The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

In hard-nosed geopolitical terms, Trump’s was the only sensible approach. No one excused Khashoggi’s murder, and few doubted it was a serious mistake. Whether or not you liked Saudi Arabia, the monarchy, Mohammed bin Salman, or Khashoggi, we had significant US national interests at stake. Withdrawing support would immediately trigger countervailing efforts by our adversaries in the region to exploit the situation to our detriment. Putin had earlier put it to me most bluntly in Moscow (see Chapter 6) on October 23, saying Russia could sell arms to the Saudis if we didn’t. Trump wasn’t necessarily deciding on the basis of geostrategic reality, but on the US jobs generated by the arms sales, and he ended up in more or less the right place. This approach was exactly Jeane Kirkpatrick’s conclusion in her iconic 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”2: “Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.”