Why did Joe Biden take a U-turn on Saudi Arabia?

Clearly, the Biden administration’s apparent efforts to punish and isolate Mohammed bin Salman over the the killing of Jamal Khashoggi were over.

“We were going to, in fact, make them [Saudi Arabia] pay the price, and make them, in fact, the par*** that they are,” Joe Biden said in November 2019 during a presidential campaign event. “They have to be held accountable,” he added. After assuming the Presidency in January 2021, Mr. Biden released a U.S. intelligence assessment that concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, ordered the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in October 2018 inside the Kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. President Biden refused to talk directly to MBS, as Prince Mohammed is widely called. The administration also announced that it was ending America’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. Speculations were rife that the U.S.-Saudi strategic alliance that goes back to the 1945 meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud was in peril.

Not really. 

One and a half years later, President Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia to reset ties with the Kingdom. In Jeddah, the port city on the Red Sea coast, Mr. Biden fist-bumped with MBS, and held talks with him and other senior officials of the Kingdom. A week before the meeting, State Secretary Antony Blinken had called Saudi Arabia a “critical partner” in dealing with extremism in West Asia and challenges posed by Iran. Clearly, the Biden administration’s apparent efforts to punish and isolate MBS were over. What is behind this U-turn?

Abraham Accords 

Three major geopolitical developments that were no in the White House’s direct control seemed to have pushed Mr. Biden to adopt a more traditional approach towards America’s allies in the region, even at the expense of contradicting the promises candidate Biden had made. First, the Abraham Accords, the set of agreements that saw Israel and four Arab countries (the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) normalise ties under the aegis of the Trump administration, brought in structural changes in the geopolitical alignment of West Asia. Israel and Arab countries had backroom contacts for decades. 

But with Abraham Accords, these two sides, the two pillars of America’s West Asia policy, have taken formal steps to build a new political, economic and security partnership, seeking to counter Iran. The Biden administration, after the initial confusion on whether it should go back to the Obama-era realism or the Trump-model partnership with allies, appears to have concluded that it should take the latter path. So if the U.S. is seeking to further strengthen the growing Arab-Israel partnership, the logical next step is to get Saudi Arabia to normalise ties with Israel.  

Iran factor