This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.
Earlier this week in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump delivered what the White House billed as a “major address,” which is a long-standing way to signal that a particular speech is meant to lay down a historical marker communicating the president’s values. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. Trump’s message was that, unlike interventionist Americans of the past, he did not take account of democracy or human rights when dealing with foreign states. His only concern was raw American interest. The host regime, which has had strained relations with the United States over the kingdom’s lack of human rights and its 2018 dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist, no doubt welcomed the moral reprieve.
