Peter Beinart: What’s really behind Trump’s coddling of Saudi Arabia

In the United States, the Trump administration has announced that it will revoke the visas of the perpetrators it identifies and consider sanctions, which Republican and Democratic lawmakers have been calling for in addition to other, more severe punishments. It’s a preliminary response that’s tougher than that of other world powers like China and Russia, and roughly in step with the actual actions (as opposed to the outraged words) of Washington’s European allies.

But the president, who recently proclaimed himself a “nationalist” rather than a “globalist … that wants the globe to do well,” has devoted much of his public commentary on the incident to the hard limits of U.S. retaliation.

Asked what price the Saudis should pay, Donald Trump has pointed out that Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post, was a permanent resident of the United States rather than a citizen and that he vanished in Turkey rather than in the U.S. The implication was that snuffing out non-American journalists on foreign soil merits merely a discounted form of U.S. retribution. The president, after all, isn’t some globalist.

Trump has also argued passionately against the United States halting billions of dollars in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, lest rivals like China, Russia, and France snatch away the contracts and enrich their economy at the American people’s expense.

“It’s a very competitive market,” the president explained this week, days after announcing his intention to withdraw from a Cold War–era arms-control treaty, in part to prevent China and Russia from outcompeting the United States on nuclear weapons. “I know that from a certain standpoint you could also say, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ because [what happened to Khashoggi] is a terrible thing. But we would be really hurting … our companies; we’d be hurting our jobs.”

And Trump has signaled that the U.S.-Saudi alliance must survive this ordeal even though Khashoggi did not, in part because the Saudis are essential partners in clamping down on Iran’s nuclear pursuits, support for militant groups, and expanding influence in the Middle East.

“You look at what [the Iranians have] done to people—vicious, horrible. And that’s no excuse for what happened with Saudi Arabia,” he said, clinically describing the extrajudicial killing of a human being as “a very bad original concept” that “was carried out poorly” and covered up even worse. “It’s a nasty part of the world,” the president observed.

Read: Why Khashoggi’s disappearance is a test for Britain

The Russian government, alleged to have poisoned a former Russian spy with a weapons-grade nerve agent in the United Kingdom earlier this year, and the Chinese government, which just last month disappeared a Chinese leader of the international police organization Interpol, find themselves on familiar territory with the Khashoggi affair. Both have remained conspicuously silent about the incident, in an apparent effort to avoid disrupting blossoming relations with the United States’ longtime strategic ally in the Middle East.