How One Journalist’s Death Provoked a Backlash That Thousands Dead in Yemen Did Not

If you had to pick a year in the past decade when the contradictions of the American-Saudi relationship seemed likeliest to explode into crisis, 2018 would not be the obvious choice.

You might pick 2011, when Arab Spring protests compelled the United States to support Middle Eastern democracy movements that the Saudi government saw as mortal threats, or 2013, when Saudi Arabia supported an Egyptian military coup that the United States had tried to prevent and that signaled the end of the region’s democratic moment.

Or perhaps even 2016, by which point the Saudi-led war in Yemen had become one of the worst humanitarian disasters in years, and in which the United States had gotten itself entangled.

But you would be wrong. Instead, the informal alliance has reached its greatest point of crisis this year, when circumstances would seem to point toward its strengthening. The two countries are aligned on every major policy issue, particularly Iran. Their leaders are closer that at any point in a decade.

Perhaps most unforeseen of all, the breakdown centers not on the deaths, particularly of children, in Yemen, but on a single — if shocking — death, of a Saudi dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Practically overnight, longtime U.S. supporters of the alliance are disavowing it. U.S. businesses are pulling back from the kingdom. Even Washington think tanks, among the most pro-Saudi institutions in the United States, are sending back Saudi money.

Why now? Why this? It is a surprise, underscoring the unpredictability of today’s world. And yet it also reveals many of the most enduring truths of alliance politics, group psychology and perceptions of morality.

Though few saw this coming — perhaps most of all, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is accused of involvement in Khashoggi’s death — it may come to seem obvious in retrospect.

Any reporter who has covered a humanitarian disaster should understand what Stalin is once reported to have said to a fellow Soviet official: The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of 1 million is a statistic.

This is why news coverage of a famine or a flood will often highlight the story of one victim.

Or why, say, Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015, galvanized global attention to the larger refugee crisis.

It is not easy to wrap one’s mind around thousands of deaths. It becomes an abstraction of geopolitics, economics, conflict dynamics — of statistics.

But a single death can be understood in the more relatable terms of, say, a grieving father or a desperate spouse. Or a slain journalist, like Khashoggi.

Psychologists have repeatedly found that people experience a greater emotional reaction to one death than to many, even if the circumstances are identical. Perversely, the more victims, the less sympathy that people feel.

The effect even has a name: collapse of compassion. It’s not that we can’t care about a million deaths, psychologists believe. Rather, we fear being overwhelmed and switch off our own emotions in pre-emptive self-defense.

For years, Saudi leaders may have unknowingly benefited from this effect.

How is any individual American, even one in government, to process thousands of cholera cases provoked by Saudi-led measures in Yemen — particularly when the United States assisted those measures? Or how it must have felt to citizens of Bahrain when, in 2011, Saudi tanks rolled into the country to help put down a democratic uprising?

Understanding those events on an intellectual level is difficult enough. But understanding them on an emotional level may simply be beyond us.

The killing of Khashoggi is different. It is relatable, particularly to the men and women running U.S. foreign policy.

Here is an educated, globe-traveling journalist, the type of person many might have as a friend or spouse. His columns for The Washington Post made him an unofficial member of the intellectual elite, a club of which many Washingtonians consider themselves members.

And Salman himself may have made the story even more resonant. Past Saudi leaders tended to be austere and distant, presenting as the vanguards of inscrutable royal bureaucracies.

Salman expended vast amounts of money and energy to brand himself as the face of Saudi Arabia. By personalizing power, he also came to personify his government and nation.

Though the Saudi government has hinted that Khashoggi was killed by rogue agents, his death is already seen as a story of two clashing personalities. The critical journalist and the capricious monarch. Protagonist and antagonist.

If dramas of individual suffering, like that of Aylan Kurdi, are easier to sympathize with than large-scale tragedies, then perhaps the story of a single wrathful act, like the killing of Khashoggi, can more readily spark outrage than years of Saudi crackdowns and interventions.

Still, there would probably not be today’s backlash without those past actions. While newfound critics of the alliance may have tolerated them as they were happening, many are now raising them in light of Khashoggi’s killing. His death, maybe more than the sole or even primary cause of the breakdown, appears to be a kind of tipping point.

But why this tipping point? Research by sociologist Ari Adut suggests it may come down to a dynamic called common knowledge: A group becomes much likelier to act against a transgressor when each individual member knows that every other member knows about the transgression. This creates a perceived social pressure to act.

It is perhaps why, for instance, society looked the other way for years on sexual assault accusations involving Bill Cosby, then suddenly didn’t. The accusations were known, but it was not until a viral stand-up routine made them common knowledge that Cosby faced consequences.

Saudi Arabia’s past behaviors were hardly unknown. But there was never common understanding on how to receive them.

The country may have been undercutting U.S. policy and values, but it tended to do so on issues that made for polarizing topics in Washington. Egypt’s coup had U.S. backers, or at least sympathizers. And while few considered the war in Yemen to be laudable, some, particularly those hawkish on Iran, considered it at least understandable.

As a result, debate on the alliance tended to polarize.

But there is less to debate about the slaying of a journalist. Wide agreement that it is both wrong and representative of Salman’s leadership style has cast past Saudi actions in a different light. Still, the greatest driver of this week’s backlash may be what has kept the countries together: the deeply personal nature of the alliance.

In a 2016 article on the persistence of the Saudi-American alliance, Washington policymakers and scholars cited the Saudi money sloshing around Washington in the form of lobbying, arms purchases and research grants.

But even critics of the alliance argued that the role of money was easy to overstate. The Saudis’ real asset was their relationships with Americans.

The United States and Saudi Arabia had been brought together by a series of common enemies: Iran and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Iraq in the 1990s, jihadi groups in the 2000s. An entire generation of Middle East specialists came up knowing and working with Saudi colleagues.

Relationships, though, come with expectations. They turn on trust. There was a sense that, under the rules of the relationship, Saudi Arabia could defy the United States within its own borders or region, but not outside of it.

Perhaps whoever is responsible for Khashoggi’s death saw it as an internal matter. But the killing of a Washington Post columnist touches closer to home. It could be seen as a betrayal of the alliance’s unstated terms and therefore of trust, possibly by a young new leader who had not inherited as much of that trust as he might have thought.