PRESIDENT BIDEN’S TRIP TO SAUDI ARABIA SCHEDULED
Officials say energy to be discussed, but not primary topic
President Joe Biden’s much-anticipated trip to Saudi Arabia has been formally set for next month, the White House announced Tuesday, but officials played down the chances of securing much immediate help in stabilizing energy markets roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Biden will make his first trip to the Middle East as president from July 13-16, stopping first in Israel and the West Bank before heading to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the reported mastermind of the brutal 2018 assassination of a Saudi dissident with U.S. ties.
The trip has generated waves of criticism even before it was officially announced. Human rights activists, media figures and even some of Biden’s fellow Democrats denounced the idea of a president shaking hands with a Saudi leader said to have ordered the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic of the royal family who lived in the United States and wrote a column for The Washington Post.
As a candidate for president, Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are” because of the murder. After taking office, he ordered the release of an intelligence report tying Crown Prince Mohammed to the Khashoggi killing and imposed modest sanctions on lowerlevel figures. But with gasoline prices marching steadily upward and Russian energy increasingly shunned, analysts said Biden could ill afford to keep one of the world’s largest oil producers at arm’s length much longer.
Biden and his staff have insisted in recent days that the decision to visit Saudi Arabia — effectively relieving it of pariah status — had more to do with security issues than the price of gasoline.
“The commitments from the Saudis don’t relate to anything having to do with energy,” Biden told reporters Sunday, citing national security concerns. “It has to do with much larger issues than having to do with the energy piece.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said Monday that while energy will be a point of discussion, the relationship between the nations was far more complex than that. “To look at this trip as it being only about oil is not — it would be simply wrong to do that,” she said.
OPEC Plus, the group of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia, already announced this month that it would increase production modestly in July and August, and American officials have said they expect the bloc to ratchet it up even more in the fall. But that commitment has had little effect thus far on the price at the pump.
An administration official who briefed reporters on the president’s trip on condition of anonymity according to White House ground rules said Biden would meet in Jeddah
with Crown Prince Mohammed, the country’s de facto ruler, but would not say whether the president would raise the Khashoggi case.
A formal White House statement announcing the trip mentioned human rights as one of a group of issues expected to come up, along with climate change, Iran’s nuclear program and the war in Yemen.
Jean-Pierre told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that Biden stood by his previous comments about the Khashoggi killing. “We’re not overlooking any conduct that happened before the president took office,” she said.