President Joe Biden came to power having pledged to make Saudi Arabia’s maverick new ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, a global pariah.
But as Biden nears the end of his term in office, having endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor in November’s US election, Saudi-US relations are closer than they have been for years.
Crown Prince Mohammed, far from being isolated by the US, has just secured an end to the four-year US ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
The deal means that air-to-ground missiles, whose transfer was suspended to pressure the Saudis to end the war in Yemen, will be delivered to Saudi bases soon.
That’s in addition to valuable new security pledges the Crown Prince secured from the Biden administration back in May, as well as agreements from the US to back Saudi civilian nuclear technology.
Biden looks to Saudi for help
As little as three years ago, a group of Democratic lawmakers were calling for MBS to be sanctioned after a declassified US intelligence report found that the crown prince ordered the assassination of dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2017. Saudi Arabia has denied the accusation.
Analysts say that MBS has navigated increasing regional and global chaos to emphasize Saudi Arabia’s importance to Washington.
The Gaza conflict between Israel and Hamas, which erupted after last year’s October 7 terror attacks, has disturbed Saudi Arabia, Giorgio Cafiero, CEO at Gulf State Analytics, told Business Insider.
It has threatened to expand into a wider regional conflict while empowering its arch-regional rival Iran and its proxies in the “Axis of Resistance.”
“There is something to be said about how the Biden administration has looked to the kingdom for help in terms of Washington’s efforts to contain these conflicts and prevent their further spread, which has given Saudi Arabia’s leadership an opportunity to further underscore to the West how Riyadh is a capital which the US and European countries must work with to advance their interests in the Arab-Islamic world and beyond,” said Cafiero.
A relationship that began with mistrust
Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power was marked by audacity and brutality, allegedly forcing the resignation of then-Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri in 2017 and imprisoning of some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful figures in a luxury hotel in a demonstration of force that roiled the region and the kingdom.
The 2017 assassination of Khashoggi, a longtime US resident and critic of the Saudi government, upended relations with the US, which for decades has been the kingdom’s most important ally.
It’s a move that provoked fury among US lawmakers and pledges of retaliation by then-Democratic presidential candidate Biden, who threatened to make the new Saudi ruler a “pariah” on the 2020 campaign trail.
But since that nadir, the crown prince has made clear that Saudi Arabia and the US depend on each other — while striking an independent and risky path.
He’s worked in tandem with Russia to maintain global oil prices, a move that sparked another confrontation with the Biden administration in 2022 as the White House sought to tamp down domestic inflation.
He has also struck valuable deals with China, which is competing with the US as a power broker in the Middle East, taking part in a Beijing-brokered agreement to ease tensions with arch-regional rival Iran in 2023.
Saudi Arabia’s importance
But global instability, economic change, and the war in Gaza have made clear to the White House Saudi Arabia’s indispensability.
The Saudis have played a mediating role in the war in Ukraine, helping to negotiate the release of prisoners. Riyadh has also sought to open up its economy and veer away from its reliance on fossil fuels, plowing trillions into the Neom megacity project.
In 2022, Biden underscored the continuing importance of US-Saudi ties and visited Saudi Arabia, risking the wrath of members of his own party by greeting Crown Prince Mohammed with a fist bump.
“Despite Biden’s campaign rhetoric and his policy of not directly speaking to [Crown Prince Mohammed] at the start of his presidency, this administration has worked very closely with Riyadh. The White House has engaged Saudi Arabia in manners which underscore the extent to which the US places a high level of value on the Washington-Riyadh partnership,” said Cafiero.
“Put simply, far from treating the kingdom like a ‘pariah,’ Biden’s foreign policy has been very pro-Saudi.”
Saudi Arabia sees the US as crucial to its long-term goals
The US has long sought to broker a rapprochement between its Arab allies and Israel, with the Trump administration in 2020 negotiating a renewal of diplomatic ties between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain as part of the Abraham Accords.
The Biden administration picked up the discussions, and a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Arab state, and Israel appeared on the table when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, sparking a brutal conflict that has once again thrown the region into turmoil.
Crown Prince Mohammed has condemned Israel’s attack on Gaza but has not ruled out a normalization deal with Israel.
However, he’s striking a hard bargain to keep a potential deal alive, demanding the formation of a Palestinian state and new US security guarantees in the face of the renewed threat from Iran-backed militias, such as the Houthi militants that attacked global shipping routes.
Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in the US, said Crown Prince Mohammed is playing a long game.
“MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] expects to be in power in 40 years,” he said. “In that time, he expects to have a domestic nuclear power program, robust US military support, a defense agreement with the United States, and significant movement toward Palestinian self-determination. I think he is open to varied timelines and sequencing, depending on external conditions.”
Saudi Arabia was engaged in a brutal war with the Houthis until 2022, with Biden imposing the offensive weapons sales ban to end a conflict he described as a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”
But in the wake of the Gaza conflict, the militant group has attacked global shipping routes in the Red Sea, and the Biden administration now sees Saudi Arabia as a “constructive” actor in tamping down Houthi aggression, said Alterman.
With a shared goal of avoiding spiraling conflict in the Middle East, the US is now overall more receptive to Saudi interests, said Cafiero.
“The Biden administration is convinced that Saudi Arabia is simply too important an actor in global affairs to be cast aside as a ‘pariah’ and it is extremely important to US national interests to accommodate Riyadh and its own interests,” he added.
“These factors help one understand the context of both Biden’s controversial trip to Jeddah in mid-2022 and the administration’s decision to resume the sale of US ‘offensive’ weapons to Saudi Arabia.”
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