Looks like Biden is getting desperate.
President Biden is set to make his first official trip since taking office to Saudi Arabia in July. Many believe that he is looking to find ways to reduce gasoline prices by talking with Saudi Arabia, a big oil producer, while also trying to handle the nuclear weapons program in Iran.
U.S.-Saudi relations have suffered a blow, as earlier in the year an attempt from Biden to speak with Saudi Arabia was supposedly refused. Mohammed Khalid Alyahya, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C., has said that “Fixing a relationship that has been beneficial for eighty years to the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It has not reached a low worse than recently.”
In order to rekindle the relations, Biden will need to stop his attempts to make the country a “pariah.” This had so far been the case according to the CIA, after the assassination of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the country’s consulate in Istanbul.
“There’s no way around the fact that the Saudi trip marks a reversal of President Biden’s original effort to downgrade the bilateral relationship while humiliating and ostracizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” John Hannah, a former national security adviser said.
Hannah, also added that the visit will be “a major climb down for the administration that’s been forced on them by $5 per gallon gasoline prices, raging inflation, and an accommodationist policy toward Iran that has reached a dead end.”
He further said, “All of the virtue signaling of the administration’s first few months in office, aimed at making good on the president’s campaign promise to turn the Saudis into pariahs, might have made the Democratic Party’s progressive left feel good,” but he said Biden’s playing to the progressive constituency “backfired miserably when it came to serving U.S. national interests,” and “it poisoned relations with the Arab and Muslim world’s most influential country to a point where it wouldn’t even take a call from the President of the United States in the middle of a European crisis (the Ukraine war) that posed the greatest challenge to the American-led international order in the past 30 years.”
