Biden weighs risks, rewards on visit
Mideast trip aimed at reassuring wary leaders in region
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Before stepping foot in Saudi Arabia, President Joe Biden knew there would be trouble.
Biden was risking criticism by visiting a country he had vowed to make a “pariah” for human rights abuses, and there was no guarantee the visit would immediately yield higher oil production to offset rising gas prices.
He decided to face the blowback anyway, hoping to use the visit to repair strained ties and make clear to wary Arab leaders that the United States remains committed to their security and the region’s stability.
His visit to Saudi Arabia was occasionally uncomfortable but, in Biden’s view, ultimately necessary. Although he’s been focused on confronting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and limiting China’s expanding influence in Asia, those goals become far more difficult without the partnerships that he was tending to here.
“It is only becoming clearer to me how closely interwoven America’s interests are with the successes of the Middle East,” the president said Saturday at a summit in Jeddah.
It was a belated recognition of geopolitical reality that has long kept the United States deeply invested in the energy-rich region, most recently with ruinous wars that stretched over two decades. Biden tried to turn the page on those conflicts while insisting that the U.S. would remain engaged.
“We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Biden said.
The summit, where Biden announced $1 billion in U.S. funding to alleviate hunger in the region, was the final destination on Biden’s fourday trip, which included stops in Israel and the West Bank.
Biden’s challenge has been to recognize the shifting landscape and persuade Middle East leaders to remain aligned with U.S. interests without being dragged back into a corner of the world the American public has largely turned away from after the end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although Biden expressed a renewed commitment to the region, saying “the United States is not going anywhere,” he also seemed to acknowledge its limitations.
“The United States is clear-eyed about the challenges in the Middle East and about where we have the greatest capacity to help drive positive outcomes,” he said.
The centerpiece of Biden’s Middle East outreach was his first meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
The encounter began Friday with a fist bump outside the royal palace in Jeddah, a gesture that was swiftly criticized because of Prince Mohammed’s history of human rights abuses. In addition to cracking down on his critics in Saudi Arabia, the prince, according to U.S. intelligence, likely approved the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi nearly four years ago.
Biden rejected the notion that he was abandoning human rights by meeting with the crown prince, and said he brought up Khashoggi’s murder during their conversation. The topic created a “frosty” start to the meeting, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news network, citing an unnamed Saudi source, reported that Prince Mohammed responded to Biden’s mention of Khashoggi by saying that attempts to impose a set of values can backfire. He also said the U.S. had committed mistakes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where detainees were tortured, and pressed Biden on the killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during a recent Israeli raid in the West Bank.
The atmosphere between the two eventually became more relaxed, the U.S. official said, as they spoke about energy security and other issues.
The regional summit in Jeddah and Biden’s visit provided Prince Mohammed with the opportunity to showcase his country’s heavyweight role in the Middle East, and his position at the helm of the world’s largest oil exporter.
He hinted that the kingdom could pump more oil than it currently does, something Biden wants to see when existing production quotas among OPEC+ member countries, which include Russia, expire in September.
Biden also tried to draw Arab nations onto his side over the invasion of Ukraine by releasing satellite imagery indicating that Russian officials visited Iran in June and July to see weaponscapable drones that it could acquire.
The disclosure appeared aimed at drawing a connection between the war in Europe and Arab leaders’ own concerns about Iran.
So far, none of the countries represented at the summit has moved in lockstep with the U.S. to sanction Russia, a foreign policy priority for the Biden administration. If anything, the UAE has emerged as a sort of financial haven for Russian billionaires and
their multimillion-dollar yachts. Egypt remains open to Russian tourists.
But before ending his speech at the summit, Biden expressed hopes for a new era of cooperation.
“This is a table full of problem solvers,” he said. “There’s a lot of good we can do if we do it together.”