Bruce Riedel called for major changes to the U.S.-Saudi relationship last week:

The next president should bring American troops home immediately from the kingdom and cut off all military support to the Saudis, at least until there is a permanent political settlement in Yemen. Saudi diplomatic facilities in the United States should be shut or stripped down because they are used to spy on dissidents like Khashoggi. Saudi soldiers in the U.S. for training or other tasks should be sent home. The Saudis should understand that anyone implicated in the Khashoggi murder will not be welcome in the U.S. The attorney general should review what judicial process may apply to the case.

All of this should be part of a larger review of policy toward the region to reduce our military footprint and use more diplomacy. Iran should be engaged, and the Iran nuclear deal should be revived and strengthened. A serious political process between Israel and the Palestinians should be initiated, not the sham deal announced by this administration. It will certainly be challenging, but it is time for fundamental changes.

The U.S.-Saudi relationship is one of the chief examples of what is wrong with our foreign policy today. Not only are they an increasingly repressive authoritarian state and one of the worst governments in the world, but they don’t even provide the U.S. with any meaningful strategic advantages. The distorting influence of the lobbyists that they pay for has allowed them to escape most of the consequences of their reckless foreign policy over the last decade, but the next administration needs to make clear that the time for impunity and indulgence is over. Maintaining this relationship is not worth the increasing costs to the U.S., and trying to cater to Riyadh has kept the U.S. involved in a monstrous and indefensible war in Yemen for the last five years. The U.S. owes Saudi Arabia nothing, and the Saudi government has never been our ally. Whatever value the relationship with the Saudis may have had forty or fifty years ago has greatly diminished, and at this point they are a liability to U.S. interests and an obstacle to reorienting our foreign policy away from the Middle East. If we want to extricate U.S. forces from the region and disentangle ourselves from the region’s conflicts, the relationship with Saudi Arabia as it exists today will have to go.

Mohammed bin Salman will almost certainly be the next king, and there is every reason to expect him to rule for a long time to come. That makes ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia in all its forms that much more important. The crown prince has already demonstrated his ineptitude, his recklessness, and his dishonesty to the world on many occasions. He cannot be trusted, and he has proven that he will lie to us and everyone else whenever it suits him. He has taken a bad Saudi government and made it even worse and turned it into a much more aggressive regional menace. If the U.S. continues business as usual, that will encourage the crown prince in more reckless behavior to the detriment of regional stability, U.S. interests, and the security of Saudi Arabia’s neighbors. Cutting the Saudis loose is the most responsible thing that the U.S. could do under the circumstances.

There will undoubtedly be stiff resistance to terminating the “special” relationship with Riyadh. There are many powerful constituencies that want to preserve things just as they are, but as the Yemen debate has shown that resistance can be overcome if there is sufficient organization and popular support for changing U.S. policy. Washington is sloshing in money going to Saudi and UAE-backed lobbyists, but the kingdom’s standing in Congress has never been lower at any time except perhaps in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. If ever there was a time to dismantle this noxious relationship, it is right now. The case against preserving the status quo is compelling. Supporting the Saudis exposes the U.S. to unacceptable risks of being drawn into new regional conflicts, it tars us with the war crimes that our government has enabled in Yemen, and it makes us complicit in the myriad abuses that their government commits against its own people. In return for all that, the U.S. gets virtually nothing. There might be a hard-headed case for keeping a temporary relationship with a nasty authoritarian government if one could show how that relationship makes the U.S. significantly safer, but in the Saudi case that’s just not true. The relationship is almost all costs for the U.S. and virtually no benefits. Ending the current U.S.-Saudi relationship is something that Americans of all political stripes can agree on, and with any luck we will see the end of that relationship within the next few years.