“There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.”
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)
international relations is a dismal science whose eminent experts view the global arena as an unmitigated anarchy. your nation, within its own borders, can write its own rules and referee a game that only it plays. its borders are set by the outer bound of your monopoly of violence. somewhere else, in another nation-state, there is another game, with another set of rules, set by a ruling faction with just as much claim to power as yours. you do not set rules for it, and it does not set rules for you, unless by mutual agreement or by force (in which case its borders are then in yours). and in the interstitial demilitarized space, whose rule is neither yours nor theirs, there is nothing.
to understand nothing requires a model.
“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
what Hobbes describes, he called the state of nature. nature provides no template, allows no law except the law of violence, which is the only universal law. in truth, humanity was probably gathered in bands before it could stop to reason why, but the law of such a question does not require that its subjects understand. without together, none should survive. the logic of together is fractal: bands unite into tribes and clans, into kingdoms, into empires and federations. at every point, the unity is fragile and temporary. and so far, history has only weakly hinted at a possible unity above the nation-state. nations, according to the honestly-named Realist school of statecraft, are subject only to the red law of nature.
within the state of nature, which we’ll refer to as the international arena, states act according to predictable self-interest. self-interest is a veiled and complicated subject within society, but in the international arena, states act with a reptilian brain. most actions, at least those actions with a footprint in the physical world, can be understood as a response to survival instinct, or an automatic accumulation of resources. by concerted effort, a state can attempt to feint or to hide their actions, but once the details of their action are understood, the motives are rarely unclear.
let us turn to our newsworthy subject: the House of Saud. the government of the United States sanctioned and imposed visa restrictions on seventy-six individuals in links to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. the White House also released an internal document pinning ultimate blame for the killing on crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, a document which was held back by the previous administration under Pres. Donald Trump.
within the U.S., the narrative is focused on a single sanction which did not take place: one against the crown prince himself. let us focus on this point.
the Grey Lady pushes more gently in the same direction:
But when it came to penalizing the crown prince personally, Mr. Biden ended up in the same place as his predecessor. In effect, Mr. Biden acknowledged that relations with Saudi Arabia, an ally against the ambitions of Iran, a tacit ally of Israel, a trade partner worth tens of billions of dollars and an oil producer with the ability to seriously disrupt the world economy, were too important to American interests to risk by punishing the all-powerful prince.
Nicholas Kristof, writing also under the New York Times, is furious:
Instead of imposing sanctions on M.B.S., Biden appears ready to let the murderer walk. The weak message to other thuggish dictators considering such a murder is: Please don’t do it, but we’ll still work with you if we have to. The message to Saudi Arabia is: Go ahead and elevate M.B.S. to be the country’s next king if you must.
Democrat senator Ron Wyden delivers the same message:
“There should be personal consequences for MBS — he should suffer sanctions, including financial, travel and legal — and the Saudi government should suffer grave consequences as long as he remains in the government.”
and contrasting this, the U.S. Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, simply stated that it is not typical to place sanctions “on the highest leadership of countries”.
the disconnect is hilarious. the journalists (and Wyden) have the identical impression that by some harsher sanctions, the United States could somehow force Mohammed bin Salman to cede control of the nation to some other member of the royal family. perhaps they harbor some fantasy that King Salman is in such control that he could order somebody to cut him out of the hierarchy! there is nobody for him to ask; they all report to Prince Mohammed. Austin’s term, “highest leadership” is vague enough so that perhaps it includes both Salman and his son, but it implies the simple truth: Mohammed bin Salman is the Kingdom’s head of state. Who, precisely, does Kristof think is on the letterhead of a “message to Saudi Arabia?” and if the name you print is Salman, then Mohammed will simply read the King’s mail. one would assume that he has taken control of the palace’s letter openers.
such a misread of the political situation in Saudi Arabia might make more sense as a ploy. by misrepresenting the goals which the United States could reach for, they can chide the fresh, young President for not shooting high enough. surely, it would fit the Grey Lady’s infamous narrative, wherein surely on some whiteboard it is written that everything that the Biden administration does must be a bit better than Trump, but weaker than what a true progressive would do. any expert would balk at the brutishness of sanctions against the Kingdom itself, but, if the Prince is not technically the Kingdom— the talent lies in contorting to fit inside the slight Venn overlap between the narrative and the technical truth.
according to the White House, the visa sanctions are a new system they’ve termed the ‘Khashoggi ban’. while i have criticisms of this from a branding perspective, more relevant is how the new administration has congratulated itself for this innovation. where previous administrations were content to wound their rivals economically, the incoming Biden team has found a clever way to annoy bad actors with the inimitable kludge of American bureaucracy. impossible though it may be to injure the pocketbooks of the Saudi deep state, Biden’s elite foreign policy gurus can decimate their travel plans.
further, the stated aims of the sanctions are a “recalibration”, according to a White House official quoted by Reuters. Reuters did not include whether this official paused dramatically before the word “recalibration”, like a Bond villain, so we must assume it was earnest. if so, it means absolutely nothing.
in The Discourse, we live in a world where it is imagined that sanctions exist on a sliding scale from ‘infinitely lenient’ to ‘infinitely firm’, and a given sanction can be made to fit any point on the scale to suit the moral weight of the circumstances. once you fit sanctions into this model, you can start to look at sanctions and get an emotional estimate of how harsh they vibe out to be, and from there you can figure out whether you’d prefer them to be harsher or more mellow (i hear that you should go for sativas in situations of journalist murder, you want a ‘mind high’ given that they’re dismembering the body).
then, when you’ve unlocked a couple more chakra, you can use your expressed harshness preferences as expressions of your morality, so that you can make it clear where you stand, and that you feel that way more strongly than your peers because you believe in a more extreme version of what they do. since the sanctions harshness scale extends infinitely, you can actually do this recursively, until the world descends into chaos and probably for a little while after.
the only real escape from this is realist statecraft. the realist critique is: who was their subject? what were they trying to get their subject to do? did it work? if you can answer these questions consistently enough to predict the behavior of a nation-state, you’re doing real analysis. real analysis isn’t easy.
when the White House makes a big deal, through conspicuously-anonymous statements fed to the papers, about ‘recalibration’, it means they want the papers to be thinking about some vague future negotiations, which means they want this to be about something other than international pressure to punish the Kingdom for the murder of a journalist.
the real impact of the proclamation and intel release is a self-expression on the part of the administration, and everybody knows it. the intel document, whose contents were already known, was released because Trump didn’t release it (and, to be fair, Trump only refused to release it because reasonable people wanted him to do so). the sanctions and visa bans are punctuation. a “recalibration” is a tautology, as of course there would need to be some recalibration in the early days of a new administration, and the self-expressive elements of the sanctions are meant to alert the Kingdom, and separately the American media, as to the relative direction in which the winds of change now point.
For their part, the Kingdom was forced to release their own statement in response, and it’s a good one:
my only remaining aspiration is to one day craft such a gorgeous bordered letter with the word ‘statement’ bolded at the top. the Ministry, forced into professional contortions that even a Times reporter couldn’t squeeze, describes an “abhorrent crime and a flagrant violation of the Kingdom’s laws and values”. twice it mentions “relevant authorities in the Kingdom” and it capitalizes “Rest in Peace”. It is a thing of inimitable beauty.
the official narrative in the Kingdom is that the group that murdered Khashoggi was headed by four officers who were given orders to apprehend the journalist and bring him back. The officers then supposedly took it upon themselves to instead kill and dismember him, and to vanish his body without a trace. the four were given performative death sentences which were performatively commuted to twenty-year sentences.
the difference in the released White House report is that its tone implies that bin Salman ordered the individuals’ apprehension, and it kinda doubts they’d do it without his approval, but admits that they don’t know if the crown prince knew beforehand that they were gonna just murk the poor guy.
technically, they’re entirely compatible! not that the Kingdom could have in either case come out and said “the Kingdom appreciates the United States’ acknowledgement that maybe the Crown Prince only ordered the illegal kidnapping of a journalist”, but we must take measure to appreciate the little things.
having already bent under international pressure around the Khashoggi affair, the Kingdom really has no more internally-consistent room in which to bend, and the Biden administration will seek to wield this little nugget of psychological pressure in some as-yet-unscheduled negotiation. interestingly, the Biden administration is said to be willing to speak with the Kingdom through King Salman himself, and not the crown prince. this is a slicker turn of the blade— you can just feel the American craftsmanship. it’s in the details; after the Kingdom has to rehash its own apology in response to the Biden administration’s document release, if bin Salman actually does want to talk about anything with the President, he’ll have to perform some diplomatic dance around his octogenarian father for the chance to sit with the septuagenarian Biden in some kind of geo-Freudian nightmare. the President, via some unnamed genius diplomat, has gone out of his way to remind the young upstart that he doesn’t even actually rule yet. almost any one of your tax dollars would be better spent in an attempt to maximize diplomatic microaggressions like this.
this is the peacetime game; nations test their relationships with one another in an attempt to predict their future behavior. the events which precipitate diplomacy— a trade dispute, the killing of a journalist— are incidental to the strategy at play between powers. some people are too afflicted by domestic ideology to view the international arena in a colder lens. some pretend to be. next, we can look at today’s example of the statecraft of violence.