Joe Biden, in November 2019, during a Presidential campaign, "We were going to, in fact, make them [Saudi Arabia] pay the price, and make them, in fact, the par*** that they are," asserted post the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Columnist. Khashoggi was slain and dismembered in October 2018 inside the Kingdom's consulate in Istanbul fences. President Biden declined to talk directly to MBS, as Prince Mohammed is popularly known. The government also declared that it was terminating America's backing for Saudi Arabia's battle on Yemen.
One and a half years later, President Biden toured Saudi Arabia to reboot ties with the Kingdom. In Jeddah, the port city on the Red Sea coast, Mr Biden greeted with a candid fist-bump with MBS and carried on formal talks with him and other senior officers of the Kingdom. A week prior to the meeting, State Secretary Antony Blinken had contended Saudi Arabia was a "critical partner" in handling extremism and radicalization in West Asia and threats feigned by Iran. Certainly, the Biden administration's evident actions to penalize and sequester MBS were over.
Now there is a catch. What? Why did all of a sudden, the relations between the two opposite regimes take a U-turn?
First, the Abraham Accords, the set of pacts that merged Israel and four Arab countries (the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan), normalized bonds under the auspices of the Trump leadership, giving rise to structural shifts in the geopolitical alignment of West Asia. Israel and Arab countries had backroom contacts for decades. Abraham Accord made them official and brought them in to serve their vested interests. The Abraham Accords, these two sides, the two pillars of America's West Asia strategy, have taken accepted strides to create a new political, economic and security cooperation, striving to counter threats from Iran.
Second, renewing the Iran nuclear pact was ascertained to be tough. Mr Biden assumed a mixed method of attempting to renew the nuclear deal while further bolstering the Israel-Arab cooperation. But the Iran deal persisted trickily.
Confronted with anticipation of the Iran pact, the Biden regime appears to have agreed to double down on the other factors of its West Asia policy–by bolstering the Israel-Sunni Arab bloc. For this, Saudi Arabia's backing is vital.
The third is the Ukraine conflict. Russia's incursion of Ukraine and the West's impetus to avenge President Vladimir Putin for the invasion has hampered the global energy markets, swerving the price of living crisis in western countries disastrous. The U.S. has restricted Russian oil. Mr Biden, whose Democratic Party countenances dismal chances in November midterm elections, needs Saudi Arabia to pump more oil into the market to fix prices. Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that have surplus potential to ramp up output.
So, to retaliate against Russia, one of the world's largest oil and gas producers, while maintaining the effect of those regulations on western economies at a minimum, the U.S. wants Mohammed bin Salman's Saudi Arabia's support. So the earlier foe turned into a friend to serve America's interests.
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