Saudi Arabia Should Not Be Our Ally

On 4/12/2022, Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept published an article about a letter certain House Democrats are sending Secretary of State Anthony Blinken where they ask President Biden to “rebalance” our relationship with Saudi Arabia. In the article, Klippenstein notes the following:

While this might seem like a relatively innocuous ask in light of the intense conflict with Saudi Arabia over oil production and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the letter hints at the existence of an unprecedented and expansive review of U.S.-Saudi relations conducted by the administration that has not yet been made public.

The letter makes note of many aspects of Saudi Arabia that critics of the United States’s friendly relationship with it have been pointing out for years, reading:

We ask that ongoing interagency policy reviews consider Saudi Arabia’s lack of progress on improving labor rights, including the continued implementation of the kafala system, women’s and girls’ rights, including the continued implementation of the male guardianship legal framework, the continued repression of LGBTQ+ individuals, the application of capital punishment, including the barbaric mass execution of 81 individuals in a single day on March 12, the continued detention of human rights activists such as Waleed Abu al-Khair and Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, the…