Hey you silly Saudis, stop being all repressive and fanatical and join the post-value Canadian diversity-fest.  Our federal Liberal administration has taken a lot of heat for tweeting something along those lines.  But really, it's harmless stuff.

The Saudis, to be sure, seem to have taken leave of their so-called senses over it.  They're ranting and raving, cancelling flights, banning our wheat and spreading genuinely "fake news" like that Jordan Peterson was arrested (as he surely would have been in Saudi Arabia, incidentally).  So what?  How much do we care what they think?  Are we to let foreign thugs dictate what we say?

As has been observed, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and her department didn't say anything others had not, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.  Moreover, Saudi Arabia really does meddle in our internal affairs including sponsoring radicalism in mosques, whereas we do not sponsor radicalism in Saudi churches which they don't even have because they're a stinking repressive corrupt theocracy.  And yes, Justin Trudeau, after denying Canada has any core values, stubbed his toe on the fact that we do and the Saudis don't share them.  But none of these considerations are directly relevant, let alone sustain the notion that we committed a diplomatic faux pas and should consider apologizing.

The key point is that there's a world of difference between criticizing how other regimes manage their affairs and tying good relations generally, or specific policies, to their altering their domestic arrangements.  Consider, if you will, the huge and often unintelligent American debate 45 years ago around the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment", on which I wrote a huge and I hope sometimes intelligent doctoral dissertation.

To make a long story shortish, part of Richard Nixon's strategy of "détente" was trading access to American technology and basic foodstuffs for Soviet geopolitical restraint.  This approach was opposed by an odd mix of old-time Cold Warriors like Senator Henry Jackson (Democrat, Washington) who thought the Soviets would keep American technology and food but break their promises, and New Left liberals who found Nixon's toughly realistic dealings with Communist dictatorships thuggish.  And this strange coalition teamed up to link Most Favoured Nation trade status for the Soviets to free emigration from the USSR.

The debate largely focused on would-be Jewish emigrants, the most vocal and persistent group seeking to flee the worker's grim grey prison-paradise.  But the real issue was whether good relations between nations depended on how they conducted their internal affairs.

Nixon was as vocal about Communist tyranny as Jackson.  But while the President thought foreign policy largely independent of domestic structure, the Senator argued that dictatorships were necessarily aggressive and untrustworthy.  The New Left, by contrast, evidently didn't realize why the Soviets could not allow free emigration (everybody would leave except Brezhnev, Kosygin and his dog) and suspected Nixon of having a soft spot for tyrannies.

Sadly, in the resulting debate people generally talked past one another.  Nixon warned that attacking the basis of Soviet tyranny would lead them to repudiate détente.  Jackson said bring it on because he thought the whole thing a scam.  George McGovern apparently thought the Amendment would make the Soviets realize repression was a silly mistake and let their people go.

It didn't.  When the Amendment passed the Soviets went on a surly rampage.  Then the USSR collapsed.  So both Nixon and Jackson could claim some vindication.  The goofy left not so much.

OK.  That wasn't short.  But the point is Jackson-Vanik for better or worse tied specific American foreign policy actions to specific Soviet domestic ones.  Our Saudi Twitter diplomacy did nothing of the sort.  We didn't threaten or imply specific consequences if they did not release imprisoned dissidents.  We just said their repressive actions stank.  And surely nobody would say we should be afraid to stand up for our values lest some nasty foreign regime throw a fit.

We can't remake the world and shouldn't try at the expense of national security.  But there's no need to be intimidated into silence on key moral issues by every two-bit punk on the planet.

I'm no fan of Justin Trudeau.  But the only odd thing his administration did here was express its views on Twitter, a reflection of modernity generally not lack of diplomatic finesse.

The Saudis aren't even in a position, unlike the Brezhnev-era USSR, to cause real trouble if annoyed.  Their sanctions can't hurt our far stronger economy.  To be sure, if they refuse to sell us oil, we might become so desperate we burn our own, even building modern, safe, clean pipelines to transport it.  But if they don't want us saying democracy is good, dictatorships are bad and they are one, they can go jump in a sand dune.  Head first.

Photo Credit: Hiiraan