Joe Biden landed this Friday in Jeddah for a controversial meeting with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salmán. During the campaign that brought him to the White House in 2020, the US president promised to send the corner of the “rogue states” to the desert kingdom for the responsibility of its de facto leader in the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose death in the Istanbul consulate in 2018 attributed the US intelligence services to the prince. Regarding the official visit, which Biden has undertaken pressured by high oil prices and runaway inflation, the question hovered over how he would approach (if he would dare to do so at all) the thorny issue. After a two-hour meeting, the US president has assured journalists sent to Jeddah that he has told Bin Salman that he considers him guilty of the murder of the columnist from The Washington Post.
“I brought it up at the beginning of the meeting,” Biden said, “making it clear what I thought at the time and what I think now. I was frank and direct in discussing it. I made my opinion very clear. I said bluntly that for an American president to remain silent on a human rights issue is inconsistent with who we are and who I am. I always defend our values.” And how did his interlocutor react? “Basically, he claimed that he was not personally responsible for it and that he had taken action against those who committed the crime.” To which Biden replied, always according to his account: “I indicated to him that I believed he was.”
Upon arrival in the Saudi city, there was no hug, no pat on the back, no handshake. A cold fist bump (of the kind that made the coronavirus fashionable around the world) served as a greeting between Biden and the crown prince. A gesture sometimes encloses a world in diplomacy, and this one spoke, not so much about pandemic precautions (despite what he has tried to make the White House see, without success) but about the discomfort caused by the visit. Bin Salmán’s father, King Salmán bin Abdelaziz, did shake hands with Biden.
Since the murder of the columnist The Washington Post, Saudi resident in the United States, many things have happened, but above all one: the war in Ukraine came, the realpolitik forced Biden to rethink his priorities and human rights took a backseat. He needs the desert regime to contain oil prices, which are out of control in the United States, and, incidentally, do something to silence criticism at home for his inaction on inflation, which in June has pulverized all records again , with 9.1%. At the meeting, according to Biden, an agreement was reached for an increase in oil production (although the US president did not specify how much increase it is), as well as measures to soften Saudi relations with Israel. Both countries are the main allies of the United States in the area.
Biden also announced the withdrawal of US troops serving as peacekeepers on two islands, Tiran and Sanafir, in the Red Sea, old sources of conflict dating back to the 1967 Six-Day War and which today are the key for the thaw in diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv. They will abandon the small islands at the end of the year, which dominate the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, Israel’s only outlet to the Red Sea. On Friday morning, a few hours before the air force One landed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia made public another decision in the same conciliatory direction: to open its airspace to planes coming from and going to Israel, which until now had been forced to circle the country. The decision has been interpreted by Biden as a gesture towards a greater integration of Israel in the region, and suggests Riyadh’s predisposition to participate in this new climate, in which it already has countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain, besides Egypt and Jordan.
Among the objectives of the United States is also to calm the tension with Iran, whose return to the nuclear pact is in a deadlock, seek solutions to the war in Yemen (for the time being, this Friday it was agreed to extend the current truce until August) and curb the influence of Chinese in the area. In that regard, Biden has shared plans to test a 5G technology designed to compete with China’s Huawei in Saudi Arabia.
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The Saudi state news agency has limited itself, for its part, to reporting that during the meeting, the Saudi and American delegations reviewed the historical relations between the two countries and discussed formulas to strengthen them to serve their interests.
The US media have made this week almost a state issue of the etiquette that Biden (who prides himself on being a close leader) was going to observe before Bin Salmán. Khashoggi was a prominent journalist and many of the analysts who have lavished on the news channels these days knew him personally, so his murder especially shocked the Washington media establishment. So much expectation had generated that the White House announced at the beginning of the tour that Biden, a population at risk at 79 years old, would not shake hands with other leaders as a precaution against the coronavirus, which in the United States is starring in a new wave. With the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, he shook his fists, but with the leader of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, he did shake hands.
Finally, Mohamed bin Salmán has gone out to receive the car that has taken Biden from the King Abdulaziz international airport in Jeddah, where he arrived shortly before 6:00 p.m., local time, to the Al Salam Royal Palace. The sober and long-awaited meeting has been broadcast on Saudi state television Al Ejbariya. After bumping fists, they entered the building to celebrate the first meeting of the last stop of the US president’s trip to the Middle East, which started on Wednesday in Israel and ended this Friday in the West Bank, where he appeared in the morning before the press with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
In another meeting with the media, shared with Lapid, the US president refused on Thursday to specify whether he would raise the Khashoggi issue with Bin Salman. “My views on Khashoggi have been absolutely, positively clear, and I have never been silent on human rights,” Biden said. “The reason I’m going to Saudi Arabia is to further the interests of the United States in a way that I think we have an opportunity to reassert our influence in the Middle East.”
Biden’s discomfort with the visit to Saudi Arabia and his need to justify himself had become apparent as the time drew near. At a press conference during the NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June, the US president tried to play down the importance of the trip by stating that his main objective was not to meet with the Saudi authorities, but to attend a meeting with leaders of several countries in the region that happened to take place in the desert kingdom. He also suggested that he was actually doing it to benefit Israel in its efforts to speed up its regional integration. And he even hinted that he didn’t know if he was going to meet the Saudi king and the crown prince. Biden also published this past weekend a tribune in the Washington Post to defend his decision and frame it as a “reorientation” of relations with Riyadh rather than a break.
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