“My own take is that the Saudis were really caught off guard with the reaction from the international community,” says Colin Clarke, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Politics and Strategy. “They’ve done so many things before that would likely be considered more severe.”

Clarke, who also is a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, says the widespread attention to this incident may cause autocratic countries to pause before they do something similar in the future, and that Saudi Arabia may have lost political capital it could use to gain the benefit of the doubt regarding potential future claims of abuse. But ultimately this incident will blow over, he says.