Biden to mend fences with Saudis after calling Gulf kingdom a “pariah” during 2020 election.
Aerial view of Ryadh, Saudi ArabiaiiStock
The White House intends to fully reset relations with Saudi Arabia.
Senior US officials told CNN that the White House has conveyed to the Saudis that it wants to “reset” the relationship between the two nations, putting the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi behind them in order to return to warm diplomatic ties with the strategically important Gulf kingdom.
Late last week, President Joe Biden shot down reports that he was planning an official visit to Saudi Arabia at the end of June.
The trip would have ended Saudi Arabia’s “pariah status” earned for the killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The turnaround is a major foreign policy change for Biden, who when running for president promised to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” over the US-based columnist’s killing.
The Biden administration also released an intelligence analysis in 2021 that alleged Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman planned the murder.
But senior officials described a White House scrambling to lower domestic energy prices as inflation rises faster than it has in four decades.
Biden has allegedly decided that rekindling relations with the Saudis supersedes any ethical qualms from Khashoggi’s death, and that restoring ties with an oil-rich nation in the era of Russia’s Ukraine invasion is a necessity.
“Both sides have decided that for the sake of achieving peace and stability in the Middle East, we need to move past it,” one of the senior officials told CNN.
(Israel National News’ North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)
