The Biden administration has set for itself an ambitious human rights agenda. “When I am president, human rights will be at the core of U.S. foreign policy,” then candidate Joe Biden told the New York Times in February 2020, citing “China’s deepening authoritarianism” and “the unconscionable detention of over a million Uighurs in western China.” His statement recalled the famous line of Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Carter had given unprecedented priority to the issue of human rights in the conduct of foreign policy. Biden seemed poised to follow in his path.
Unfortunately for the rulers in Riyadh, Biden’s focus on human rights is not merely about China. It also stems from concerns with Saudi Arabia, together with the Trump administration’s perceived willingness to condone Saudi excesses.
“The Pariah That They Are”
Donald Trump, as is no secret, enjoyed a close relationship with the young crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman (aka MbS), and was keen to defend him in spite of a litany of human rights violations. These included MbS’s crackdown on domestic rivals, his detention of human rights activists, religious scholars, and intellectuals, the Saudi aerial bombardment of Yemen, and the murder of Washington Post commentator Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents in Istanbul in October 2018. Trump came off as particularly callous in his response to the Khashoggi affair. The CIA assessed with medium-to-high confidence that MbS had targeted Khashoggi, but Trump would suggest that the crown prince may not have had knowledge of the event (“maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”). He also cited arms deals with the Saudis as a mitigating factor (“Look, Saudi Arabia is buying $400 billion worth of things [from] us”) and appeared to brag about shielding MbS from Congressional action (“I saved his a--. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”)
All of this would lead the Democratic presidential candidates, Joe Biden among them, to seek to draw a contrast with Trump as regards Saudi Arabia. Biden, in particular, signaled that he would take a hard line on the kingdom. In August 2019, he told the Council on Foreign Relations that he would “order a reassessment of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” saying “[w]e will make clear that America will never again check its principles at the door just to buy oil or sell weapons.” Asked about Saudi human rights violations during a November 2019 Democratic primary debate, Biden declared that he—unlike Trump—would not let senior Saudi leaders go unpunished. “They have to be held accountable,” he said affirming his belief that Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered at the order of MbS and decrying the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. Holding them accountable meant that “we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them. We were in fact going to make them pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are. There’s very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” Biden then pivoted to China’s human rights abuses against the Uighurs, in effect putting the Saudis and the Chinese on the same moral plane. “We have to speak out and speak loudly about violations of human rights,” he concluded.
Yet campaigning is one thing. Making policy is another. The question today is whether Biden’s campaign rhetoric regarding Saudi Arabia will translate into actual policy. Does he really intend to treat Saudi Arabia as “the pariah that they are”? Is he really prepared to sacrifice the strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia at the altar of human rights? The answer to these propositions is almost certainly no.
“A Pillar of the Regional Security Architecture”
Since coming to power in January, the Biden administration has imposed a freeze on U.S. arms sales to Riyadh and announced an end to American support for offensive military operations in Yemen. It has also signaled that President Biden will not interact directly with MbS, preferring to conduct state-to-state affairs with his aging father, King Salman. (The latter, as is well known, is not involved in the management of day-to-day affairs. That power has been delegated to MbS.) Yet in taking these steps, the administration has also reiterated its support for the kingdom’s security and highlighted the importance of the decades-old Saudi-American strategic partnership.
In his first foreign policy address, Biden stated that “we are going to continue to help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people,” referring to the “missile attacks and UAV strikes and other threats from Iranian supplied forces in multiple countries.” And while Biden himself may shy away from direct communication with MbS, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has shown no such compunction. On February 18, Austin spoke by phone with the crown prince, who also holds the position of Saudi defense minister, and wrote on Twitter that “[w]e discussed the continued commitment to the 70 year US-Saudi security partnership, and I'm looking forward to working together to achieve regional security & stability.” According to an official statement accompanying the tweet, during the call Austin “underscored Saudi Arabia’s role as a pillar of the regional security architecture in the Middle East” and “noted US and Saudi shared commitment to countering Iran’s destabilizing activities and defeating violent extremist organizations in the region.”
None of this is suggestive of a reset in the relationship with Riyadh. The Biden administration, like its predecessor, recognizes the kingdom’s value in bringing stability and security to the Middle East. The promised “reassessment” of the relationship turns out to be more of a refining or a retuning. Gone is the language of full-scale reevaluation and pariahdom. The Biden administration’s new watchword as regards Saudi Arabia seems to be “recalibration.” As the administration has made clear, it intends to “recalibrate” the relationship according to a higher standard of human rights.
Goodwill Gesture
It is against this background that one must read Saudi Arabia’s recent release of several activists from prolonged and arbitrary detention. The most prominent of these detainees, Loujain al-Hathloul, was released on February 10 after a court finally delivered a verdict in her case and suspended the time remaining on her sentence. A women’s rights activist most famous for challenging the kingdom’s (now repealed) prohibition on women’s driving, Loujain had been forcibly repatriated from the United Arab Emirates back in 2018. She was subsequently detained for 1001 days on such charges as communicating with Western diplomats and human rights organizations. According to the official Saudi press, which refers to her only as “the female detainee,” the crimes for which she was convicted include “incitement to change the underlying ruling system and seeking to carry out foreign agendas in the kingdom.”
The release of Loujain and others may be little more than a goodwill gesture from MbS, but it is nonetheless a welcome development—and one for which the Biden administration deserves credit. The challenge that the administration now faces is making further progress on Saudi human rights without alienating MbS.
Success in this regard, it must be acknowledged, will never be total. Many of those detained, including prominent religious scholars such as Salman al-Awda, are accused of links to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Riyadh regards as a terrorist organization. The calculus behind their detention is unlikely to change. But the administration can and should push for greater transparency in the Saudi legal system, and it can and should encourage Riyadh to release other rights activists. Progress here will require careful, and, for the most part, quiet, diplomacy. Naming and shaming will only get Washington so far. MbS is unlikely to respond positively to further rounds of public condemnation. He cannot be perceived as caving to Western pressure, as that would be to exhibit weakness.
The paradox of MbS’s Saudi Arabia is that it has made enormous strides in pursuit of social and economic reform at the cost of an unprecedented level of political repression. The country is a radically different place than it was just five years ago. Women can drive and travel without the permission of a male relative. The religious police no longer arrest men and women having coffee together. There are movie theaters and rock concerts and wrestling matches. Yet there is also less room for freedom of expression and less tolerance for criticism of the government.
Before the rise of MbS, Saudi Arabia was not known as a country that arbitrarily detained its citizens. It was not a beacon of human rights, but neither was it a serial human rights abuser like some of its neighbors. In the Gulf states, as Fouad Ajami wrote in the early 1990s, “the ruler keeps the peace, the citizenry minds its own concerns. No ‘visitors of dawn’ haul people off to political prisons.” This was “not quite democracy,” but it was “a benign political order.”
Tempting Fate
The United States can and should help to prod Saudi Arabia in the direction of the “benign political order” of old, but in doing so it must not lose sight of the larger humanitarian and strategic picture.
Saudi Arabia is an imperfect ally, but in terms of human rights it is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or even Abd al-Fattah Al-Sisi’s Egypt, which holds far more political prisoners than Riyadh. There is also the Islamic Republic of Iran, with which the Biden administration seems to have no qualms about engaging despite its far more numerous human rights violations. As The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood recently noted, “If the ideal number of murdered dissidents is zero, then Saudi Arabia is closer to that number than Iran.”
On a strategic level, being absolutist about human rights in the kingdom could backfire by driving MbS into the arms of the Chinese and the Russians, creating a situation in which the United States has ceded its influence and leverage. In the worst-case scenario, such an approach could contribute to discrediting and destabilizing a friendly if flawed Saudi state.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is almost certainly better than the alternative—a war-torn state wrecked by a whirlpool of jihadi violence, or, at best, an Islamist-dominated revolutionary state akin to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Either outcome would be a disaster for U.S. interests, and would be far worse for the global human rights situation than the continuation of a Saudi regime that has shown some willingness—if not an eagerness—to improve its rights record. To that extent, the Biden administration must be careful not to undermine the legitimacy of the Saudi kingdom lest it wish to tempt fate.
The Carter administration’s promotion of human rights in Iran during the Shah’s reign furnishes something of a cautionary tale in this regard. No one would deny the Shah’s obvious and numerous human rights abuses—arbitrary detention, torture, assassination. Yet neither would one deny that matters were made considerably worse by the advent of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The extent to which Carter’s human rights policy contributed to the downfall of the Shah is debatable, but it likely did play some role. As the Iran scholar Richard Cottam noted in 1978, before the onset of the revolution, “The Carter human rights advocacy has precipitated in Iran the reappearance of public opposition,” and “there is not the slightest question that the timing of opposition activity is directly related to Carter’s pronouncements on human rights.” This opposition activity would lead to the destabilizing of the Shah’s regime, and, by extension, to the Iranian revolution. For Cottam, the problem with Carter’s human rights policy in Iran was that it was “a doctrine without a strategy.” “Innocent of any understanding of the historical context of Iranian-American relations, especially as perceived by Iranians,” he wrote in 1980, “Carter could not know that his advocacy of human rights might destabilize a close ally.”
All of this is worth bearing in mind as the Biden administration weighs treating Riyadh more as partner or pariah. In the case of Saudi Arabia, as elsewhere, the promotion of human rights cannot be a mere doctrine. It must take the form of a strategy—one that not only advances the cause of human rights to the greatest degree possible, but also takes care not to produce outcomes worse than the present predicament.
