CNBC


President Joe Biden is headed to Saudi Arabia this week as part of his first Middle East trip as commander in chief.

 

Biden heads to Saudi Arabia for what could be an ‘embarrassing’ climbdown — or a welcome reset- oil and gas 360

Source: CNBC

He’s going with a list of goals, including energy security, bringing the Saudis and Israel closer together, advancing a truce in Yemen, and establishing a more cohesive regional front against Iran.

But it’s a controversial move for this president, and no one is really sure how much he’ll actually achieve.

The planned visit has spurred plenty of criticism, from both the right and left, for being what some are calling an “embarrassing” climbdown and for revealing a clear reversal from the tough talk against the kingdom that Biden had employed during his candidacy and in the early months of his presidency.

Now, things are different. Gasoline in the U.S. has been at its most expensive ever, Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine has dramatically tightened the global oil supply, and Biden really, really wants Saudi Arabia and Israel to be friends. So will the trip feel like an awkward apology, or a reset for two countries with mutual interests?

“I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t shake his hand,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in an interview in June, when asked about the president’s planned meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He then referred to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the administration attributed to the crown prince. The Saudi government has repeatedly rejected the accusation.

While campaigning in 2019, Biden vowed to treat the Saudi kingdom as “the pariah that they are,” and as president, he vocally criticized the country’s human rights abuses. He also insisted on viewing Saudi Arabia’s King Salman as his counterpart, rather than the 36-year-old crown prince, who runs the kingdom’s day-to-day affairs.

Crown Prince Mohammed in March reportedly refused to take a call from Biden, as the U.S. leader pleaded with Gulf states to increase oil production after banning Russian oil imports.

And in an early March interview with The Atlantic, when asked if he thought Biden misunderstood him, the crown prince replied: “Simply, I do not care. It’s up to him to think about the interests of America.”

A ‘welcome reset’

It seems Biden has come around to putting those interests ahead of what was perhaps a more idealistic narrative.

On Saturday, the president published an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “Why I’m going to Saudi Arabia.” In it, he argued that “from the start, my aim was to reorient — but not rupture — relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years.” He stressed the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship for stability in the region and for American interests.

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst close to the kingdom’s royal court, sees Biden’s visit as a tonic for damaged relations.

“I think the mistake that the Biden administration made was it took its campaign rhetoric into the administration” and that “hit a wall of realism,” he told CNBC.

The visit, he said, “is a reset. And I think it’s a welcome reset. Because the relationship is important to the kingdom also. And they would like those clouds to pass.”

“I think by virtue of visiting the kingdom he puts that behind him, and that allows things to go back to where they were with America previously,” Shihabi added.

Biden says human rights will still be high on his agenda. But many observers say that’s unlikely, given the other security and energy-related interests in focus.

“Biden is hardly the first president to run on a ‘human rights will be central to my foreign policy’ platform, only to be confronted in office by the realities of the Middle East,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

The Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the White House did not reply to CNBC requests for comment.

Oil and Israel

Biden has downplayed what many analysts say is his administration’s desperate need to see the Saudis and OPEC members pump more oil, in order to ease record-high gas prices for Americans.

“Absent the war in Ukraine, the tightening of the oil market and the spiking of oil prices, there would be no rapprochement with Saudi Arabia,” Martin Indyk, a former U.S. diplomat and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview with the Financial Times.

 


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