Biden in Saudi Arabia: The strategy behind ‘making nice’

It’s a maxim coined by Joe Biden a dozen years ago, when he was still vice president. But it might just as well be emblazoned on Air Force One as he embarks on his first presidential visit to the Middle East: “Life is a matter of really tough choices.”

Back then, he was talking about a political trade-off on tax-cut legislation. Now, however, he’s had to face a much tougher choice on a larger stage: a world seismically jolted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

The result: an even more difficult, and controversial, trade-off. It’s between the emphasis on democracy and human rights he has placed at the core of his foreign policy, and his campaign to build and sustain international support to isolate Mr. Putin and deny him victory.

The latest, and starkest, sign is this week’s Middle East mission.

The three-day trip is already being criticized as a jettisoning of his human rights agenda to secure an easing of world oil supplies. But the administration insists Mr. Biden will still raise human rights concerns in his meetings. And it is stressing the importance of strengthening America’s regional security partnerships in response to what it sees as the longer-term threat to democratic values represented by the Russian invasion.

The core of the controversy surrounding the visit is a scheduled meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man U.S. intelligence has blamed for the 2018 killing and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. He’s also a man Mr. Biden vowed to treat as a “pariah,” and to whom he’d not even spoken until the Ukraine war.

But MBS, as he’s known, also runs the Arab world’s leading oil-producing state. And he’s rebuffed American requests to bring millions more barrels onto the world market in order to alleviate the Ukraine-related shortages that are driving up pump prices, stoking inflation, and potentially weakening international support for the sanctions regime against Mr. Putin.

So on the face of it, President Biden is indeed swapping principle for oil.

That’s certainly the view of a growing chorus of critics: other Saudi dissidents, human rights groups, unhappy members of his own party, and newspapers including The Washington Post, for whom Mr. Khashoggi, who was a U.S. resident, wrote opinion columns.

But the MBS meeting, assuming it goes ahead, is also part of a wider picture, and a more complex conundrum: the “really tough challenges” that are simply inevitable in responding to an international crisis on the scale of the Ukraine war.

The toughest call of all

On a personal level, Mr. Biden will have found the Saudi visit the toughest call of all. The “pariah” pledge was made on the campaign trail, but he clearly felt genuine abhorrence over the Khashoggi killing. He directed all presidential communications with Saudi Arabia through its aging, ailing King Salman, instead of MBS. And within days of his inauguration, he declassified the CIA report personally linking the crown prince to the killing.

The decision to meet MBS will have been made no easier by the crown prince’s response to Mr. Biden’s freeze.  

“Simply, I do not care,” MBS told an interviewer earlier this year.

But oil, if the prime catalyst, would not have been Mr. Biden’s only one.

The broader geopolitical implications of Mr. Putin’s invasion loom large. Years of American military involvement in the Middle East have now shrunken to a far smaller presence, with no domestic appetite for reengagement. Besides, the United States is finding it difficult enough to balance its security imperatives in post-invasion Europe with its response to the growing power of China.

With both Russia and China expanding their influence in the region, the U.S. needs to shore up its alliances with other Middle East states – not just Israel, but the growing number of Gulf Arab states, Saudi Arabia among them, moving toward entente with the Israelis as a result of their shared interest in restraining Iran.

And the “tough choices” as a result of the Ukraine war are not limited to the Middle East.

In Europe, the “illiberal democracy” of Poland has become a critical NATO ally, both in welcoming Ukrainian refugees and helping Kyiv push back against the Russian invasion force. Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has imprisoned thousands of critics, has become essential to any potential arrangement to unblock Black Sea export routes for Ukrainian wheat – as well as for the required unanimous approval to welcome new members Sweden and Finland into NATO.

The administration has also felt the need to avoid a full-on political clash with key Asian powers – India, and China too – that have been cushioning the effect of the Russia sanctions by buying Russian oil. The concern has been to prevent them from more actively undermining Western sanctions and, in China’s case, helping shore up Mr. Putin’s military machine.

Put differently, the “really tough choices” have led to a recognition that, with the overriding priority of confronting Russia’s invasion, making nice isn’t only for close friends.

The key question now is whether the downplaying of human rights and democracy concerns that have been central to Mr. Biden’s message, even if in clear response to Ukraine policy considerations, may weaken America’s ability to make that case in the longer run.

In a strongly worded article on the eve of Mr. Biden’s departure for the Middle East, the publisher of The Washington Post argued that his U-turn on MBS wouldn’t only “erode our moral authority” but also “breed anti-American resentment” and “communicate to democracy activists and reform-minded governments worldwide that Washington is an unreliable partner.”

President Biden’s evident belief – and certainly his hope – is that the choices his administration is making will lead to success in what he’s termed a broader international struggle between democracy and autocracy, by consigning Mr. Putin’s invasion to failure.

So not only are the choices really tough. The stakes are really high.