The Growing Crisis Over a Saudi Journalist’s Disappearance
The disappearance and possible murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and dissident, has brought sharp attention to Saudi-U.S. relations. On Thursday, President Donald Trump told Fox & Friends that Khashoggi “went in [to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey] and it doesn’t look like he came out.” That itself is a marked departure from the Saudi line that he left the facility that he had entered October 2 in order to obtain paperwork needed to get married. In an interview Wednesday on Fox, Trump ruled out cutting off arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the fate of Khashoggi, who divided his time among Virginia, London, and Istanbul. Trump said that Saudi arms sales were helping the U.S. economy and that cutting them off “would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country.”
[Read: What happened to Jamal Khashoggi?]
Saudi-U.S. relations have
