‘There will be consequences’: Biden vows to reassess relations with Saudi Arabia
‘There will be consequences’: Biden vows to reassess relations with Saudi Arabia
Central question the review "will ask is, is the nature of the relationship serving the interests and values of the United States," NSC's Jake Sullivan said Oct. 12.
The Biden administration vowed to consult with Congress on a re-assessment of U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia after the United States was deeply angered by a Saudi-led decision by the OPEC+ oil cartel last week to cut output by two million barrels per day.
The decision aligns the Saudi-dominated cartel with Russia’s war aims, American officials and lawmakers said.
The Saudis insist that the move was driven only by economic factors. But sources close to the kingdom acknowledge that its de facto ruler Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has been looking to diversify the kingdom’s orientation away from the United States towards Russia and China, as a hedging strategy.
“In recent years, changes have taken place, to reposition the kingdom further away from the United States and diversify Saudi foreign policy options,” Firas Maksad, with the Middle East Institute, said in an interview. “We need to have a thorough policy review process to reassess the relationship.”
“I think a policy review of the relationship with Saudi Arabia is welcome and overdue,” Maksad added. “If we don’t reevaluate the relationship, we are going to continue to fall into recurrent crises, because the expectations do not meet reality.”
Nevertheless, Maksad acknowledged that Saudi officials should be “very worried” about the kinds of comments emanating not just from the US administration, but also from even quite hawkish members of Congress in the wake of the OPEC decision, vowing to take action to punish the kingdom.
“I would expect, just like anybody who deals with these issues, they would be very concerned,” he said.
‘Enough is enough’
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez does not always see eye to eye with the Biden administration, especially in regards to efforts to revive the nuclear deal with Iran. But the New Jersey Democrat came out with both guns blazing this week vowing to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia and casting the kingdom as having picked the wrong side in the Russian war on Ukraine.
“I must speak out against the government of Saudi Arabia’s recent decision to help underwrite Putin’s war through the OPEC+ cartel,” Menendez said in a statement Monday (Oct. 10). “There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict – either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”
“The United States must immediately freeze all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including any arms sales and security cooperation beyond what is absolutely necessary to defend U.S. personnel and interests,” Menendez said. “Enough is enough.”
“I think it is time for us to imagine a foreign policy where we do not count on Saudi Arabia,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), the Senate Democratic whip, told CNN Tuesday (Oct. 11). “That is just as clear a declaration by the Saudis that they’re on the other side of history as we can ask for.”
“This blunder hurts America and helps Russia, and Americans ought to be deeply offended,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said at a press conference today (Oct. 12). “Saudi Arabia has broken trust with America.”
“What galls many of us in Congress is the ingratitude,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) said at the press conference with Blumenthal today.
US review will ask if relations with KSA serve American interests
President Biden said this week that he was in the process of consulting with members of Congress and that when Congress returned from recess, they’d take action.
"I’m not going to get into what I’d consider and what I have in mind,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Tuesday. “There will be consequences.”
“We’re going to react to Saudi Arabia,” Biden told reporters as he headed out to Marine Force One this morning (Oct. 12). “We’ll take action.”
Biden aides said the question at the center of the US reassessment with be if the US relationship with Saudi Arabia still serves American interests. And while they cast the reevaluation of relations as something that would be conducted methodically, there was an unmistakable element of real anger in their comments, and seeming sense that the Saudis had betrayed them. That sense of betrayal was seemingly exacerbated by the fact that Biden traveled to Jeddah in July and attempted a sort of rapprochement with the controversial crown prince, reviled by many Americans for his suspected role in ordering the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“One question [Biden]’s going to ask is, is the nature of the relationship serving the interests and values of the United States, and what changes would make it better serve those interests and values,” US national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters in a call on the new US national security strategy today (Oct. 12).
“He wants to be able to engage and consult with Congress when they return,” Sullivan said. “He wants to be able to reevaluate in a methodical, strategic effective way.”
“And then he will, in a time and place of his choosing, lay out how he intends to proceed with respect to the relationship,” Sullivan said.
The State Department cast the administration reassessment of relations with Saudi Arabia as something Biden had been calling for going back to the campaign.
“The President has been clear all along… that we need a different sort of relationship with Saudi Arabia,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told journalists at the department press briefing on Tuesday. “I think the events of the last few days just put that in fairly stark relief.”
“Our north star, our guiding principle, will be to see to it that we have a relationship that serves our interests,” Price said. “This is not a bilateral relationship that has always served our interests…. We are going to continue to consult with stakeholders, to consult with Congress, to consult with partners around the world, about what more we can and should do to see to it that this relationship is optimized in terms of how it can serve our interests.”
‘Partners don’t do this’
Current and former American officials who advocated for the Biden trip to Saudi Arabia as a way to try to put the relationship on a better footing seem to be among the most convinced now that the reason the relationship doesn’t work is because the U.S. does not have a partner in Riyadh.
“Biden was still right to go and make the effort,” a former senior US official, speaking not for attribution, told me. “It’s in our own interest to try to have the basis for a sustainable US presence in and commitment to the region.”
“But we do need partners to make it possible,” the former senior US official said. “Partners don’t do this, so a reevaluation is now clearly inevitable.”
US now has ‘clarity’ that the Saudi crown prince picks Russia
Precisely because Biden traveled to Jeddah to meet MBS despite criticism and doubts from within his own party, the Saudi rebuff of the US and free world offers stark clarity, said Joel Rubin, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs.
“Pres. Biden stretched out the hand to MBS despite significant pressure to not do so, and made a trip to Jeddah in order to advance American interests as he sees them,” Rubin said in an interview. “That was the correct assessment.”
“He could have taken an easier path…but he made the trip and the stakes were high,” Rubin said. “I believe that it is crucial for an American president to take all the diplomatic opportunities that they can to advance American interests. If that meant going to talk to MBS, then that is the right call.”
“But it doesn’t mean that there are no consequences to that outreach being rejected or rebuffed,” Rubin said. “Because he went, he was able to assess that MBS has decided to invest in the relationship with Russia….The Biden outreach was a significant factor in getting that clarity.”
What does the US do now?
“We call their bluff,” Rubin said. “Because the Saudis… need to understand at this moment that there is a cost for this decision.”
“First and foremost, if I were in the administration, I would talk to every single member of Congress with an interest in putting pressure on the Saudis to support US national security goals,” Rubin said. “And I would work with them to put something on the floor this calendar year, to show bicameral, whole of government, support.”
“It is not all on Biden, and it should not be all on him,” Rubin said. “There should be strong backing from Congress that is chomping at the bit to respond, because this does not just hurt American national security, it also hurts American consumers.”
‘Huge disconnect’
The United States has lots of ways to express its annoyance at Riyadh, said Hussein Ibish, senior resident fellow with the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He ticked off a list of options: “Pull the Patriots out. Take retaliatory actions against the whole OPEC+ cartel. They can do a lot of bilateral not cooperating. Not sell them any weapons.”
What people in Washington may not understand, he said, is that the price of oil was going down pretty fast, and the Saudis were nervous and wanted to prop it up. By doing so, however, “they sent a message that they are more interested in their economy … than in the global crisis over Ukraine,” Ibish said. “And that’s not acceptable to us.”
“There’s a huge disconnect,” Ibish said. From the US administration’s standpoint, “it’s really important that they understand that they don’t get to sit this one out…The western world is now dividing into two camps. Pro and anti-Putin. Shades of the 1930s.”
But the Saudis “don’t see the world like this,” Ibish said.
“The only thing the Saudis care about with Putin is getting the amount of dollars per barrel they need to keep their development plan going to transform the economy,” Ibish said. “They feel they have a short time to receive a lot of money before fossil fuels are phased out.”
“Saudi Arabia is not siding with Russia,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir told CNN’s Becky Anderson in an interview Wednesday. “Saudi Arabia is taking the side of trying to ensure the stability of the oil markets, which benefits consumers and producers alike.”
Gregory Brew, a scholar on oil geopolitics, noted that while there was a three or four dollar price jump immediately after the OPEC+ output cuts were announced last week, prices have since gone back down this week. In addition, he said, OPEC+ today lowered its forecast of the amount of oil demand growth there will be this year and next because of continued economic uncertainty.
“OPEC+ today said it is expecting slower demand growth, and that has had a depressing impact on prices,” Brew said.
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