“We are going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are” confidently stated then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2019 presidential primary debates. Three years on, that assertion appears to be long forgotten.
Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by a Saudi government hit squad in the fall of 2018. The brutal killing of Khashoggi inside the Istanbul Saudi Consulate aroused outrage internationally, especially amongst American politicians. The United States Senate unanimously passed a motion holding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, directly responsible for the murder and voted to end US military support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen. More than a year later, with the Democratic presidential primaries in full swing, then-candidate Biden
vowed to punish Saudi Arabia for the slaying of Khashoggi.
Fast forward to 2022, google “Biden - Bin Salman fistbump”, and the extent of the punishment Biden has delivered to the Saudis is clear. With oil prices severely heightened due to the Russian-Ukrainian war and domestic pressure to fix energy costs rising, now-President Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to avoid a cut in production from OPEC, the oil cartel which Saudi Arabia belongs to. (The Saudis promptly cut oil production, against the direct requests of the Biden administration.) The photograph of Biden fistbumping Salman adorned newspapers around the world and served as a damning repudiation of US attempts to distance itself from Salman and the Saudi government.
Biden’s initial determination to make Saudi Arabia pay for the murder of a journalist and US citizen was commendable, and several months into his term he did ban certain weapons sales to the Saudi government. Yet the perception that America only cares to condemn Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses while oil prices remain low is here to stay. Far from making Saudi Arabia a “pariah”, Biden has now sought to rebuild Saudi-US ties as the economic situation has demanded, indicating that human rights (in theory a key tenet of US foreign policy) go on the backburner when the country is faced with greater challenges.
The United States obviously cannot levy immense punishment on a crucial ally in the Middle East, but likewise it should not give the impression that the outrage over an egregious human rights violation was a one-off. If we do not ignore Russian and Chinese repression, neither should we ignore repression when it is an American ally guilty of it. As a nation built on the bedrock of human rights, we should hold ourselves and our allies to a higher standard.
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