President Joe Biden plans to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, according to reports, despite vowing during his presidential campaign to treat the country as a “pariah.”
Biden was incensed by the killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the direction of the Saudis in 2018, and then-President Donald Trump’s passive response to the incident.
During a Democrat primary debate in November 2019, Biden boasted he was “going to, in fact, make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”
He added there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
File/Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (R) welcomes U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at the Riyadh airbase on October 27, 2011, upon his arrival in the Saudi capital with a U.S. official delegation. (AFP via Getty)
In 2019, Biden also boasted he would “make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons” to the Saudis but in November he authorized the sale of 280 air-to-air missiles valued at up to $650 million.
But now Biden is expected to meet with Saudi Arabia and even possibly with Bin Salman at the end of June, according to reports.
The president has failed to demonstrate a commitment to significantly boost domestic oil production in the United States, leaving his administration at the mercy of OPEC+.
Sky-high gas prices are the main reason for a presidential visit, as the Biden administration has pleaded in vain for OPEC to lift their production caps on foreign oil.
The price of oil fell Thursday in response to news of Biden’s potential meeting with the Saudis as well as the news of the potential for the OPEC+ increasing oil production to help deal with oil shortages in the wake of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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