Any rock star or Hollywood actor would envy the puff pieces Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman currently enjoys in the American press. Thomas Friedman got the ball rolling in The New York Times last November, praising bin Salam as the Middle East’s great hope, a tireless reformer leading an “Arab Spring, Saudi style” which would modernize the oil-rich autocracy and promote a more tolerant Islam. “After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age,” Friedman wrote of their interview, in language recalling Penthouse Forum more than The New York Times Opinion page. “It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.”

The column received a devastating rebuke from a group of Middle Eastern scholars led by University of Richmond’s Sheila Carapico, who pointed out that bin Salman’s autocratic attempt to impose social change had nothing in common with the Arab Spring, a genuine mass movement for democratization. Bin Salman’s “growing power has been accompanied by a ramping up of censorship, arrests, imprisonments without (fair) trials and other forms of violent repression against dissent,” the scholars wrote, also noting that Saudi military intervention in Yemen had caused of one of the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent years.

Yet as bin Salman proceeds through his three-week charm tour of American cities, such criticisms have been largely absent from current coverage. Instead, reports echo Friedman’s cheerleading, pointing to genuine reforms (women can now drive in Saudi Arabia and Black Panther will be the first movie to screen in the kingdom in 35-years) and downplaying bin Salman’s habit of jailing opponents. According to 60 Minutes, bin Salman’s “reforms inside Saudi Arabia have been revolutionary. He is emancipating women, introducing music and cinema and cracking down on corruption, in a land with 15,000 princes.” The Wrap reports that bin Salman has been “expounding on his vision of an economically diverse, culturally significant Saudi Arabia, a message he has been selling hard in a jam-packed trip to Hollywood and later in the week to Silicon Valley.” Time magazine acknowledged “contradictions” in the prince’s policies, but insisted that “few come away from an encounter with bin Salman unaware of the force of his personality, intellect and devotion to change.”

This positive press is part of a long and sordid tradition of the American press celebrating friendly dictators—the Pinochet regime in Chile and repressive South Korean President Syngman Rhee being two particularly well-documented examples. But it also reflects the broader bipartisan exhaustion with American foreign policy, especially in the area of democracy promotion: politicians aren’t giving the press dissenting quotes to report. The last two decades have witnessed two failed attempts to bring democracy to the Middle East: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under the George W. Bush administration, which overthrew genuine tyrannies but substituted barely functioning semi-states, and the popular revolutions of the Arab Spring, which produced a ferocious backlash in most countries where protests arose, not to mention civil war in Syria.

In the wake of these twin disappointments, the American foreign policy establishment has reverted to a pre-9/11 strategy of expedient ally support. No one better embodies this cynicism than President Donald Trump. “Who blew up the World Trade Center?” candidate Trump asked on Fox News in February 2016. “It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.” As president, Trump has forgotten about 9/11 and has embraced Saudi Arabia as a key ally, to the point of offending traditional European partners with the deference shown to Riyadh.