I have been trying to remember the last time I read a story about Jamal Khashoggi, and I keep landing on an evening in October 2018 when the news would not move off him, which was a fifty nine year old columnist for the Washington Post who walked into his own consulate in Istanbul to collect a paper he needed for his marriage and never walked back out. And the details that followed were the kind that people sitting in flats all over the world had never been asked to hold in their heads before, which is fifteen men arriving on two private planes and leaving the same day, a body that was never found, and a set of official explanations that changed shape every few weeks. Honestly, I remember how clean my anger felt that week, and the cleanliness has become the part of it I no longer trust.

The country I was being told about back then was a very specific villain, which was a kingdom of public executions and women who were not allowed to drive and girls who could not travel without a male relative’s permission, a place where the religious police walked the streets and a version of Islam was printed into textbooks and shipped across the world, and even the detail that fifteen of the nineteen men who flew the planes into New York and Washington in 2001 carried Saudi passports kept resurfacing for years afterwards. None of that reporting was invented, since all of it was true, the executions and the guardianship laws and the textbooks that got shipped abroad, and the only thing about that portrait which has changed is that nobody is writing it anymore.

Then the arithmetic moved and the writing moved with it, and weapons are the clearest place to see it, because the numbers announced at these summits are so large that they stop meaning anything, and a single visit to Riyadh in May 2025 produced a defence package reported at a hundred and forty two billion dollars, which is roughly what India spends on its entire defence establishment in two years. Thats yuuuuge! And in the same visit the kingdom was added to the list of America’s major non NATO allies, and the pause on offensive weapons that had been announced during the Yemen war was quietly lifted in 2024, and the man named in the killing shook hands in the sunlight and flew home to a welcome that used to be reserved for countries which had earned it.

The case itself went to the place such cases go, which is a courtroom that met in secret and closed its doors to journalists and diplomats, and it convicted eight people and sentenced five of them to death and then commuted those sentences to twenty years, and American intelligence assessed that the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had approved the operation to capture or kill him, which the kingdom denies to this day. And when the report saying so was finally released in 2021 the sanctions that followed landed on a unit of the royal guard and a handful of officials, and the man named in it was never touched, and the lawsuit brought by his fiancee Hatice Cengiz was answered with a legal opinion that the crown prince enjoyed immunity as a sitting head of government (or atleast that is what the legal opinion said) and the case against him was dismissed. So the file sits in limbo while the men who could have answered her questions carry on with their careers. Its so sad to see.

What bothers me more than the killing, which at least got a year of headlines, is the war that never got any, because the same kingdom spent years bombing a country that could not shoot back, and American tankers refueled those bombers for years and American intelligence fed the coalition’s targeting, and one airstrike in August 2018 hit a school bus at a market in Dahyan and killed forty children, and the cholera outbreak that followed became the largest ever recorded, with more than a million suspected cases in a country of thirty million. Congress tried to stop the whole thing with a war powers resolution that got vetoed, and then the war slid off the front pages when a truce arrived. And I cannot remember the last Yemen story I read either, which says more about my attention than about Yemen.

India has its own copy of this reflex, and I say that as someone who lives inside it, because we are one of the biggest buyers of Saudi oil and we keep about two and a half million of our people working there and the money they send home holds whole districts of Kerala and Bihar and Uttar Pradesh together. Most times our outrage about the consulate lasts about as long as a news cycle, and a few months later the crown prince landed in Delhi with a red carpet and a joint statement about energy and investment, and almost nobody in my timeline found that strange enough to mention twice.

I am not trying to make Iran look better here, and I want to be careful because the Iranian state has graves in its record and hangings in its courts and militias on its payroll, and it has crushed its own protesters more than once, so a country can be a target of American pressure and a nasty piece of work at the same time. What interests me is the labeling, and the labels come off one machine, because the United States makes weapons and movies and dollars, and it also makes the categories, and it makes them so well that a reader in Delhi or Lagos or Jakarta absorbs the same set of villains without noticing that the set was assembled somewhere else. There was an order in 2017 that blocked travel from seven countries, which included Iran and left Saudi Arabia off the list, and there was a nuclear deal in 2015 that made Iran a partner and a maximum pressure campaign in 2018 that made it the great evil, and through all of it the kingdom was buying the machinery of its own reputation with tens of millions of dollars a year in Washington lobbyists and public relations firms, which is how one country buys a reputation while another country buys aircraft.

In plain English; the label follows the invoice and the moral facts come along for the ride.

So the answer to who the enemy is has very little to do with conduct, and the enemy is whoever the current arrangement needs, and the arrangement changes when the money does, and Iran became the bigger evil at almost exactly the moment the kingdom became the bigger customer, and the labels moved without a single moral fact having to move with them. The part I find hardest to write honestly is that my own reaction followed the same schedule, which is that I was furious in October 2018 and I am merely informed in September 2026, and nothing between those two dates was a fact about what happened inside that consulate, and everything between them was a fact about how much airtime the story was getting. So my sense of good and evil turns out to have been rented to me from a building I have never visited, and I have been paying the rent on time every month without ever reading the lease.

I used to think the difference between a person and a country was that people have souls and states have interests, and I am no longer sure which of the two behaves more predictably, because the man who walked into that consulate was planning a wedding, and the state that ended him was protecting a set of relationships it could not afford to lose, and the sentence the world passed in 2018 has since been reduced by the same discretion that keeps the peace with a customer. The vocabulary of good and evil did not retire when the story did, and it gets reused every year for whoever is inconvenient, which is why the word evil now reaches me like a weather report from a country I am not standing in.

The arrangement is not even holding, which is the part I keep coming back to when I zoom out, because the whole purpose of making Iran the villain was to line up the region behind an alliance that would keep the oil and the shipping lanes and the airbases in friendly hands. And while Washington was working that problem the two countries sat down in Beijing and restored relations in March 2023 under an agreement brokered by China, and the corridor that was supposed to weld India to the Gulf and Europe was announced at a summit in Delhi and has travelled about as far as a press release usually travels, so an assignment of evil produced something close to the opposite of the alliance it was meant to build. And nobody inside the machine seems to have noticed, and the machine has already moved on to the next round of names. Do we really need an enemy this badly? I don’t think so!

The image I keep from that October is Hatice Cengiz standing at the consulate gate with her phone in her hand, waiting for a man who was already gone, and she is still waiting in the only way a person can wait on a government that has stopped returning calls, and the men who could answer her are being photographed in warmer rooms with better lighting. I do not know who the enemy is anymore, and I have stopped expecting the answer to arrive from any government, because every answer I have been handed so far turned out to be a description of the moment it was issued in. What is left for me is to decide whose description I will accept the next time somebody points at a country and calls it evil, and I notice that nobody has asked me that question in years, which is probably the answer.

Tweet to me who you were told to hate this year and whether you still do. I am @troysk704.