President Joe Biden took a defensive tone in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia on Friday. “I have never been quiet about talking about human rights,” he said at a news conference in Israel on Thursday. But his reason for going to Saudi Arabia, he said, was much broader: to promote U.S. interests and reassert our influence in the Middle East. And anyway, Biden added, he was “going to be meeting with nine other heads of state. It’s not just — it happens to be in Saudi Arabia.”
That’s a shorter version of the argument the president has made for weeks since his first official Middle East visit was announced with a tour stop in Riyadh. As a 2020 candidate, Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state for the regime’s murder of U.S. journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Biden touted his administration’s reversal of “the blank-check policy (toward Saudi Arabia) we inherited” from the Trump administration. But the bulk of his op-ed played defense, pushing back on widespread criticism that cast this trip as a betrayal of Biden’s promises and ideals motivated by a desperation for oil.
There’s merit to that charge. The Saudi state’s human rights record is gruesome, and the visit is unquestionably a reversal for Biden. But most criticism of the trip is wrongly aimed: Diplomacy is not what’s wrong in Washington’s handling of Riyadh; it’s the long-term U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and ongoing U.S. support for the Saudi military, including its brutality in Yemen.
