What is more important for Biden? Saudi oil or Khashoggi

The Washington Post’s publisher blasted President Biden for greeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump Friday, saying it not only “projected intimacy and comfort” but also gave the Middle East leader “redemption.”

Fred Ryan, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, called the exchange between the two leaders at the royal palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, “shameful.”

“The first bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful. It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption he was been desperately seeking,” Ryan said in a statement, using a common media abbreviation for the crown prince’s name.

Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized, including his meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed, who the US intelligence community said approved the 2018 murder of US-based journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.  

The Post also reported that Saudi officials had initially excluded two reporters from the newspaper from a planned media briefing that the government was holding on Friday.

They were later allowed to attend the roundtable after bringing up the issue with the White House officials, the Post added.

This is Biden’s first visit to Saudi Arabia after he was elected in 2020 and comes after he promised during his presidential campaign to make the Middle East country a “pariah” state over Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Biden highlighted progress in moving relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel toward normalization and said the US and Saudi Arabia agreed to partner on a far-reaching green energy initiative.

Biden also expressed optimism that Saudi Arabia would take steps to boost the global oil supply in the coming weeks, which had been viewed as a major goal of the trip given high domestic gas prices and the disruption of the global energy market caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The trip to the Middle East, Biden said, was about reasserting US leadership in the region at a time when China and Russia are trying to expand their influence and challenge global order.

 

Biden said Friday he raised Khashoggi’s murder during his meeting with the crown prince after the White House wouldn’t comment on whether the president would raise the journalist’s death in the meeting. 

“I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now,” Biden said in a speech.

 “We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill, and we’re getting results,” Biden said.