Saudi Arabia has been ranked one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and is frequently placed among the “worst of the worst” in Freedom House’s survey of political and civil rights. Amnesty International says that despite a massive global “image laundering” campaign, “the human rights situation in the Kingdom has deteriorated exponentially.” It has no national elections, and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) uses imprisonment, torture, and execution to quash even mild dissent against the government. People can be sentenced to death over their tweets, and women who protest being kept as chattel by men can be thrown into prison and tortured. The resulting climate of fear can result in absurdities—the Financial Times recently reported that Saudi engineers and designers have been too afraid to tell MBS that his ludicrous plan for a utopian city is literally physically impossible.

No country that values freedom, democracy, and basic human rights should want anything to do with the Saudi government. Yet over the last quarter century, American presidential administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump) have warmly embraced the repressive Saudi state, helping to ensure that there is no meaningful pressure on it to reform, and no punishment for torturing and killing dissidents. This shameful American posture means that blood is on our hands, including that of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, extrajudicially executed by the Saudi regime in 2018.

Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, where he was strangled and dismembered by a team of special operatives that reported directly to the Crown Prince. U.S. intelligence quickly concluded that there was no way that the killing could have occurred without MBS’s instruction, in part because in an absolute monarchy, the killing of a prominent dissident would only occur with authorization from the top.

The killing of Khashoggi was so lurid, and he possessed such social status in the United States, that the murder actually became a scandal. But he’s far from the only victim. In fact, the Saudi regime executes people routinely. The killings reached a new height last year, with 345 people being put to death, usually by beheading. Human Rights Watch warns that there have been “a terrifying number of executions in 2025” as well, including the killing of Turki al-Jasser, a journalist who “exposed corruption and human rights abuse linked to the Saudi royal family.” Al-Jasser was accused of “terrorism,” the go-to smear of state propagandists looking to demonize their political opponents. Most of those killed by the Saudi state are foreign nationals, with the most common offense being nonviolent drug crimes. Khashoggi is also not the only dissident the Saudi state has kidnapped abroad, with even princes being captured, brought back to the country, and disappeared if they get out of line. (I have only touched on the misdeeds of the Saudi state, which also include sabotaging climate talks to protect the monarchy’s right to get rich off the destruction of the planet, and horrific war crimes in Yemen.)

Saudi Arabia should be an international pariah. The United States, certainly, should totally cut off relations with any country that murders our newspaper columnists in cold blood—although it also shouldn’t matter morally whether an executed dissident does or does not possess a tie to the Washington Post. And yet MBS recently received a warm welcome from Donald Trump at the White House. Asked directly about the killing of Khashoggi, Trump waved away the murder, choosing to smear Khashoggi as someone “a lot of people didn’t like” who was “extremely controversial.” “Things happen,” Trump said, but MBS “knew nothing about it.”

Trump’s comments were heinous. He has long boasted that he protected MBS’s reputation after the Khashoggi killing and helped shield the Saudi leader from accountability. It will surprise nobody that Trump cares far more about business deals than about human rights, but it was still a little shocking to see the president deny MBS’s guilt when his own intelligence agencies had confirmed that MBS ordered the killing, and to see a principled dissident slandered after his death.

Still, we shouldn’t single out Trump for sole blame here. Joe Biden did almost as much to help ensure that the killing of Khashoggi wouldn’t be a lasting stain on the Saudi regime. It was Biden who decided not to punish MBS for the murder with sanctions or a travel ban, and Biden who successfully pushed a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit against MBS over the killing. It was Biden who, having previously called MBS a “pariah,” went and fist-bumped him, an image that the Saudi government proudly shared. Of course, it didn’t begin with Biden, either. It was Barack Obama who agreed to provide the Saudi government with $115 billion in weapons, and the Bush family had extensive, friendly ties to the Saudi royal family.

There are real consequences to this chumminess. Human rights campaigner Josh Cooper explained to Middle East Eye that the record level of executions would be unthinkable without the rehabilitation of MBS by world leaders. It’s quite simple: the fewer consequences there are for MBS’s abuses of human rights, the more Saudi dissidents will suffer. If the U.S. president sets clear standards for allies (freedom of the press, freedom of political speech, basic elections, due process), then a country wanting to do business with the U.S. will have no choice but to improve internally. If, on the other hand, the U.S. president makes it clear that who dictators kill is simply their own business, we can expect to see the repression escalate.