The ignorance towards Saudi Arabia has existed long before Trump.

Just to be clear: I absolutely do not intend to minimise the monstrous crime committed by the Saudi state. It is monstrous, and it, alone, is sufficient to sever our "alliance" in my book.

But I do think it's vitally important for people, especially people who are new to looking at the US in the Middle East, to understand that US presidents have always known exactly what kind of operation the Saudis run, and have been happily ignoring it for decades.

That's not an excuse or absolution for Trump, obviously. But we have to understand that this deference to tyrants is systemic and institutional in our foreign policy. Otherwise it can't change.

Funnily enough, one of the hopes I heard from otherwise good people who (inexplicably) lent their support to Trump in 2016 was that he was the type of match-thrower who would break the US out of these perverse and indefensible foreign entanglements.

They were wrong, of course, but they were wrong because Trump's ignorance and narcissism led him to the same willingness to excuse and ignore these crimes against humanity that his predecessors exhibited.

Trump ignores the atrocities of our "allies" for his own self-interest; his predecessors ignored them for ideology, or convenience, or strategy. The result is always the same.