Why the U.S. Can’t Quit Saudi Arabia

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has arrived in Riyadh with instructions to get to the bottom of a journalist’s disappearance from a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, while an outpouring of leaks from Turkish intelligence seem to point to a case of murder, perhaps orchestrated at an official level.

The U.S.-Saudi relationship was already attracting fierce criticism in some quarters because of the carnage of the war in Yemen; now, the gruesome suspicions around the fate of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who lived in the U.S. and wrote for , have brought a bipartisan chorus demanding answers and threatening sanctions. Meanwhile, both the Kingdom and, it seems, President Donald Trump himself, are scrambling for a way out of the crisis. Trump declared Monday that King Salman told him he knew nothing about the incident, and the president speculated it could have been the work of “rogue” actors.