Well, I Guess He IS Our Son of a Bitch

President Trump, despite my earlier blog (Not Our Son of a Bitch, published October 24, 2018) advising him that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) should not be our son of a bitch, has declared that, indeed, MBS is our son of a bitch. In a crass exposition of realpolitik, President Trump stated that the Saudis buy billions and billions of dollars worth of our stuff and he does not want to harm this profitable relationship. For example, there is a pending arms sales to Saudi Arabia valued at $100 billion and it is clear that the president does not want to jeopardize that cash inflow. Just the ticket to wipeout that nagging little trade deficit we have with the country.

It is true that in the past, the United States has papered over the crimes committed by strategically important countries. I can’t quite call tinhorn Latin American dictators like Anastasio Somoza an ally, but when you are fighting commies the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And Iran is our enemy and it is also the enemy of Saudi Arabia. So there you have it. (Ironically, it was the assassination of journalist and editor Pedro Chamorro that was one of the contributing factors to Somoza’s downfall.)

The Middle East is really a nasty place to do business. Saudi Arabia is not alone in sending out hit teams to assassinate rivals and dissidents. An Iranian diplomat was recently stopped by German police for transporting bomb materials that were intended to blow up a rally of Iranian dissidents. There is a bloody civil war in Syria, ISIS has converted from a caliphate to a terror cell and there are riots in Pakistan because the government declined to execute a Christian woman for blasphemy. Also keep in mind is that the reason the Turkish government has tapes of Khashoggi’s murder is that they were obviously spying on the Saudi Consulate.

It is hard to be involved in the region without getting your hands dirty. But President Trump was very blatant about the reasons why he was not going to put more sanctions on Saudi Arabia or call out the crown prince for the murder. It all came down to money. That’s why most people do business in the Middle East – as long as they don’t mind getting their hands dirty. The Europeans don’t mind paying a little baksheesh to get a juicy contract and the Chinese excel at it.

Americans trying to do business in the Middle East and other parts of the world do so with one hand tied behind their backs. For Americans, a little baksheesh might mean a little jail time. When I worked in Africa the American companies all told me that they kept losing contracts to the French and the Italians because the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prevented them from matching their offers.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) no doubt has reduced the exports of American products around the world and thus contributed to our gargantuan trade deficit. Why should we care if a foreign leader dishes out contracts based on the bribes he receives? He (or she) is breaking local laws and harming the citizens of his (or her) country, not ours. And our refusal to pay out bribes won’t stop the practice. It just means that companies from other countries and their workers will benefit from these sales instead of our companies and workers. President Trump was quoted by the New York Times as saying the FCPA is “a horrible law” and was reported to have said the world is laughing at us for enforcing it.

But the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an expression of American principles. It is wrong to bribe government officials in the United States and it is wrong to do this in other countries. American exceptionalism is not based on our GDP or the New York Stock Exchange. It is based on our principles. And the Founders declared that these universal principles apply to all men (and women). We can’t be good citizens and true to our principles in our country and bad citizens ignoring our principles in other people’s countries.

President Trump does not believe in America’s principles. He thinks people are laughing at us because we try to live by our principles. He thinks principles prevent us from being great again.

But America was exceptional long before it was big and strong. Jefferson knew it in 1802 and De Tocqueville noted it when he cam