On the menu today: Less than three years after he pledged to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state for killing and dismembering Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, President Biden will travel to the kingdom and shake the hand of the man who ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. It is an embarrassing end to a story of hubris and shortsightedness, reflecting the American appetite for simple solutions to complicated problems. Governing is a lot harder than campaigning, as Biden has been forced to learn over and over again as his presidency continues.
A Humiliating About-Face
Then-candidate Joe Biden, November 21, 2019:
ANDREA MITCHELL: Mr. Vice President, the CIA has concluded that the leader of Saudi Arabia directed the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The State Department also says the Saudi government is responsible for executing nonviolent offenders and for torture. President Trump has not punished senior Saudi leaders. Would you?
JOE BIDEN: Yes, and I said it at the time. Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and dismembered, and I believe on the order of the crown prince. And I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. There’s very little social redeeming value of the — in the present government in Saudi Arabia. [Emphasis added.]
And I would also, as pointed out, I would end — end subsidies that we have, end the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children, and they’re murdering innocent people. And so they have to be held accountable.
The New York Times, this morning:
President Biden, who as a candidate vowed to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ in response to the assassination of a prominent dissident, has decided to travel to Riyadh this month to rebuild relations with the oil-rich kingdom at a time when he is seeking to lower gas prices at home and isolate Russia abroad. . . . During his stop in Riyadh, the president will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was deemed responsible for the dismemberment of the dissident, the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
It was never particularly realistic for Biden or any other presidential candidate to pledge to make Saudi Arabia a pariah. Even at the height of the recent boom of U.S. oil production, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were too dependent upon each other and had too many mutual geopolitical interests:
- For starters, even as recently as May 2021, Saudi Arabia was the fourth-largest source of U.S. crude-oil imports, providing an average of 395,000 barrels per day of the 8.5 million barrels per day in gross U.S. crude-oil imports, behind Canada, Mexico, and Russia.
- Besides holding the world’s second-largest reserve of oil, Saudi Arabia is still the custodian of Mecca and Medina, and manages the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim is expected to make at least once in their life — meaning that the Saudi government has an extremely influential role in shaping the discussions and perceptions of the U.S. within the Muslim world.
- The State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism stated in 2019 that, “Saudi Arabia maintained a high cooperation tempo with U.S. and international partners in a range of counterterrorism fields, including terrorist information sharing, monitoring of [foreign terrorist fighters], border security, countering unmanned aerial systems, and [countering violent extremism. The Saudi Arabian government worked to disrupt, and supported U.S. and international sanctions against, terrorist finance networks, focusing heavily on entities supporting Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Quds Force, Lebanese Hizballah, and other Iranian proxy groups active in the Gulf. . . . Saudi Arabia was a full partner and active participant in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and provided significant operational and logistical support for Coalition activities in Syria and Iraq.”
- Saudi Arabia is the largest buyer of American-made weapons.
- Saudi Arabia doesn’t control its neighbors, but it has considerable influence in the Arab world. There have been some small signs of an end to Saudi hostility to the state of Israel.
Biden’s pledge to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state would mean ending all these interactions — economic, military, diplomatic, cultural, social, geopolitical. None of this is meant to hand-wave away the significant and serious U.S. concerns about the execution and barbaric dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, or Saudi Arabia’s horrific human-rights record, atrocious antisemitism, and Saudi citizens supporting terrorism and extremist causes. But many decades of intense economic and security ties, along with close diplomatic relations and shared security interests relating to Iran and Islamist terrorism, means that the U.S.–Saudi relationship can’t be turned on and off like a light switch.
In other words, Biden, off the cuff, made a sweeping, bold promise that he didn’t know how to keep. And less than six weeks after Biden took office, State Department spokesman Ned Price had the awkward job of announcing that, while the U.S. was ending some arms sales related to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, the Biden administration was not going to make the kingdom a pariah state: “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is important. It’s important to U.S. interests and it requires continued progress and reforms to ensure that this important partnership rests on strong fundamentals and continues to advance our shared objectives in the Middle East.”
So how did Biden — and the country — end up doing this humiliating about-face?
Recent cycles have brought out crowds of candidates — 17 major and minor candidates for the Republicans in 2016, 29 major and minor candidates for the Democrats in 2020 — and almost all of those candidates seemed like they were targeting the same group of voters.
The minds behind major presidential campaigns always have a vision of who their party’s primary voters are, and tailor their campaigns, and sometimes their policies, accordingly. For a Republican, the easiest-to-reach and most-targeted primary voter is a church-attending Christian who is white, older, Fox News-watching, gun-owning, pro-life, tough on crime, and passionately opposed to illegal immigration. They’re more likely to be a small-business owner or contractor, have an American flag outside of their house almost all the time, watch college football, and use Facebook.
For a Democrat, the easiest-to-reach and targeted primary voter is atheist, nonreligious, a religious minority, or a Christian whose faith just happens to perfectly align with the DNC platform; is more likely to be a racial or ethnic minority, more likely to be younger, more likely to watch MSNBC, and more likely to be a union member (although that last one has shifted in recent years). They may own prayer candles with images of Robert Mueller, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stacey Abrams, and Anthony Fauci on them. They likely donate to environmental groups, have a rainbow flag hanging somewhere in their home or office, and are more likely to watch soccer or the prestige dramas on premium streaming channels. They’re likely to have one of those “in this house we believe” yard signs, and they may have stopped wearing masks to protect against Covid only in the last week or so.
When you have a crowd of candidates competing for the support of the same small-but-pivotal group of voters, the primary turns into a game of “can you top this?” A reasonable, nuanced position isn’t going to get a candidate noticed in a field so large that they can’t all stand on the same debate stage. The only way to stand out is to take a position more extreme than everyone else’s.
By 2019, President Trump was widely perceived as cozy with the Saudi royal family. (Considering Trump’s longstanding disdain for the Bush family, that’s kind of ironic.) Many Democrats believed that the Saudi government had gone too far. It wasn’t just that they had brutally murdered a critic; the Saudis did that sort of thing all the time. It was that the regime had brutally murdered a critic whose name they recognized because he wrote for the Washington Post.
(While no one deserves to get murdered and dismembered, it is worth keeping in mind that Jamal Khashoggi had used a researcher and translator affiliated with a Qatari-government-funded organization that was urging him to take a tougher line against the Saudi government — and hid this arrangement from his editors. His secret deal makes him look less like an independent journalist and more like an agent of another country that was, if not an enemy of Saudi Arabia, then certainly a rival. Again, this doesn’t mean he deserved his grisly fate, but it does mean that there’s been some airbrushing of history around Khashoggi.)
The execution of Khashoggi had to have some sort of consequence; he was a legal permanent resident of the United States. As I wrote at the time, “We don’t want to blow up the whole relationship; we just need to send a signal that they’ve done something unacceptable, that they need to make restitution and need to resist the temptation to take similar actions in the future.”
But in the Democratic Party in 2019, an anti-Saudi position was seen as an anti-Trump position and, by extension, a pro-free-speech position. No one was interested in a proportional response, and nobody wanted to think through the longer-term consequences of an action. The Brookings Institution noted Biden’s comments and similar ones from Nancy Pelosi and observed that, “For two very senior Democrats to publicly condemn the Saudi leadership at a time when the kingdom is under attack by Iran is unprecedented. . . . The vehement and unprecedented despairing remarks about our oldest partner in the Middle East suggests an existential crisis in the relationship may be only around a year away if the Democrats win the White House.”
But once in office, Biden belatedly realized that his promise was nearly impossible to keep, and that U.S. interests would not be served by severing all ties with the kingdom.
Even if Biden wanted to back away from his “pariah state” pledge, the president might have been able to get through his term without a personal meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. But as world oil prices rose and the Biden administration signaled its desire to reduce U.S. use of fossil fuels, Saudi Arabian leverage increased, and U.S. leverage decreased.
Last November, some Democrats noted the kingdom’s lower oil-production numbers and speculated that “Salman is enacting revenge on Democrats in general and President Joe Biden specifically for the party’s increasingly standoffish attitude toward the kingdom — by driving up energy prices and fueling global inflation.” And some anecdotes suggested that the Saudis were laughing their tushies off at the U.S. under Biden suddenly begging the rest of the world to produce more oil:
In a comment to The Intercept, [Ali Shihabi, a Saudi national who is considered a voice for MBS in Washington] said, “Saudi has put a lot of work into getting a cohesive OPEC+ to work over the past 15 months since the crisis that dropped oil futures below zero so will not break ranks with the consensus or Russia on this. Also the Kingdom resents being blamed for what is essentially a structural problem not of its own making in the US which has hampered its own energy production. Finally, I hear that the price of Thanksgiving Turkeys has doubled in the US so why can oil prices also not inflate?” Shihabi added a wink emoji to the end of his comment.
And it may well be that MBS wanted to see Biden grovel. There were reports in March that “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks,” although the White House denied that those reports were accurate.
In a year and a half, Biden has maneuvered himself into a spot where a gallon of gas now averages $4.71 nationwide; the Saudi leadership hates his guts and wants to see him crawl; the attempt to revive a nuclear deal with a regime that tries to hack U.S. children’s hospitals is effectively dead; human-rights groups are appalled by the administration’s reversal on the kingdom; the families of 9/11 victims are seething; and, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius put it, “In terms of any meaningful accountability from MBS on Khashoggi’s death or other important human rights issues, Biden is likely to come away empty-handed.” Many presidents step into complicated and challenging situations and disappoint themselves and the country. But it’s a rare skill to lose on every front in an issue, simultaneously.
This seems like a good time to recall the warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [expletive] things up . . .” from Barack Obama, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
ADDENDUM: Kevin Williamson on the president’s speech on guns last night:
I’d love it if we would start enforcing a few of the gun laws we already have in place. For instance, we could follow through and prosecute people who commit fraud on the ATF forms needed to purchase a firearm. But, I suppose President Biden doesn’t want to send Hunter to the penitentiary.