![]() relations with the reformed, MBS-era kingdom, which has come a very long way from the Islamist-supporting, Wahhabist cleric-outsourcing Saudi Arabia of yesteryear. There is no other intelligible reason to object to cordial U.S. The cornucopia of hostile anti-Saudi rhetoric on the liberal internationalist Left, combined with no small degree of similar animus emanating from some on the neoconservative Right, is predicated upon the presumption that a Western conception of "human rights" ought to play a leading role in U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) during the G20 Summit in Osaka on June 29, 2019. Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman attends a working breakfast with former U.S. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), have criticized Biden's trip by invoking the Saudis' involvement in the current conflict in Yemen against Iran-funded Houthi rebels. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said last month about MBS, no doubt focusing on L'Affaire Khashoggi: "Until Saudi Arabia makes a radical change in terms of (its) human rights, I wouldn't want anything to do with him." Others on the party's Tehran-mollycoddling far-left, such as Rep. Yet many loud voices within Biden's own party disagree with his attempted rapprochement with Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has cozied up of late, in the absence of a steady American hand, to our Chinese archfoe. Confronted with these particular domestic and foreign crises, who better to call for help than the House of Saud?īiden's trip comes not a moment too soon. What's more, on the geopolitical stage, Tehran's revolutionary theocrats race ever closer to a nuclear weapon. Inflation is through the roof prices at the pump are gouging low- and middle-income consumers already bedeviled by stagnant wages. ![]() Now a year and a half into his tenure, Biden's lofty campaign rhetoric decrying Riyadh, intended to woo devotees of the Obama-era effort to " realign" America's Middle East involvement away from our traditional regional allies and toward Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, has met an immovable object: reality. (While Khashoggi's death was tragic, it is still worth pointing out that he was a former Osama bin Laden comrade, a supporter of Hamas' jihad against Israel, and a lifelong unrepentant Islamist.) After all, Biden's trip comes two years after a presidential campaign in which he pledged to make the Saudis "pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are." At the time, Biden was channeling the ginned up indignation directed against the Saudis, and MBS in particular, due to the fact that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi-a Saudi-born journalist who had a falling out with Riyadh and subsequently fell under rival Qatar's sprawling ambit of influence-was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. It seems Biden has had a change of heart. Oil production, and perhaps the simmering Iranian nuclear threat, will surely dominate the conversation. ![]() He may not explicitly beseech the kingdom's precocious crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), for an increase in oil output, but the timing of this trip-amid consumer jitters at the pump and destabilized global commodities markets-is surely more than mere happenstance. As part of his trip, he will visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. President Joe Biden, who faces four-decade-high inflation and record-high gasoline prices, is set to depart for the Middle East next week. ![]()
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