Back in the Mideast, it looks like maybe the Saudis have caught on to the tricks of manipulating President Trump. From Jack Detsch in AL Monitor:
The Donald Trump administration’s approval of a long-delayed, $15 billion missile-defense sale to Saudi Arabia is widely seen as a way to thwart a rival Russian bid.
The State Department announced that it had approved the sale of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) on Oct. 6, barely a day after the Saudis signed a preliminary deal for Russia’s S-400 system during King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud’s visit to Moscow. US experts say the Saudis would have great difficulty operating both.
Deploying both systems would mean “having two maintenance systems that can never cross paths, and having two spare parts pipelines,” said Dave Des Roches, a former Defense Department and White House official who now works at the National Defense University in Washington.
“They would be seriously challenged to employ those two systems simultaneously,” Des Roches told Al-Monitor. “They would have profound institutional challenges in fielding the S-400, THAAD and Patriot [air and missile defense system] at the same time.”
You have to wonder if Trump or one of his appointees (Tillerson, perhaps, given that the State Department is cited as giving approval) saw the news, realized profit was slipping away, and decided to shitcan any national security concerns that might have been holding up the deal.
While I won’t go so far to say Once a businessman, always a businessman is a good general rule, it does appear to apply to Trump. He betrays no notion of the role of government in society.
