Commentary
President Joe Biden, who faces four-decade-high inflation and record-high gasoline prices, is set to depart for the Middle East this week. As part of his trip, he will visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He may not explicitly beseech the kingdom’s precocious crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), for an increase in oil output, but the timing of this trip—amid consumer jitters at the pump and destabilized global commodities markets—is surely more than mere happenstance. Oil production, and perhaps the simmering Iranian nuclear threat, will surely dominate the conversation.
It seems Biden has had a change of heart. After all, Biden’s trip comes two years after a presidential campaign in which he pledged to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” At the time, Biden was channeling the ginned up indignation directed against the Saudis, and MBS in particular, due to the fact that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi—a Saudi-born journalist who had a falling out with Riyadh and subsequently fell under rival Qatar’s sprawling ambit of influence—was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. (While Khashoggi’s death was tragic, it is still worth pointing out that he was a former Osama bin Laden comrade, a supporter of Hamas’ jihad against Israel, and a lifelong unrepentant Islamist.)…