“Fargo” on the Bosporus: A 15-man Saudi hit squad, complete with a forensic expert, arrives in Istanbul on two planes, murders the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi after he enters the Saudi consulate, cuts up his body into disposable segments and makes its escape.

That is what Turkish authorities, based on video and audio evidence, some of whose content has been leaked, contend happened to Khashoggi. He was living in self-imposed exile in the United States and had become a prominent critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the hard-charging and belligerent 33-year-old Saudi heir to the throne and sometime darling of the West.

Khashoggi, captured on Turkish security cameras, entered the consulate on Oct. 2. He never emerged. The Saudis say he left, but they have produced no evidence. That may be because corpses don’t walk.

For six days, the Trump Administration was virtually silent. M.B.S., as the prince is known, has been embraced by Trump as his lost Middle Eastern son, an infatuation cemented by a $110 billion arms deal on the president’s first trip abroad. Trump has relegated human rights to a non-issue in his foreign policy. He has embraced autocrats. He has insulted journalists like Khashoggi who speak truth to power. Beyond himself and money, Trump has no serious interests.

Put these and other elements together — an erratic Saudi prince given carte blanche by Trump, wielding cash and fear to secure fealty, brooking no opposition to the House of Saud, blind to devastation from the Saudi-led war in Yemen, allowing women to drive but arresting the women activists behind this concession, detaining critics en masse, throwing a fit at Canada (yes, Canada!) over justified human-rights criticism — and the folly of killing Khashoggi in Turkey becomes incremental rather than inconceivable. For now, I find the case for Saudi perpetration of this hideous crime persuasive.

Khashoggi’s disappearance is now Exhibit A in the price of Trump’s values-free foreign policy, his cavalier contempt for the core American values at the heart of America’s alliances. That price was already evident from Yemen to the Philippines to Russia. Trump is a man who has called the European Union “brutal” and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, “a great personality.” His former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, suggested that human rights concerns were secondary to “our national security interests, our economic interests.” So what did M.B.S. have to fear? After more than a week, Trump did muster a mild dissent — “I don’t like it” — but called relations with Saudi Arabia “excellent.”

This is Trump World. Money talks. Brutes do what they want. Human rights are scoffed at. Morality (ha-ha) is what you can get away with. Truth is no match for manipulation (don’t hold your breath for clarity on this foul deed). Decency dies. Culture collapses. M.B.S. dangles billions for his Vision 2030 Saudi makeover, and fawning businesses scurry to his “Davos in the Desert” extravaganza this month. A stubborn journalist, a human being with a conscience, gets dismembered in a Saudi consulate.

Enough already. Let’s hear it for Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber chief executive, who has dropped out of that now obscene extravaganza. And for The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist and other publications that have withdrawn. And for the Harbour Group, a lobbying firm in Washington that has dropped the Saudi government as a client.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin should not attend, absent some serious Saudi clarification of what happened. Nor should Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.

One life! Mnuchin and Dimon might argue. What’s a single life beside vast economic interests? But sometimes a single life is all of civilization.

Congress, already angered over the Yemen war, has woken up while the White House slumbered. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has demanded an investigation that could lead to sanctions. Senator Lindsey Graham, whom I am loath to quote after his Kavanaugh performance but here goes, said that, “If you’re an ally of the US because we have strategic interests,” that does not mean you have “a blank check to do anything you would like.”

Except that right now you do.

As to those strategic interests, prominent among them for the Trump administration is using Saudi Arabia in its obsessive campaign against Iran. When I was in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, every senior Saudi official I met compared Iran to Hitler’s Nazi regime. This is pure Iran derangement syndrome. Iran is a repressive and expansionist regime with a hideous human rights record. So is Saudi Arabia.

Looking at the history of the past two decades, and Saudi Arabia’s consistent underwriting of the Wahhabi orthodoxy behind murderous Islamist hatred of the apostate West, it is impossible to argue that Iran has inflicted more harm on American interests than Saudi Arabia has. The Saudis take that dubious accolade.

After 9/11, 15-man Saudi hit squads are very familiar to Americans.

It’s time to call in every Saudi chip. The United States has plenty, including arms sales. They should be stopped until we know how Khashoggi disappeared in his own consulate. –NY TIMES