Biden's U-Turn On Saudi Arabia: Ready To Deal With Dictators? | Hot Mic with Nidhi Razdan

Hi, this is Hot Mic and I'm Nidhi Razdan.

When he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden said, Saudi Arabia should be made a pariah for its human rights record. Now, in a dramatic turnaround, he's going out of his way to repair that relationship. The White House has just announced that the US president will travel to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West Bank in July. He will meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country's de facto ruler.

It will be the first time that President Biden directly engages with the Saudi leader since taking office. So far, Biden has opted instead to speak directly with King Salman, the crown prince's father. The US president has been highly critical of the Saudi's record on human rights, its war in Yemen and the role that its government played in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But rising oil prices and the need to isolate Russia globally has changed the picture. The news of Biden's trip has prompted a lot of outrage. The president himself defended it recently when he said that he's trying to bring peace and stability to the Middle East. The White House press secretary, when persistently asked questions on this, said that it's important to emphasize that while we recalibrate relationships, we are not looking to rupture relationships, but human rights issues and human rights conversations are something that the president brings up with many leaders and plans to do so.

Jamal Khashoggi's fiancée issued a strongly worded statement when news reports first came out of Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia. She said, “President Biden's decision to meet MBS or Mohammed bin Salman is horribly upsetting to me and supporters of freedom and justice everywhere. President Biden, if he meets MBS, will have lost his moral compass and greatly heightened my grief.”

This was a statement that she gave to CNN. One Saudi human rights campaigner has called Biden's decision to meet the crown prince, a betrayal. And a senior Democratic senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois, has said that while he understood Biden's need to work with the Saudis to lessen oil prices and thereby reduce pressure on US consumers, he called Riyadh's record on human rights an outrage.

Another group that is very upset is the 9/11 Families United, which represents the family members of those who were killed on September 11, 2001, in the terror attacks. They have urged Biden to raise Saudi Arabia's role in the attacks, should he meet with Prince Mohammed bin Salman or other leaders in Riyadh.

But experts say, Biden's visit shows that realpolitik is ultimately more important than moral outrage. The fact is, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, global oil prices have been surging. And in November, Biden faces crucial midterm elections and high energy prices do not make for a good campaign. So he has been looking for alternative energy producers to replace oil from Russia. OPEC+ which is the group of oil producing nations led by Saudi Arabia, has just announced that it will increase production by 648,000 barrels a day.

After which the White House announced the Biden visit. America is hoping they produce even more oil later on in the year, but they're desperate for that to happen before November's congressional elections. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration had been stepping up cooperation with Saudi Arabia on a number of issues.

This was largely to seek an end to the eight-year-old Saudi led war in neighboring Yemen. The kingdom, in fact, has also agreed to extend a UN mediated ceasefire in its war with Yemen. The US and Saudi Arabia have actually been close allies for many decades. But that relationship took a turn for the worse after the 2018 death of Jamal Khashoggi.

US intelligence in fact concluded that it was Prince Mohammed Salman or MBS who ordered the hit on Khashoggi, in which the killers also dismembered Khashoggi's body at a consulate in Istanbul. During his presidential campaign, Biden had said he would make the Saudis pay the price and make them, in fact the pariah that they are, while saying there was very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.

When he became president, Biden even released the US intelligence report on Khashoggi's murder and imposed sanctions on some of those involved in the killing.

However, no sanctions were announced against MBS, showing just how far Biden was willing to go, even then. The U.S. relationship with Riyadh also exposes a fundamental hypocrisy in Biden's foreign policy approach, which makes democracy and human rights its centerpiece. In the standoff with Russia, the US president has made the narrative about autocracies versus democracies, but when realpolitik demands it, he isn't afraid to do business with autocrats like the Saudis or even the Venezuelans.

Only weeks ago, the US Secretary of State said that Saudi Arabia is a critical partner to us in dealing with extremism in the region and in dealing with challenges posed by Iran. He said human rights are still important, but we are addressing the totality of our interests in that relationship. Perhaps that's the yardstick that would apply to other countries as well.