EDITORIAL: President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel last week did not fail, but it wasn’t a successful visit per se. The only tangible positive outcome was the Saudi Arabia decision that its airspace is open to all, including Israel, airlines.
Given the Joe Biden’s election campaign pledge to make the desert kingdom a “pariah”, nobody had expected that he would be embraced and kissed on the forehead on arrival, and rightly so as Prince Muhammad bin Salman delivered him fist-bump instead of handshake on arrival. The talks at the Red Sea port city Jeddah were a mere formality with Joe Biden repeating the trite White House promise, “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran”.
The Saudi leadership was not impressed by this hyperbole – as it has its own worldview on this issue and wasn’t expecting the American intervention.
The Saudis knew in advance that President Biden was coming to ask the kingdom to boost its oil production to counterbalance Moscow’s policy to fully meet the oil shortages faced by other countries.
Being a member of OPEC-plus alliance which comprises, among others, Russia, Saudi Arabia, did not agree to boost oil production as desired by the visiting US president.
During his stay in Jeddah the US president also met leaders of six members of Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Egypt’s, Jordan’s and Iraq’s (GCC+3) and sought recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia, but the kingdom’s leadership politically declined his request. Analysts say the Gulf countries have stopped seeing the world through the American lens.
Of course numerous agreements were signed by the two countries during President Biden’s visit of Saudi Arabia, but none of these seems to be in compliance with the United States’ strategic perspective of the Middle East, particularly its perspective on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Reacting to President Biden’s warning that “stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon”, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenie’s spokesperson told al-Jazeera TV that Iran has the technical capability to make a nuclear bomb “but has not decided to build one. In a few days we were able to enrich uranium up to 60 per cent and we can easily produce 90 per cent (weapon grade) enriched uranium”.
President Biden doesn’t own Donald Trump’s legacy who walked out of an international nuclear deal, but is not ready to promise that he would not follow in the footsteps of Trump. According to him, the nuclear deal is a non-binding political understanding, not a legal binding treaty.
That kind of double-speak also marked his meeting on Friday with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas a day earlier. The US President conveniently swept aside Palestinians’ concerns on issues including self-determination and settlement building in the occupied West Bank.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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