Oh, and just a note to add that I don't think walking away from the table is somehow going to magically shame the kingdom into changing a thousand or so years of laws.
It seems like the sort of argument that completely misses the point. Being allies with them makes it easier for non-profit work, the UN, etc. to shed light on this and try to stop this sort of stuff from happening. It's not going to be easy, and I - frankly - think the argument that pretending like they don't exist, don't have value for the world, deserve to be called "barbarians", etc, well that stuff isn't anything resembling useful.
They're not a nation of "barbarians". They're a nation of "Saudi Arabians". And, there are good, decent people in their home country who are trying hard to bring about the cultural shifts needed to protect their women and young people from some old, bad ideas. In many cases, the people who want something different for their daughters do so by moving out of the land their families have lived in for ten thousand years, which is a lot harder than it sounds to rootless Americans like me.
Let's scrap the lingo that talks about these folks as if they were not humans, and stop using their suffering daughters for some kind of political moral stand that won't do anything to actually help the children. 'Kay?
