US President Biden exchanged the shaken fist for a fist bump on Friday as he abandoned his promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and sat down with the crown prince he deemed responsible for the muder of Jamal Khashoggi
In the most fraught foreign visit of his presidency to date, Biden’s encounter with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave the de facto Saudi leader a measure of the international rehabilitation he sought, while securing steps toward closer relations with Israel and an unannounced understanding that the kingdom would soon pump more oil to relieve high gas prices at home, according to a report by Washington Post.
Biden’s discomfort was palpable as he avoided a handshake with the prince in favor of a fist bump that in the end proved no less problematic politically. While cameras recorded the opening of their subsequent meeting, the president made no mention of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist assassinated in 2018 by Saudi operatives, and the prince smiled silently when a reporter asked if he owed an apology to the family.
But Biden later told reporters Khashoggi’s murder was “outrageous” and said he had confronted the crown prince privately. “I raised it at the top of the meeting, making clear what I thought at the time and what I think of it now,” he said. “I was straightforward and direct in discussing it. I made my view crystal clear.”
He reported that Prince Mohammed, often known by his initials M.B.S., had denied culpability. “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it,” Biden said. “I indicated that I thought he was.”
Saudi officials contradicted his account. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, told reporters that he did not hear Biden tell the crown prince that he was responsible, describing instead a brief and less contentious exchange that focused on human rights without dwelling on the killing.
Jubeir called the Khashoggi murder “a terrible mistake,” but added that the two countries have moved on and he showed no interest in looking back. “People were put on trial,” he said, referring to underlings convicted in the case. “We have individuals who are paying the price.”
The Saudis wasted little time splashing photographs of the president and the prince across social media two years after Biden had vowed on a campaign stage to make them “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder and declared that he saw “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
White House officials knew there would be a political cost, but calculated the alliance with Saudi Arabia was too important to leave in limbo forever.
Human rights activists and those who had been close to Khashoggi expressed outrage. Hatice Cengiz, his fiancée, tweeted what she said Khashoggi would have thought: “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victims is on your hands.”
Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, was equally scathing. “The fist bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful,” he said in a statement. “It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption he has been desperately seeking.”
The White House was eager to show the tangible benefits of a revived relationship with Saudi Arabia, releasing a raft of accords negotiated by a team led by Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, who has served every president since George W. Bush. Among them were agreements to open Saudi airspace to all Israeli commercial flights for the first time, extend a cease-fire in the devastating 8-year-old war in Yemen and build 5G telecommunications networks.
Some of the accords simply ratified action underway. For example, the administration said that Saudi Arabia would “support global oil market balancing for sustained economic growth,” without specifying how much additional petroleum the Saudis and their allies in the United Arab Emirates would pump starting in the fall. That announcement is expected in August, as part of a larger decision by the OPEC+ group of oil-producing nations.
But others were new. The two nations announced the withdrawal of a small U.S. peacekeeping force stationed for four decades on Tiran Island, once the source of many conflicts in the region, including during the Six-Day War in 1967. The Americans will leave by the end of the year.
Tiran and the neighboring island of Sanafir were previously administered by Egypt and, while uninhabited, are strategically important because they sit where the Red Sea connects to the Gulf of Aqaba, near Israel’s only access to the gulf. The return of the islands to Saudi Arabia required Israeli assent because of its Camp David Accords, with Egypt and the Saudis agreeing to respect Israeli freedom of navigation.
The overflights and island deals fell short of the broader Abraham Accords that established diplomatic relations between Israel and several other Arab states under President Donald Trump. But they represented the first tentative steps toward possible normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the most influential of the Sunni Arab states in the region, which Biden’s team hopes to complete by the end of his term.
The president’s aides were particularly focused on progress in ending the Yemen war, which has produced one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. In effect, in their view, the meeting was a delayed reward for Saudi agreement several months ago to pause the war and encouragement to work toward a wider settlement.
“The last administration walked away from diplomacy when it came to ending the war in Yemen,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters aboard Air Force One. “This president reengaged on that and now we have a 15-week truce, the longest peaceful period in that conflict in several years.”
Biden also announced new Saudi investments in solar and nuclear energy, among other technologies meant to meet climate change goals. But those long-term efforts are being overwhelmed for the moment by Biden’s request that the Saudis and others in the region boost oil production.
Some analysts thought it was not worth the trade-offs. “At a time when Biden is defending Ukraine, human rights, democracy against Russia, Biden walked into a meeting with a ruthless and repressive Saudi leader, which he seemed to enjoy, validated MBS’ leadership and traded the status of the presidency for a set of gains, most of which were already in Saudi interests,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East diplomat at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
