The Middle East is unraveling very quickly, and with momentum. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, committed by a Saudi hit squad sent by their thug king, is the latest and so far largest domino to fall. (Never mind, of course, that the Saudis have been mercilessly driving Yemen back into the Stone Age for several years now, aided and abetted by the current and previous US governments.
If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.
Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.
Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.
But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.
If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.
Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.
Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.
But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.
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