By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Running for election in 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia an outcast as punishment for the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
He had declared that he would make the Saudis “pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are,” for orchestrating the Khashoggi murder, while adding that there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
The new president froze weapons sales to the country pending a review of how they would be used and informed the Saudis he would deal only with King Salman rather than Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, whom he held responsible for ordering the assassination.
Rebuking the Saudis allowed the Biden administration to get off to a good start with Democratic members of Congress. It was a seemingly cost-free political win.
But with the price of a gallon of gasoline exceeding five dollars in much of the country, Biden has begun making efforts to mend ties with Riyadh and the crown prince, its de-facto ruler since 2017.
OPEC OIL CARTEL
For months, the OPEC oil cartel, which is led by the kingdom, balked at calls to relieve the pressure on global petroleum prices. But earlier this month it announced that it would finally bend to global demand and increase oil production by about 50 per cent in the coming months.
This breakthrough tracks conspicuously with the news Biden will be making a visit to Saudi Arabia next month and will meet with the crown prince. The trip comes as overriding U.S. strategic interests in oil and security have pushed the administration to rethink the arms-length stance that Biden had pledged to take with the Saudis.
Biden can’t afford to take the high road now. After all, other states have been moving into the vacuum. In March, Saudi Arabia announced that it was close to agreeing with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan and not dollars, thereby damaging the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market.
If nothing else, this is hugely symbolic and showed deep unease with Biden’s administration. Saudi Arabia is China’s top crude supplier — it sells more than 25 per cent of its output to Beijing — and the kingdom remains committed to supplying crude oil to China.
Saudi Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal al-ibrahim indicated that Riyadh is also interested in collaborating with China on issues ranging from climate change to curbing inflation.
China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner — an arrangement that extends to military cooperation. Beijing is offering Riyadh a simple deal: Sell us your oil and in return, help us to stabilize global energy markets. In other words, the Chinese are offering what increasingly appears modeled on the American-saudi deal that stabilized the Middle East for 70 years.
The Saudis fear Iran above all and now look at America’s attempts to curry favour with the Tehran regime with anger. They view the current attempts to renegotiate the nuclear treaty with the Islamic republic as an assault
Biden can’t afford to take the high road now. After all, other states have been moving into the vacuum.
on the regional order that the United States established in the aftermath of the Second World War.
And Iran is getting ever closer to becoming a fullfledged nuclear power. It has started to remove 27 surveillance cameras from nuclear sites in the country, according to Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who warned the world about the move on June 9.
Now that the Iranians reportedly have enough fissile material for a nuclear device, the United States will have to rally a regional coalition, with Saudi Arabia as a central member, to contain and deter Iran. So a Washington turnabout has become imperative.
UKRAINE WAR
As well, the war between Russia and Ukraine has made it also necessary for Biden to rebuild relations with the Saudis as he seeks to lower gas prices and isolate Moscow.
The administration was pleased that Saudi Arabia joined an American-backed United Nations resolution condemning Russia in March and that more recently Riyadh sent a message pressing the Kremlin to release food exports blockaded at the Ukrainian port of Odesa.
Also, in early April, a twomonth truce between the warring parties in Yemen went into effect, providing some hope for a reduction of violence in a seven-year war in which the Saudis have been heavily involved, one that has roiled the Arabian Peninsula and caused a humanitarian crisis.
Biden welcomed the truce and praised the role played by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ahead of the president’s trip to Riyadh. The visit will represent the triumph of realpolitik over moral outrage.
No comments:
Post a Comment