Just hours after Joe Biden greeted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump ahead of a lengthy meeting between the two, the US president still insisted his visit to Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with the kingdom’s day-to-day leader.
“I didn’t come here to meet the crown prince,” Biden said, pointing to his agenda, which included a summit with other Arab leaders.
Weeks before his visit to Saudi Arabia, the White House sought to use the summit to deflect criticism of the controversial trip to a nation Biden has vowed to treat as a pariah. But the images of the president engaging with Prince Mohammed – the man US intelligence has concluded authorized the operation that led to the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi – may be the trip’s most lasting legacy.
“This visit was mostly about optics, especially the Saudi part of it,” said Stephen Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There were many advantages for the Saudis and many disadvantages for the Americans.”
Biden and his team knew the trip would come with a political price — and that Riyadh would use his meeting with Prince Mohammed as a sign of the crown prince’s rehabilitation in the West, less than four years after Khashoggi’s assassination. But with oil prices at their highest levels in more than a decade and Washington trying to isolate Russia, aides have pressed Biden to restore ties with the world’s biggest crude exporter.
The challenges to rebuilding relations with Riyadh were highlighted, however, when Saudi officials quickly dismissed Biden’s assessments of two key US targets: human rights and oil.
The president told reporters he raised the issue of the assassination of Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi agents in 2018, at the start of his meeting with Prince Mohammed.
Biden said Prince Mohammed reiterated that he was “not personally responsible” for the killing – Riyadh blamed the killing on a fraud operation.
The president, who previously refused to speak to the crown prince, said he was “indicating that he probably is” in response. However, Saudi officials said Prince Mohammed pushed back, demanding that those responsible be tried and jailed.
US President Joe Biden meets Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman © Saudi Royal Court
Officials said the crown prince then cited US troops’ abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison as he sought to question Washington’s record of human rights. The exchange was brief and the leaders moved on to other topics, they added.
Similarly, Biden told reporters he believed he had secured Saudi Arabia’s agreement to produce more oil in the coming weeks. But Saudi officials, who have long argued that simply pumping more crude won’t lower prices, are quick to play that down.
They reiterated Riyadh’s position that any decision to produce more oil would be based on demand.
“If you say if we promised more oil, it means we are seeing a shortage of oil,” said Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir. “If we see a shortage of oil, there will be more oil produced.”
Biden did secure some foreign policy victories on his first visit to the Middle East as president, which began with a stop in Israel. This included Saudi Arabia agreeing to open its airspace to all flights to and from Israel, a country with which Riyadh has no formal relations.
Washington and Riyadh also agreed to cooperate on building 5G and 6G in Saudi Arabia, a deal the US hopes will wean the kingdom off Chinese communications technology.
But Brian Catoulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said the success of the visit would only become clear in the coming weeks and would depend on the Saudis’ follow-up.
“If Biden does get relief at the gas pump, and he’s believed to be getting some relief for Americans in terms of inflation through this visit. . . it will bring more political dividends than the price that comes from people spewing on Twitter,” he said.
Even before it began, the trip drew criticism from human rights activists and US lawmakers, and Biden struggled to articulate why he was going to Saudi Arabia.
At various times, he suggested it was to push for greater regional integration, bolster efforts to end a seven-year war in Yemen and stabilize energy markets.
The message grew sharper as the visit progressed, and he concluded with a speech on Saturday to the leaders of the Gulf states and Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, in which he insisted the US would remain “an active, engaged partner in the Middle East”.
“We’re not going to walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China or Russia or Iran,” Biden said.
The comments were intended to respond to a perception among Arab states that successive US administrations have sought to disengage from the region. That sentiment has pushed Gulf states in particular to deepen ties with Russia and China, the region’s biggest oil buyer, and to hedge their traditional relationship with Washington.
Yemeni security guards survey the damage to the telecommunications ministry after overnight airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition targeted the Houthi rebel-held capital Sanaa in February © Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images
Gulf states and Israel are also worried about Biden’s efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal Iran signed with world powers, fearing it will embolden their arch-rival. Riyadh has been irritated by his criticism of human rights and his policy towards Yemen, where Saudi Arabia leads a coalition fighting Iran-linked Houthi rebels.
John Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “Biden’s general instinct is that the Middle East will be a source of problems, not opportunities.”
But factors including the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and concerns about China’s deepening footprint in the region mean he cannot ignore the region.
“He doesn’t tend to be too embedded, but he also understands that he can’t leave it behind,” Alterman said.
Whatever the view in the White House, Biden ended up delivering a “huge victory” for Prince Mohammed, said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator familiar with the royal court’s thinking.
“The visit was a rehabilitation for MBS and one that proved that you certainly cannot ignore Saudi Arabia and MBS, let alone isolate them,” Shihabi said.
Still, for critics of Saudi Arabia, the trip dashed any remaining hopes that Biden would back up his earlier promises and hold the kingdom to account.
Khashoggi’s fiancee Hatice Cengiz tweeted her condemnation of the trip, using a fake account of the former journalist and a photo of Biden and Prince Mohammed fist bumping.
“Hey @Potus is this the accountability you promised for my murder?” she wrote.
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