US Ties With Saudi Become Stronger Despite Bidens Previous “There will be consequences”

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“There will be consequences.” It was the warning a fuming Joe Biden hurled at Saudi Arabia during a CNN interview in the autumn of 2022, a week after the kingdom announced deep cuts to its oil production. The US president feared the move risked pushing up crude prices amid the turmoil triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. American officials, blindsided by the Saudi decision, considered it a slap in the face to an administration concerned about domestic gasoline prices in the run-up to midterm elections.

 

For Biden, it was personal. The production cut announced by Opec+, the Saudi-led oil cartel, came just three months after he had expended significant political capital by traveling to the kingdom for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom the president had previously refused to engage with. Behind the scenes, harsh words were exchanged. Some in the administration thought the Saudis, who insisted their decision had been based on market dynamics, had deliberately screwed them. It became a make-or-break moment after months of efforts to repair ties between the two. Biden threatened another “review” of the relationship.

 

Yet the “consequences” Biden threatened never materialized and what could have been a rupture instead became merely a setback in attempts by both sides to rebuild the relationship. In the months since, relations between the US and Saudi Arabia have blossomed, with the kingdom transitioning from pariah to what administration officials describe as one of Washington’s most important global partners.

 

US officials note with irony that today it is Israel, not Saudi Arabia, that is standing in the way of a historic deal that would reshape the Middle East: the normalization of diplomatic relations between the kingdom and the Jewish state. Such a rapprochement — while impossible as the Israel-Hamas war continues — would deliver Biden a signature foreign policy achievement and Prince Mohammed his long-cherished US-Saudi defense pact. US officials believe it could be a key part of a sustainable resolution to the crisis in Gaza. “One thing that is sure to keep a pathway to [a two-state solution] alive is the influence of Saudi Arabia,” says a senior Biden administration official. “It is the one thing that really, truly moves the Israelis.”

 

In part, the dramatic shift in tone is a reflection of how Biden’s foreign policy has been driven by events rather than ideology, just as Barack Obama’s was before him. The volatile Middle East perennially sucks in US presidents even as they seek to pivot away from the region, a factor brought into sharper focus after Hamas’s October 7 attack ignited the group’s war with Israel. It also underlines the importance to American domestic politics of energy from the Gulf; although the US has reduced its dependence on oil imports, what happens in the Middle East still affects global prices.

 

But at its core was a realpolitik realization in Washington that in the game of great-power competition, Saudi Arabia was too important to ignore, with concerns that if the administration did not engage with Riyadh, a traditional US ally would fall deeper into the orbit of China and Russia. “How do you keep Russia from aligning with Saudi Arabia? You have to have a relationship [with the Saudis]; how do you keep China from aligning with Saudi Arabia? You have a relationship,” says Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Part of the argument, [for the rapprochement], is they couldn’t abandon the Middle East to China, and the Saudis reminded the administration of the Chinese option at every opportunity they got.”

 

The US-Saudi relationship has been through highs and lows over the decades, but improved significantly after President Donald Trump succeeded Obama and pursued a transactional relationship with Riyadh. The Republican president made his first overseas trip to the kingdom and inked billions in arms deals. “They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran,” Trump said in 2018, only weeks after the brutal murder in Turkey of the US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.

 

But Biden did a 180-degree turn. He had vowed on the campaign trail to reassess ties with the world’s top oil exporter and promised to make Riyadh “pay the price” for the killing of Khashoggi. Biden also accused the kingdom of “murdering children’‘ in an apparent reference to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Once in office, he began to act on his threats. A week after his inauguration, he suspended offensive arms sales to the kingdom. A month later, Biden released a classified intelligence report that concluded that Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto leader, approved a mission to “capture or kill” Khashoggi. (Riyadh blamed the murder on a “rogue operation”).

 

In the background, however, lines of communication were kept open. Brett McGurk, the White House’s top Middle East adviser and veteran of previous administrations, made an early trip to the kingdom in a bid to quietly reassure the Saudis that things would improve after a few months. Riyadh also made moves viewed in Washington as overtures to the new president. Shortly before Biden’s inauguration, Saudi Arabia lifted a more than three-year regional embargo on Qatar, another key US ally, that helped foster a region-wide mood shift towards de-escalation between rival Middle East powers. In February 2021, Riyadh released Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi activist.

 

But relations were still strained when Biden dispatched his national security adviser Jake Sullivan to the kingdom in September that year. US officials tentatively discussed the possibility of a meeting between Biden and Prince Mohammed at a G20 gathering in Rome the following month, but those plans were scuppered when the crown prince chose not to attend the summit in person. In the end, it was Vladimir Putin who delivered the key turning point. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent energy prices to multiyear highs and US officials feared that Riyadh, which had been cooperating with Moscow on oil production since 2016, might side with the Russian president. “Great power competition with China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine understandably changed the Biden administration’s views of Saudi Arabia from a problematic partner to a coveted swing state,” says Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

 

Many in the administration, including in the State Department, were still resistant to stepping up engagement with Prince Mohammed. But those who argued that pragmatism trumped moral outrage won the day. Biden dispatched McGurk and Amos Hochstein, the White House’s chief energy adviser and one of the few administration figures with a background in the oil and gas industry, to the kingdom in January 2022, weeks before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. The pair have visited frequently ever since.

 

As relations tentatively improved, the Biden administration floated the idea of a grand deal for Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel. The carrot for Riyadh, long irked by what it regards as US unpredictability and a perceived lack of commitment to the Gulf’s security, was a defense treaty similar to the one the US shares with Japan, and cooperation with its nascent civilian nuclear program. Discussions also began on a potential Biden trip to the kingdom, despite continued consternation across sections of the administration. The case for supporters of the outreach was helped by Riyadh agreeing in April 2022 to a UN-brokered truce with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels they had been fighting in Yemen.

 

Biden’s trip to Jeddah eventually took place in July, weeks after Opec+ agreed to a modest increase in crude output, something Washington had pushed for in the hope of containing oil prices. The optics of the meeting in the Saudi port appeared frosty, with an awkward fist-bump greeting between the aging president and the millennial prince. But US officials insist it went well, clearing the air on differences and laying the foundations for areas of cooperation. “The point of the Jeddah visit was to break the ice and allow bureaucracies to engage. Once they started talking there was the sense of possibility,” says Alterman.

 

But then the furore over Opec+’s October decision to cut output ahead of November midterms erupted, causing some irate members of the administration to suspect that elements within Saudi Arabia wanted the Democrats to lose at the polls. For months there was negligible contact. Riyadh cold-shouldered Washington and hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit in December, underlining its burgeoning ties to a country that over the past two decades has become the kingdom’s biggest buyer of oil and its largest trading partner.

 

But as tempers cooled and oil prices remained relatively stable, vindicating the Saudis and persuading US officials that the decision to cut was based on market dynamics rather than politics, the channels of communication were eventually reopened. “It was a tense moment, heading into an election,” says the senior administration official. “I think it’s fair to say there was a misunderstanding of what [the Saudis] were trying to do.” Now, says a Saudi official, the relationship is “a hundred times better than it was when this administration came in.” The point US officials make is that the relationship today is about much more than just oil.

 

The Biden administration realized that in addition to keeping Saudi Arabia from slipping further into China’s orbit, it needed Riyadh’s cooperation on other objectives, such as ending the war in Yemen and de-escalating tensions with Iran. Petrodollars have also influenced attitudes; Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than $100bn in the US between 2017 and 2023. “The fundamentals are not just the historic defense relationship . . . [Saudi Arabia] is a G20 country that wants to work with us on a huge [range of issues],” says another senior US official.

 

The Saudis, like others in the Gulf, have hedged their relationships with a range of countries over the past decade as the US was perceived to be disengaging from the region. But there is a recognition that neither China nor Russia could replicate the US’s security or diplomatic role.

 

Credit: Times 2024-06-19

 

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[spidermike007]

The US is simply too compromised and the Saudis simply control too much oil. There will be consequences is a nice concept, but I don't see that it ever happened, on any level. Trump bowed down to him too. 

 

There is no question that MBS is a serial killer and a madman, but nobody's ever taken him to task. He is simply too powerful, and therefore untouchable. 

Edited June 19 by spidermike007

[Purdey]

Why does America have to kiss the ring of Crown Prince Mohammed "Chopper" bin Salman?

Why did America forget that the pilots who flew into the twin trade towers were Saudi?

 

Hmm. It will come to me in a minute.

[JonnyF]

Does anyone really expect Biden to keep to his word at this point?

 

He has a history of lies. As do the rest of his crime family. 

[impulse]

Saudi has Biden by the short and curlies through November.  (Or at least through the DNC Convention, then it may be someone else's pubes being pulled) 

 

Even draining the SPR may not be enough to keep gas prices low enough through the summer driving season.  He can't afford any supply disruptions and spiking prices if he wants to win.

 

[placnx]

Israel is resisting the two-state solution, so any deal will be held up until after the US election, with the expectation that Trump will win. Then Netanyahu hopes to get a deal with meaningless gestures to the two-state solution and neutralization of the Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002. It's unlikely that Biden will do anything serious to stop the Gaza war, so Netanyahu will avoid getting ousted until the never-ending war is "over", and by that time Trump may already be in power again.

[Srikcir]

3 hours ago, Purdey said:

Why did America forget that the pilots who flew into the twin trade towers were Saudi?

It didn't.

CIA's Counterterrorism Center had determined that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the September 11 attacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation connected the hijackers to al-Qaeda, a militant Salafist Islamist multi-national organization. US did not find any connection between the Saudi government and Twin Towers attack. Subsequently, POTUS Obama government found and killed Bin Laden.

 

[Srikcir]

36 minutes ago, placnx said:

Israel is resisting the two-state solution, so any deal will be held up until after the US election, with the expectation that Trump will win.

Trump supported a one-state solution with Israeli domination over Gaza and Palestinians. Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem toward that policy.

[Srikcir]

3 hours ago, Purdey said:

Why does America have to kiss the ring of Crown Prince Mohammed "Chopper" bin Salman?

It was POTUS Trump who did the Saudi sword dance to show favor. It was Trump who suppressed retribution for Salman's murder. It was POTUS Trump who approved the sale of Texas largest oil refinery to the Saudis through Kushner. It was POTUS Trump who asked OPEC to raise oil prices to enrich his oil company donors regardless on the economic effect on American consumers.

 

[Srikcir]

48 minutes ago, impulse said:

 

Even draining the SPR may not be enough to keep gas prices low enough through the summer driving season.  He can't afford any supply disruptions and spiking prices if he wants to win.

The U.S. has the largest untapped oil reserves in the world, surpassing even Saudi Arabia!

Trump said drill baby drill and under Biden the US did. Biden has approved nearly 50 percent more oil and gas drilling permits for wells on federal land since taking office than former President Donald Trump did in his first three years. Between higher US oil production and SPR releases Biden lowered retail fuel prices.

[placnx]

On 6/19/2024 at 7:03 PM, Srikcir said:

Trump supported a one-state solution with Israeli domination over Gaza and Palestinians. Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem toward that policy.

Exactly. Netanyahu would like to prolong to war to make Biden lose the election (besides keeping himself from being convicted of corruption). Then with Trump in power annexation of the West Bank can be done, and Saudi Arabia can become a client state of Israel!! If Trump and Netanyahu have their way, the Palestinians in Gaza will be left to rot, if they don't depart.

[Bkk Brian]

On 6/25/2024 at 1:05 PM, placnx said:

Exactly. Netanyahu would like to prolong to war to make Biden lose the election (besides keeping himself from being convicted of corruption). Then with Trump in power annexation of the West Bank can be done, and Saudi Arabia can become a client state of Israel!! If Trump and Netanyahu have their way, the Palestinians in Gaza will be left to rot, if they don't depart.

Ah the conspiracy theories are all lined up from you. I wont bother to ask for a link to that B.S. I know there's not any.