for all manner of Swamp creatures. The Trump administration, certainly, has yet to telegraph any interest in altering its relationship with Riyadh, let alone with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has a close personal connection with Jared Kushner. If there was a window for Trump to exert his leverage over Saudi Arabia—a desert economy with a singular, but depleting, natural resource—he missed the opportunity. Nor did he bother to engage with the European Union or NATO allies, as past administrations likely would have done, signaling the extent to which “America First” has also come to mean “America Alone.” Meanwhile, Juul lamented, the Saudis are “very much all in on Trump. They’re trying to see what they can get away with in however long he’s in office. They’re trying to run the table.”