There are ongoing operational maintenance and training contracts worth billions. US "advisors" employed by major defense contractors are in Saudi Arabia right now training the Saudi air force.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uk+...
Yeah; There's that little hitch that woman who actually camgaigned for this are rotting in a Saudi jail [1]
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/saudi-arabia-...
They're torturing millions of Muslims in Xinjiang, directly or indirectly through terrifying police state actions that entirely revoke all human liberty.
There is no greater mass atrocity going on anywhere on earth than what's happening in Xinjiang.
How many people, companies, VC firms in Silicon Valley are working with China and living off of Chinese money?
Where's the mass outrage and suspension of relations with China? Nope, you won't see that. No chance in hell.
The millions of Muslims in China being tortured don't matter, and one journalist does? Not exactly: it's because China is a big fat platter of money and many want to feast on it. It's a willingness to disregard all ethics because the check is big enough. It's so much money, the people that claim to care about a single journalist, don't care about millions of people being actively repressed and tortured.
It goes to the line about a million deaths being a statistic, and one death being a tragedy. Same premise at work.
Despite being repeated often, to my knowledge there's no evidence for that. It also doesn't sound very plausible as only about 10M Uigurs and Kasachs live there (those two are the mostly muslim minorities living there). If we assume this is about young to middle age male adults (because this is the relevant cohort in practically every violent conflict), "millions" of these are getting imprisoned and tortured implies that a whopping 100% of non-elderly muslim males in the region are in internment camps. Actually more than 100%, if we assume not every Uigur is a Muslim.
What we do know though, is that the conflicts in the region are very violent. Islamic extremists have bombed civilians on multiple occasions, including public markets, buses, killing sleeping workers in coal mines etc. [1]
And we know the Chinese police has killed people at riots, though I haven't yet researched the circumstances.
In both cases the violence is abhorrent and to be condemned. The mass torturing story seems to be fake, though.
(1)...of course after you've made sure no coup d'etat happens in response.
He's consolidating power but if recordings come out on how the journo was murdered, this guy will no longer meet Bill Gates or Bezos in his next US trip. He'll be treated like mad African dictators were.
It was pretty sickening to listen to.
As far as your question the first step I guess would obviously be that I would object to killing journalists. Not a small ask, probabbly wouldn't create the collapse you're talking about.
Those "intellectual elites" are most likely the latter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tab...
I don't want to single out the US or give the impression that I hate it. I actually love that country. No doubt one of the best countries in the world despite everything.
But I don't think SA is particularly worse than any other regional/global powerful country on earth wrt. foreign policy. Why should that prompt the US (or any other security council country for that matter) to re-evaluate their relationship when they commit the same, if not worse, crimes.
and somewhere along a scale it becomes another to do shitty things for somebody else's twisted reasons.
I realize it's all intertwined and the House of Saud and the US are allies for reasons, but at some point it not only looks bad, I wonder if the Saudis will lose respect for the US?
This whole relationship makes all the Rumors of the Sauds swapping to the yuan all the more intriguing. If that ever did happen our response could well trigger something like a worldwide Cold War. China and probably Russia would likely have an obligation of support for Saudi Arabia, America would pull in NATO and the world would likely split along one side or the other. For that matter Saudi Arabia is also not like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, ... . Saudi Arabia itself is now world's third largest spender on defense in raw dollars - and #1 in the world by percent of GDP. 10% of their entire GDP goes to defense. By contrast, we spend about 3%. On top of that Mecca and Medina reside within Saudi Arabia. Propaganda would be strongly on the side of the Saudis who would portray an attack on them as an attack on Islam.
I doubt that. In the KSA - Iran cold war, China is squarely in the Iran camp. Personally, I don't even think they side with Iran because we support The Kingdom. Rather I think they side with Iran because the more sanctions we put on Iran, the cheaper the oil and gas China can get out of Iran becomes.
But yeah, there is pretty much zero chance that China supports KSA. Even if KSA wanted to use the Yuan. Just wouldn't happen.
But the big thing here is that oil is still by far the most in demand resource in the world. And, thanks to some incredibly prescient negotiations dating back to the 70s, the majority of all oil producing nations only settle oil contracts in the dollar. This means that if you have a dollar you have access to oil. This creates an amazing system of externalizing stability. Imagine the value of the dollar decreases. This incentivizes foreign nations to increase their reserves of the dollar to ensure stable access to a fixed amount of oil. This, simultaneously, creates a natural dampening affect on any sort of inflation as that money is taken out of circulation. And this even applies with the Mideastern nations themselves. Saudi Arabia and other nations also agreed to purchase US securities with whatever leftover dollars they have after accounting for national expenses. Once again, helping to mitigate any negative consequence of let's say 'creative' economic policy.
Oil, the petro dollar in particular, stabilizes our currency and our economy. If you take the control of oil away from America, I do not think our military might alone would be sufficient to keep the dollar stable. And if the dollar loses stability our entire nation implodes. Everything that happens in the Mideast is based around this relatively simple fundamental aspect. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya. What they all actually have in common is that they expressed real intents to move away from the petro dollar. Venezuela has done the same.
The reason China/Russia would side against the US has nothing to do with oil or Saudi Arabia or Iran. It has to do with the US. If the petro dollar collapses, which it arguably already is, the US isn't far behind. And the US is still the greatest immediate danger to those nations. And the only reason Saudi Arabia would ever turn away from the petro dollar is if they believe the US will not be able to force them back to it, which would all but require the collapse of the US.