Yeah, guess where I am going with that title…
If you have been living under a rock, Saudi Arabia barbarically murdered/assassinated a Washington Post journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey about three weeks ago. The journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was a Saudi citizen and US resident living around Washington from where he reported on the new Saudi government under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
There is a lot to unpack in the story, but the key points are that Saudi Arabia has, for weeks, disputed the idea that his fingers were severed, then beheaded, body dismembered, and corpse disposed of within their consulate in Istanbul. Only yesterday did they begrudgingly admit that it was a “rogue” operation that involved some of the closest advisors/bodyguards to MBS. (We will look at that later.) How do we know all this? Basically, every time Saudi Arabia denies something, the Turks let leak evidence proving them wrong.
So while the story will continue to develop, what is the potential cost for Saudi Arabia? Well, according to President Trump, not arms sales. Although this morning Germany announced it was temporarily halting all exports to the Saudi kingdom. But the two of the largest providers of weapons to Saudi Arabia are the United States and the United Kingdom. And that is how we get to today’s chart. The question is what, if any, action will these two countries take against Saudi Arabia?
It’s a line chart from the Washington Post. There really isn’t much to say in its design. However, what I found interesting is the unit of measure. We might expect dollars, pounds, or euros, but instead we get TIV, or trend indicator values. It’s a unit devised by the data provider to allow a common measurement, presumably so that we can do just this: compare two different countries’ arms sales.
Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.