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President Trump's $110 billion weapons deal with Saudi Arabia could have an unannounced side benefit of giving the United States leverage to reduce the Muslim monarchy's support for radical clerics, according to Republican lawmakers.

"There's no doubt there are things the Saudis are going to have to do to improve on as well," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told the Washington Examiner.

There are signs Trump is aware that the deal could help him address the problem. Just last year, presidential candidate Donald Trump was accusing Saudi Arabia of funding terrorism. A veto-proof majority of Congress voted last fall to allow the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue the Saudi Arabian government, and the Saudis were criticized heavily for financing schools around the world that teach a fundamentalist variant of Islam known as Wahhabism.

"That's the issue, in addition to other human rights concerns and other things," Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., said of the Wahhabist schools. "It's the incendiary, it's the kindling."

In public, Trump framed the arms deal as a means of getting Saudi Arabia, long a critical partner for U.S. security interests in the Middle East despite its ideological moorings, to counteract Iranian aggression and support for terrorism in the region. Those interests alone justify the agreement in the minds of many lawmakers.

"What's our list of high priority issues? Terrorism, pushing back against Iran, stability in the Middle East," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. "When you put that kind of in a list, it makes sense to continue a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia."

But Rubio suggested that it could also be a way to extract reforms in Saudi Arabia. "I imagine if a year from now Saudi Arabia, two years from now, has not improved in its ability to control radicalism, portions of that deal would be on the table in terms of revoking it," he told the Washington Examiner.

Roskam concurred. "I think that there will be a great deal of interest in posing those questions to the Saudis, what are their next steps in terms of the recognition of their exporting of Wahhabism," he said.

U.S. policymakers have struggled to strike a balance between the need for that relationship, which has buttressed the American economy and foreign policy interests in the Middle East for decades, and the danger posed by radical Saudi-backed schools. Saudi Arabian leaders are "both the arsonists and the firefighters" in the struggle against most jihadists, the Brookings Institution's William McCants told the New York Times in August.

"They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim," he said.

The Saudis might not readily agree with that assessment, according to Roskam. "It's not clear to me that the Saudis recognize to the same extent that we do the concern about exporting Wahhabism," he said.

But that's where the arms deal could be useful. "To Senator Rubio's point, if you have a longer-term deal and delivery is not all at once, then you can stage it," Roskam said.

See the article here:
Trump gets new leverage over radical Saudi clerics, Republicans say - Washington Examiner