AMMAN – The London-based daily Al-Araby Al-Jadeed recently published a cartoon, by the Jordanian artist Emad Hajjaj, depicting a faceless man wearing a red and white keffiyeh and sweeping his brown thawb in such a way that it looks almost like he is performing a magic trick. Whipped up by his movement, papers float around him. At the bottom of the frame, the hand of another man, wearing what appears to be a white button-down shirt, reaches up, apparently having let go of his pen in order to try to grab onto something, to save himself. The caption reads, “The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”

The cartoon names the victim, but not the perpetrator. True, any Arab – indeed, virtually everyone – knows exactly who is responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. But the fact that a well-known cartoonist had to disguise the culprit’s image speaks volumes about the fear felt by independent journalists in the Arab world. Khashoggi’s disappearance has only deepened their anxiety.

Arab countries have a long history of rewarding journalists who toe the official line, while punishing those, like Khashoggi, who dare to speak truth to power. Since the failed Arab Spring revolutions – of which Tunisia is the only success story – citizens across the region have found themselves with a stark choice between radical Islamist regimes and military rule. Efforts presenting democratic alternatives have been systematically repressed.

Discrediting, constraining, or otherwise silencing independent journalists is a key tool of this repression. Autocratic governments create laws and regulations to protect themselves and their cronies from criticism or exposure by independent media. They claim that only the journalists on their payroll – who praise their rulers and criticize the regime’s opponents – are legitimate; all others are enemies of the state.

Such behavior is not limited to dictatorships. Even in the United States – long admired for its robust free press, protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and powerful investigative journalism, which once brought down a president – President Donald Trump’s administration routinely attacks independent journalists, labeling them traitors, paid agents, and purveyors of “fake news.”

Trump may simply be trying to appease his right-wing base and avoid accountability for his innumerable mistakes and misdeeds. But his attacks on the US press, together with his silence on attacks occurring elsewhere, have gone a long way to embolden violators of press freedom around the world.

It does not help that many of those press-freedom violators – including Saudi Arabia – are among America’s closest allies. Trump has been true to America’s all-too-frequent willingness to place lucrative military contracts ahead of human rights, saying that he would be “very upset and angry” if Saudi Arabia were found to be responsible for Khashoggi ’s death, while ruling out a halt to big military contracts.

America’s fellow NATO member Turkey is the world leader in imprisoning journalists, yet the Trump administration has complained only about the detention of one (recently released) American pastor, and that was just to placate America’s “religious right” (beginning with Vice President Mike Pence). The US authorities have said nothing about Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein’s nearly two-year detention in Egypt.

Nor has the Trump administration commented on the fact that, in March 2017, the United Arab Emirates sentenced the Jordanian journalist Tayseer al-Najjar to three years imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 UAE dirhams (approximately $136,000) over a Facebook post. Even countries that are not particularly close US allies – such as Myanmar, where two Reuters journalists have been sentenced to seven years imprisonment – do not face pushback from the US.

Independent journalists have one goal: to find the truth and share it widely. When governments can repress those journalists with impunity, and when others compromise their supposed commitment to basic human rights for political or partisan goals, the truth remains hidden, with serious consequences.

I have known Khashoggi for years, both in a professional and a personal capacity. He is a Saudi patriot, who is not opposed to his country’s system of rule. Yes, he has critiqued policies, such as the inhumane war in Yemen and how Saudi rulers deal with dissent. But his arguments were always based on facts. He is not a dissident or a rebel, but a monarchist who wants to see his country do better than it is. And now he may have paid the ultimate price for that.

For Arab freedom fighters, the road ahead is long and treacherous. Building on the sacrifices of true heroes and genuine democrats, journalists and cartoonists like Hajjaj will continue to speak truth to power, as they fight for basic human rights like freedom of the press. It is truly unconscionable, however, that they must go into battle without the support of those who claim to have their backs.

WASHINGTON, DC – The alleged killing of the Saudi Arabian dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a permanent resident of the United States, in the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul has unleashed a tidal wave of criticism. In the US Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike have promised to end weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and impose sanctions if its government is shown to have murdered Khashoggi.

But significant damage to bilateral ties, let alone a diplomatic rupture, is not in the cards, even if all the evidence points to a state-sanctioned assassination. Saudi Arabia is simply too crucial to US interests to allow the death of one man to affect the relationship. And with new allies working with old lobbyists to stem the damage, it is unlikely that the episode will lead to anything more than a lovers’ quarrel.

Saudi Arabia’s special role in American foreign policy is a lesson that US presidents learn only with experience. When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, his advisers were bent on distancing the new administration from George H.W. Bush’s policies. Among the changes sought by Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, was an end to the unfettered White House access that Saudi Arabian Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan enjoyed during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Bandar was to be treated like any other ambassador.

But Clinton quickly warmed to Bandar, and Bandar and the royal court would become crucial to Clinton’s regional policies, ranging from Arab-Israeli peace talks to containing Iraq. In 1993, when Clinton needed a quote from the Koran to go alongside those from the Old and New Testament for a ceremony marking an Israeli-Palestinian accord, he turned to the Saudi ambassador.

Before Donald Trump assumed office, he frequently bashed the Saudis and threatened to cease oil purchases from the Kingdom, grouping them with freeloaders who had taken advantage of America. But after the Saudis feted him with sword dances and bestowed on him the highest civilian award when he visited the Kingdom on his first trip abroad as US president, he changed his tune.

Even the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, could not damage the relationship. Though al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national, recruited 15 of the 19 hijackers from the Kingdom, senior Saudi officials dismissed the implications. In a November 2002 interview, the Saudi interior minister simply deemed it “impossible,” before attempting to redirect blame by accusing Jews of “exploiting” the attacks and accusing the Israeli intelligence services of having relationships with terrorist organizations.

Americans seethed, and it appeared that the awkward alliance between a secular democracy and a secretive theocracy, cemented by common interests during the Cold War, was plunging into the abyss separating their values. But the alliance not only survived; it deepened. Bandar provided key insights and advice as President George W. Bush planned the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Today, American politicians are again ratcheting up their rhetoric following Khashoggi’s disappearance. The Turks claim they have audio and video revealing his death, and Senator Lindsey Graham warned, “If it did happen there would be hell to pay,” while Senator Benjamin Cardin has threatened to target sanctions at senior Saudi officials.

But Saudi Arabia wears too many hats for America to abandon it easily. Though the US no longer needs Saudi oil, thanks to its shale reserves, it does need the Kingdom to regulate production and thereby stabilize markets. American defense contractors are dependent on the billions the Kingdom spends on military hardware. Intelligence cooperation is crucial to ferreting out jihadists and thwarting their plots. But, most important, Saudi Arabia is the leading Arab bulwark against Iranian expansionism. The Kingdom has supported proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen to contain Iran’s machinations. Any steps to hold the Saudis responsible for Khashoggi’s death would force the US to assume responsibilities it is far more comfortable outsourcing.

It is a role America has long sought to avoid. When the United Kingdom, the region’s colonial master and protector, decided that it could no longer afford such financial burdens, US leaders ruled out taking its place. Policymakers were too focused on Vietnam to contemplate action in another theater. Instead, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger conceived a policy whereby Iran and Saudi Arabia, backed by unlimited US military hardware, would police the Gulf. While Iran stopped playing its role following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Saudis still do.

It is a quandary Trump seems to grasp. Though he vowed “severe punishment” if the Saudis did indeed kill Khashoggi, he refused to countenance canceling military contracts, instead lamenting what their loss would mean for American jobs.

It is not only defense contractors who are going to bat for the Saudis. Before Khashoggi became Washington’s topic du jour, the Saudis paid about ten lobbying firms no less than $759,000 a month to sing their praises in America’s halls of power.

But it may be the Saudis’ new best friend who will throw them a lifeline. As Iran has become the biggest threat to Israel, the Jewish State has made common cause with the Saudis. Former Saudi bashers such as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s confidant Dore Gold now meet with the Kingdom’s officials. Following the 2013 military coup that toppled Egypt’s democratically elected government, Israeli leaders urged US officials to embrace the generals. They are likely to do the same today if US anti-Saudi sentiment imperils their Iran strategy.

The US-Saudi relationship has been a rocky one, and its setbacks and scandals have mostly played out away from the public eye. Yet it has endured and thrived. This time, too, in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance, common interests and mutual dependence will almost certainly prevail over the desire to hold the Saudis to the standards expected of other close US allies.

NEW YORK – From the military juntas that ruled Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s to Joseph Stalin’s iron-fisted regime in the Soviet Union, dictatorships have a long history of making their detractors “disappear.” Today, this sinister practice seems to be making a comeback.

Under the military regimes in Chile or Argentina, a person might be tossed into the sea from a helicopter, never to be found. They might be killed and then burned beyond recognition or coated in lime, to accelerate decomposition, and buried in an unmarked grave.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, someone could be picked up and taken to the Lubyanka (the KGB headquarters) or some other nightmarish facility at any moment. During the purges of the 1930s and later, members of the Communist Party were particularly vulnerable, and millions of Soviet citizens disappeared forever in prisons or the gulag.

Today, modern authoritarians are reviving such behavior, suddenly and covertly snatching people, including well-known figures and high-ranking officials, to be detained or worse. In many cases, the “vanished” do eventually resurface, but with an apparently transformed perspective on their past work or the government that detained them. Here, China and Saudi Arabia stand out – though they are by no means alone – for orchestrating a series of increasingly brazen abductions or vanishings of their detractors.

China was behind last month’s disappearance of Interpol President Meng Hongwei on a trip from France, where Interpol is based, to Beijing, where he also served as vice minister of public security. Meng’s abduction was particularly shocking, because many Chinese trumpeted his 2016 appointment to Interpol’s highest post – which made him the first Chinese citizen to lead a major global institution – as a sign that the country had finally arrived at the top tier of the international order.

Yet Chinese President Xi Jinping was willing simply to throw away that public relations victory. Eventually, it was announced that Meng had been detained and was being investigated for bribery. The decision, justified as part of China’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign – an endeavor that critics say is a cover for eliminating political figures disloyal to Xi – revealed an utter lack of regard, or even contempt, for world opinion.

In fact, Xi is something of a serial kidnapper. Since he came to power in 2012, all sorts of people – from small-scale book publishers in Hong Kong (including some holders of non-Chinese citizenship) to Chinese business leaders – have been covertly kidnapped and returned to China. After a long period of silence and seclusion, they emerged to renounce their past work.

That is what happened to Fan Bingbing, China’s biggest movie star, who disappeared last July, when her previously very active account on the Sina Weibo social media platform (China’s answer to Twitter) suddenly went silent. No one knew what happened, but it was assumed that the government had something to do with it, and businesses with which she had spokesperson deals cut ties with her.

Finally, Fan resurfaced earlier this month, issuing a groveling apology for having evaded taxes, for which she will now face massive fines. Tellingly, her statement included plenty of praise for the Communist Party of China, which she credited for her success as an actress. It was all depressingly familiar, recalling as it did the pathetic confessions of Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, and others during Stalin’s purges.

Saudi Arabia has also executed a series of high-profile, politically motivated kidnappings. Last year, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the detention of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who was on an official visit to Riyadh. Hariri was isolated even from his bodyguards and forced to resign. Weeks later, and evidently enlightened to his captors’ satisfaction, he was permitted to return to Lebanon and resume his role as its elected leader.

Then, last week, Jamal Khashoggi, an exiled Saudi journalist, vanished after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain a document confirming his divorce, so that he could marry a Turkish woman the next day. His fiancée waited at the consulate’s entrance; he never reemerged.

Khashoggi’s disappearance is further evidence of how little regard today’s authoritarians have for national borders when it comes to silencing their detractors. Precisely what happened to Khashoggi is still unknown, but Turkey’s government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has insisted that he was killed while in the consulate.

According to the Turkish authorities, two teams, totaling 15 people, flew from Riyadh to Istanbul on the day of Khashoggi’s appointment and left within hours. This, too, is grimly familiar to Russians: Stalin also had special assassination teams, one of which carried out the murder in Mexico of his archenemy, Leon Trotsky. Unsurprisingly, the Saudis have denied any wrongdoing. Khashoggi, they claim, left the consulate.

Russia’s own experience with government-orchestrated disappearances is not limited to the past. President Vladimir Putin’s regime has also been known to target detractors for elimination on foreign soil, as allegedly happened with the nerve-agent attack on the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the United Kingdom in March.

The question is whether autocrats’ contempt for borders or sovereignty in silencing opponents is worth the cost. In the majority of the Western world, Putin is regarded as an outcast, Xi is flirting with a similar loss of credibility, and Prince Mohammed’s reputation as a reformer has been severely damaged, perhaps beyond repair. All of them may soon face a realization like that of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s police chief, after the abduction and sham trial of the Duke of Enghien: “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

JERUSALEM – “The most dangerous moment for a bad government,” the nineteenth-century French statesman and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “is usually when it begins to reform itself.” Reform, after all, implies that traditional norms and institutions may have already been discredited, but that alternative structures have yet to be firmly established.

Tocqueville’s classic example was the regime of Louis XVI, whose attempts at reform quickly led to the French Revolution, and to his own execution in 1793. Another example is Mikhail Gorbachev’s effort to reform the Soviet Union in the 1980s. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was out of power. Today, something similar could very well happen to the young Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (widely known as MBS), as he takes steps to modernize his country.

Saudi Arabia has long maintained (relative) internal stability by spreading its enormous oil wealth among its subjects, and by imposing on Saudi society fundamentalist Islamic doctrines based on the austere Wahhabi tradition. After the Kingdom’s founding in 1932, many Saudis enjoyed unprecedentedly high standards of living, and hundreds of members of the Saudi royal family were transformed from desert sheikhs into enormously rich members of the international moneyed elite. Various sons of the regime’s founder, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, succeeded each other as rulers a kingdom that, following Arab tradition, bore the name of its founding and ruling dynasty (another is the current Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan).

In recent years, however, the Saudi regime has had to worry about its future. Plummeting oil prices followed the 2011-2012 Arab Spring, which brought down rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and seriously challenged the al-Assad family’s rule in Syria. MBS, for his part, has gotten the message: Since being named crown prince in June 2017, he has introduced sweeping reforms to the Saudi system.

Some of MBS’s actions have garnered favorable international press coverage, not least his decrees allowing women to drive and curtailing the power of the religious police, who have long enforced public dress codes. These are positive steps toward emancipating the Kingdom from the more oppressive elements of Wahhabism. So, too, are the crown prince’s statements calling for more tolerance of Christian, Jewish, and other non-Muslim communities, as well as his strengthening of ties with Israel.

Still, other new policies could prove problematic. MBS’s plan for diversifying the Saudi economy to reduce its dependence on oil is still on the drawing board. But, in the meantime, he has launched a (euphemistically named) “anti-corruption” campaign that has raised red flags for outside observers. Since last November, MBS has had hundreds of members of the Saudi elite – including princes and businessmen with international profiles – arrested on dubious grounds, and with no regard for the rule of law.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia lacks a basic code of laws or legally enshrined rights. And many frustrated Saudis might welcome the fact that those rounded up in the purge have agreed, under duress, to “return” some of their obviously ill-gotten fortunes to the treasury – which, of course, is controlled by the crown prince.

But even if MBS succeeds in shoring up his power and endearing himself to the people in the short term, it has become clear that he intends to rule as an authoritarian despot when he succeeds his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. This would be a radical departure from the Kingdom’s tradition of power-sharing among princes within a highly decentralized system.

MBS’s hardnosed political style also has international implications. For starters, he has taken an increasingly tough line against Iran and that country’s regional ambitions, thus exacerbating the Sunni-Shia divide. MBS’s approach – which includes ill-informed statements comparing the Iranian regime to Nazi Germany – has the support of other Sunni countries such as Egypt and Jordan, and from US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But it hardly bodes well for the region’s stability.

Moreover, MBS’s military intervention in Yemen has been a failure, and his decision to impose an embargo on Qatar – a small but wealthy Gulf country that challenges Saudi hegemony – has backfired. Similarly, his attempt late last year to depose Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri ended in a fiasco.

It is hard to say where Saudi Arabia may be heading. The country certainly needs comprehensive reforms. But the jury is still out on whether MBS’s approach is the right one. If he succeeds, he will emerge with a reputation as a reformer. Yet he clearly is not interested in establishing representative institutions or strengthening the rule of law, so his country will have become a personal dictatorship.

Alternatively, MBS’s authoritarian tendencies and embarrassing foreign-policy failures might provoke internal opposition, both from the traditional elites he has vowed to decimate, and from the sizeable Shia minority in the Kingdom’s Eastern Province, whose members may look to Iran as a protector.

And, on the international front, MBS’s escalation with Iran could spin out of his control. Despite its recent weapons purchases from the US, Saudi Arabia would still be outmatched in a military confrontation with Iran. If such a confrontation does take place, one must hope that it will not lead to a wider regional war.