I find myself with a few thoughts about the Saudi Arabia angle. On the one hand, if we're just caught up on the one very bad act (luring someone from American soil into an embassy, chopping them to pieces), that seems like a forest/trees moment. Politics are a weird world, and someone somewhere is doing something gross we don't like, yet we still need them for things.
On the other hand, as some of our more pro Saudi voices on the board have pointed out, these people are in many ways monsters. And we're basically saying, if you don't pal around with monsters for money, you're an unfit leader of the free world (as compared to being an enthusiastic pal). That seems at least worth examining.
There's also some of the confirmation bias angle, that we often start by not liking someone, and then see actions through that lens. Which is to say, if the current president was prostrating himself before this murderous crown prince, many of the same voices would just turn to calling him a weakling who takes the most powerful job in the world and uses it to put himself below psychotic despots, making them feel all warm in the nether regions.
There's also a not small amount of wish casting and removing some agency and motivations from the Saudis themselves. We're sort of sidestepping the fact that they're in this business to make money, not necessarily just to earn plaudits and feelings. So their price manipulation probably extends to creating windfalls (we could trade them Israel for releasing a bunch of oil, I suppose. That would make the relationship rosy in a hurry).
And of course, there's some pick and chose to it. We imbue people we like with positive qualities, ones we don't with negative ones. We say that we simply must keep one despot happy to keep our economy going, but regularly fantasize about cutting off a geopolitical rival (folks across the pacific), even though it would mean an enormous cost to main street. And the wages of our politics roll on.
