The world’s democracies sent an interesting message to the world’s autocrats this week: You can get away with harassing and killing your dissidents. Just not while wearing a sheriff’s badge.
One could almost call the message mixed. Almost, because this rather hazy line in the sand is one worth drawing.
U.S. President Donald Trump articulated the first part of the message on Wednesday. Or rather, he bellowed it.
In a bizarre missive, he explained that, despite the real possibility that Saudi Arabia’s leaders knew about the mission to murder the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the crime will not interfere with Saudi-U.S. relations. Riyadh’s oil and help fighting Iran are too important.
As usual, Mr. Trump’s way of expressing himself was almost unimaginably coarse and morally vacant. (On the question of whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman knew of the murder ahead of time, the President wrote, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”)
Still, the White House has now said in plain English what most of its allies imply by their actions: that the killing of one columnist is not worth burning bridges and cancelling military contracts over. Only Germany has stopped arms sales to the Saudis in the wake of Mr. Khashoggi’s death.
Riyadh, not to mention Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow and Ankara, will have heard the message loud and clear.
What about that caveat? It came courtesy of a surprise vote against Russia’s candidate to lead Interpol, the global body for co-ordinating police work across borders. The Kremlin’s man, Alexander Prokopchuk, was considered the front-runner until recently, despite the fact that he wantonly abused the outfit’s “red notice” arrest warrant system to harass political opponents while leading Interpol’s Russian office.
A lobbying campaign by the United States and Europe thwarted Mr. Prokopchuk on Wednesday. He was beaten by a South Korean cop with no history of making a mockery of the institution he was vying to serve.
This momentary exertion of spine may not absolve the world community of its tepid response to the extraterritorial slaying of a peaceful government critic. But at least it says, that is not the way we do things.