Washington, Amid Outrage Over Saudi Arabia’s Takeover of Golf, Seeks To Mend Ties With Riyadh

As President Biden finally seems ready to repair the damage he caused early in his presidency by attempting to turn an important Mideast ally, Saudi Arabia, into a pariah state, a holy outrage is engulfing Washington over Riyadh’s takeover of professional golf.Secretary Blinken is at Riyadh this week, conferring with Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. Save for some hints about human rights, he is mostly attempting to highlight our shared interests: the push to mediate resolutions to the Yemen and Sudan wars; deepening cooperation over clean energy and technology; battling terrorism; and advancing Saudi-Israeli ties. Mr. Blinken even refrained this time from wagging fingers at the Saudis’ weekend announcement of oil production cuts. As it turns out, a similar recent cut did not raise global oil prices significantly. Perhaps Mr. Blinken is realizing that Riyadh is acting in accordance with its economic interests, and no longer uses oil prices as a political tool, as OPEC did in the 1970s to retaliate against America’s support of Israel. Meanwhile the crown prince, known as MbS, is attempting to erase the image of the kingdom as the world’s gas station. Hence the outrage over Tuesday’s announcement of the merger between the Saudi golf league, known as LIV, and the Professional Golf Association of America. At the height of the association’s feud with LIV, the PGA’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, a few weeks ago took the Saudi league to task over that country’s human rights record, asking rhetorically, “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA tour?” Now that the American golf association has agreed to merge with LIV, which is pouring cash into the PGA’s coffers, some of its stars are wondering if an apology is required. “I still hate LIV,” one of the Saudis’ most outspoken critics, star golfer Rory McIlroy, said Wednesday. “I hope it goes away, and I fully expect that it does. It’s hard for me not to sit up here and feel somewhat like a sacrificial lamb.” Yet, he added, “removing myself from the situation, I see how this is better for the game of golf. There’s no denying that.” Many in Washington do deny it, sticking with outrage over so-called Saudi sportswashing.“Having a brutal foreign dictatorship that beheads its political opponents as the new owner of a major American sports league sends a chilling message,” Senator Murphy of Connecticut said Wednesday. “Money is king now, and we are poorer for it.”Never mind that we all cheered “USA-USA” last year rather than boycott soccer’s World Cup. Speaking of sportwashing, that tournament was played in Qatari stadiums that were financed by natural gas money and built on the backs of foreign workers in near slavery conditions. Thousands of them died. Also, never mind that in 2014 the PGA launched its annual China Tour, ignoring atrocities in the Communist country where party elites are golf enthusiasts. The tour has been on hiatus since 2019, but that’s because of Covid-related fears rather than moral qualms over human rights. MbS has launched his “2030 vision” to usher backward Saudi Arabia into the 21st century. As a result, women appear to have more freedoms than ever. Entrepreneurship is rampant where once entitlement was the rule. American pop stars fill stadiums in a country that until recently shunned them.Yet, the crown prince is far from a Jeffersonian democrat. Mr. Blinken raised with his host the plight of three dual Saudi-American citizens who are banned from traveling abroad after having criticized the palace. Many other Saudis, including royal family members, are languishing in prisons or under home arrests for resisting MbS’s one-man rule. Such practices, as well as the murder of a Washington Post op-ed contributor, Jamal Khashoggi, have rattled the capital. In his 2020 election campaign, Mr. Biden vowed to turn the kingdom into a “pariah” state. No longer.Appearing before the American Israel Public affairs Committee last week, Mr. Blinken vowed to promote adding Saudi Arabia to the group of Arab countries that made peace with Israel in the Abraham Accords. While in Riyadh, he listed a number of other areas where America and Saudi Arabia could cooperate and where Washington may be more helpful to the kingdom than Beijing. Why? “Throughout American history we’ve understood that there are times when it makes sense to sit down across the table with your enemy and your adversary and engage in a diplomatic conversation that’s good for you and good for the world,” Mr. Murphy said last year. Except rather than Saudi Arabia, he was speaking of its then-sworn enemy, Iran.Washington’s outrage over Saudi Arabia’s human rights may well have been rooted in the Obama era’s push to “rebalance” the Mideast in favor of Iran. Yet, as the mullahs keep rejecting diplomacy — and as Riyadh is tightening relations with Beijing — America’s global interests are taking a hit. MbS still sees America as the top dog; otherwise he likely would have gone for some Chinese cultural asset instead of swallowing the PGA. Time for America, including our moralizing athletes, to ease up on highly selective lecturing over human rights and to start repairing relations with allies that could advance our interests instead.

Washington, Amid Outrage Over Saudi Arabia’s Takeover of Golf, Seeks To Mend Ties With Riyadh

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