True to its word, the Biden administration is readjusting its ties with Saudi Arabia.
Just not in the way we expected.
According to press sources, Biden will visit the country in mid-July and will meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS.
Nothing has been formally confirmed, and there is still time to cancel. Biden should not attend if there are no guarantees that the visit would result in quick human rights achievements.
Biden should do what he pledged in 2019: make the Saudi leadership “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”
That is not his intention.
In 2021, a report from the US intelligence community concluded that MBS authorized the operation in Turkey to capture or kill Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, but the Biden administration chose not to hold the Crown Prince accountable, declining to bar MBS from entering the country or consider charges against him.
If President Biden shakes MBS’s hand and sits for photo ops in Saudi Arabia next month, it will seem more like rehabilitation for the Crown Prince than recalibration.
Those of us who have been pushing for human rights in Saudi Arabia aren’t shocked that the White House has once again betrayed local activists.
Abdulrahman Al Sadhan grew raised in Port Hueneme, California, and worked as a humanitarian relief worker in Saudi Arabia until being charged last year with insulting MBS’s royal family with a satirical tweet. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a Saudi jail.
According to his sister Areej, “Biden vowed to make human rights a priority, but now he prepares to meet with MBS without any actual improvement to human rights, instead human rights have been worsening”.
“We’re an American family who has been subjected to Saudi violence,” Areej explained. “After three years without charge, my brother was condemned to 20 years in jail in a sham secret trial that lacked any reasonable due process.” Our goal as Americans was that our president would, as promised, stand up for his countrymen and human rights.”
Previous governments in Saudi Arabia failed to sufficiently advocate for the safety of local activists. Obama claimed to care about human rights in Saudi Arabia, but when he met the former Saudi dictator in 2014, they “didn’t get to” the subject.
The Obama administration gave Saudi Arabia $115 billion in military aid, significantly more than any previous US government had done. Trump, who went so far as to defend MBS’s denial of involvement for Khashoggi’s murder, continued to arm the regime and its authoritarian neighbors. Biden has carried on this disgraceful practice. It should be recalled that these purchases occurred when Saudi Arabia was fighting a horrific war in Yemen, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The White House will try to explain a visit to MBS by claiming that unexpected things happen, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine altered everything, that Washington now needs Saudi help to cut high gasoline costs, and that an oil price of $120 a barrel is electoral death for Biden.
If you just support human rights in some regions, or only support human rights in Saudi until petrol reaches $5 per gallon, you are not truly supporting human rights.
In such scenario, don’t pretend that human rights are a top concern. Nonetheless, this administration has made public assertions about how much it cherishes human rights.
It stated that human rights will be at the forefront of its foreign policy. It would convene a Summit for Democracy to unite in the face of challenges from autocracies. If Biden allows MBS’s recuperation, these programs will appear like Maximum Cringe.
There is a gap between the Biden administration’s statements and deeds on human rights. In its rhetoric surrounding the Summit for Democracy project, the administration claims that “since day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has made clear that renewing democracy in the United States and around the world is essential to meeting the unprecedented challenges of our time,” and that “one of democracy’s unique strengths [is] the ability to acknowledge its imperfections and confront them openly and transparently.”
This immediately raises two questions.
To begin, how does supporting MBS’ dictatorship assist to revive democracy when his regime imprisons and tortures those who urge it?
Second, the Summit for Democracy specifically emphasizes openness and transparency as democratic ideals. The Kremlin and Beijing’s aggressive authoritarians don’t pretend to care about human rights, but WYSIWYG. Is the White House blind to the fact that when it makes and breaches human-rights pledges – when Biden flip-flops on declaring Saudi Arabia a pariah state – it seems dishonest and fraudulent, handing authoritarians easy victories?
Biden’s human rights record, both at home and abroad, is a shambles. Meeting MBS without obtaining substantial human rights progress will undercut democratic aspirations and severely erode White House credibility.
This week, we joined a dozen other human rights organizations in reminding the President that “efforts to repair the US-Saudi relationship without a genuine commitment to prioritize human rights… will likely embolden the crown prince to commit further violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
President Biden should cancel his trip unless the government receives those pledges in advance.