similar resolution in the U.S. Senate is bipartisan and fails by just six votes.97
The only justification the Trump administration has offered for continuing to aid MBS is that America’s in-theater training and refueling operations save civilian lives—an argument that flies in the face of hard data confirming that the Saudis and Emiratis are indeed committing war crimes with U.S. assistance.98 According to an internal U.S. Agency for International Development memo acquired by the Wall Street Journal, it is not the case that “continued refueling support will improve [the Saudis’ or Emiratis’] approach to civilian casualties or human protections.”99 Moreover, per reporting in The Intercept, multiple human rights groups have decried the Saudis’ and Emiratis’ apparent targeting of civilians. In August 2018, one incident alone saw coalition warplanes bomb a school bus, killing more than forty children with—forensic evidence later revealed—American bombs. The next month, coalition aircraft deliberately attacked the Yemeni port that is “the major conduit for humanitarian aid in Yemen,” an action United Nations officials said “could lead to the death of 250,000 people, mainly from mass starvation.”100 According to former assistant secretary of state and current congressman Tom Malinowski, who was interviewed by the New York Times in late 2018, the Saudis and Emiratis are “just not willing to listen” to advice from U.S. military personnel on the subject of avoiding the slaughter of innocent civilians. They “were given specific coordinates of targets that should not be struck,” Malinowski told the Times, “and they continued to strike them.”101 This, despite the fact that in 2017 the Trump administration initiated a $750 million program focused on training the Saudis on how to avoid civilian casualties—money that ought to have given Trump leverage in holding the Saudis to account for civilian deaths, as it could have included benchmarks to measure progress and provisions to withhold new military aid if those benchmarks went unmet.102 Without such benchmarks, the Saudis and Emiratis have been able to, as Malinowski describes it, exhibit “willful disregard of advice they [a]re getting” regarding airstrike targeting and avoidance of collateral damage.103
By December 2018, concern over Trump’s support for MBS’s Yemeni adventures boils over into a successful Senate vote to end U.S. involvement in the coalition’s campaign.104 The Republican House refuses to take up the legislation, but the bill will pass in bipartisan fashion in February 2019 once the Democrats take control of the lower chamber of Congress.105 In March 2019, the Senate again passes the bill with bipartisan support—establishing the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and the systemic cruelties of the Saudis’ and Emiratis’ military campaign there, as one of the few issues in recent memory that is both of significant moment and the subject of any concurrence whatsoever between the two political parties.106 Trump immediately vows to veto the measure, which he thereafter does; an attempted Senate override of his veto fails in May 2019.107
In March 2019, the first fruits of the new U.S.-Saudi-Russian axis manifest, with the three nations “shocking” delegates “from around the world” during a global climate conference in Poland when they are the only countries to “object[] to a statement ‘welcoming’ the latest scientific report on the impact of manmade climate change.”108 At the three new allies’ insistence, the “key” scientific report is not adopted by the conference.109 The same week, Qatar—an old U.S. ally left out of Trump’s new Middle East axis—announces that it may depart OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) due to its treatment at the hands of Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies in the Gulf.110 The Associated Press warns that “Qatar’s decision … throws into question the viability of the [OPEC] cartel.”111
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On January 17, a young Belarussian model, Anastasia Vashukevich, steps off a plane in Moscow and is immediately arrested on prostitution allegations.112 She has just arrived in the Russian capital from Thailand, where she has been held for months on allegations of soliciting sex.113 Vashukevich, a former girlfriend of Oleg Deripaska who goes by the name “Nastya Rybka” on social media, is significant to the Trump-Russia investigation inasmuch as her eleven-month detention in Thailand in early 2018 came on the heels of her revelation on social media that she had “16 hours of audio and video proving ties between Russian officials and the Trump campaign that influenced the 2016 U.S. elections.”114 Allegedly, Deripaska orchestrated not only Vashukevich’s arrest in Thailand but also—after Russian officials promised her safe passage by plane from Thailand to Belarus following her expulsion from the former country—her detention in