The US has relatively little qualms about doing business with Saudi Arabia, a country with numerous human rights abuses. The obvious reason lies in petroleum - but at what point should the US cut off trade and relations with a country over human rights issues?
North Korea is easy to embargo; the US economy doesn’t depend on North Korea at all. But what if, say, (1), nearly all of the world’s petroleum was located in Saudi Arabia, (2), the US economy was totally dependent on these oil imports, and (3) Saudi Arabia was an even worse human-rights abuser than North Korea?
At what point does human rights become such a severe issue that the US government would or should cut off all trade? Holocaust-scale genocide?
You are asking a very difficult question here. The answer probably depends on what you want to achieve. Is it your goal to improve the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia? Or do you just want to avoid shaking hands with an abuser of human rights?
If it is the latter, the answer is easy. Stop all trade, and you will have achieved your goal. However, that is a very inward looking approach. It does not do anything for the people in Saudi Arabia. For all we know isolation does not shorten the lifespan of a tyrannical regime - North Korea is a good example for that. And in the unlikely event that an embargo could actually destabilize the Saudi government to the point of collapse, it is at least questionable whether what follows would be any better for the people.
If you want to achieve change in Saudi Arabia, you’d probably do best to “keep the lines open”. I believe our liberal society to be superior to the in many respects still medieval system of Saudi Arabia. But change will only happen, if the people there also see it that way. And for that to become reality, they have to know our way of life first. I may be mistaken, but I believe that in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran the well educated minority would be much more open to change than the broad majority that knows next to nothing about our way of life. By cutting off trade, you may hurt the wrong people.
I’m referring to mainly this. Also, Saudi Arabia is just one example.
I guess the first question is how much does it damage us. For instance if all of the world’s oil was in Saudi then we would need to work with them to keep our transportation infantstructure and agriculture intact. If we removed oil (and I’m assuming natural gas) from the US economy over night thousands of people if not more would be dieing in weeks or months I see that as a great human rights problem easily on the level of genocide.
Now of course all of the oil and gas isn’t in Saudi and so cutting off buying from them just means we either use less for a greater cost or we buy from someone else. I’m a bit behind on my world oil production but Saudi produces about 15% of world oil so simply cutting world supply by that much would do some terrible things to prices probably around $200/barrel which would do lots of damage to our economy but I’d stop well short of genocide before I was uncomfortable with who we were working with but it would have to get near ISIS levels since 2008 would look like a cake walk.