The Daily - When Biden Met M.B.S.

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

In the past, President Biden has called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for its human rights abuses and said that he would never meet with its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.But Mr. Biden’s first trip as president to the Middle East included talks with the prince. What prompted the change in course?Guest: Ben Hubbard, the Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Mr. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia garnered scathing criticism and modest accords.An unspoken result of Mr. Biden’s meeting with Prince Mohammed: A setback in the case of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was killed by Saudi agents in 2018.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. Two years ago, Joe Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state and vowed never to talk to its young leader, Mohammed bin Salman. On Friday, Biden traveled to his palace to meet him. Today, Beirut Bureau Chief Ben Hubbard on what brought Biden back to the table with the Saudi leader

and how America's relationship with the oil-rich nation has changed. It's Monday, July 18th. So, Ben, Biden has been on this trip to the Middle East over the past week, and I know he met a number of leaders throughout the region. Tell me about what happened. So this was Biden's first trip to the Middle East as president. First, he went to Israel and met with a whole range of Israeli leaders. And after that, he flew to Saudi Arabia. And this was primarily for two reasons. The first is that he is having trouble with the price of gas, obviously. And so he's looking to talk to oil producers to see what can be done to try to bring down the oil price.

And second, he's concerned about Iran, and so he's looking for partners in the region he can work with to find ways to deter Iran. But this trip to Saudi Arabia was by far the most scrutinized part of the trip, and that was largely because of its host. Biden was going to be hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He is by far the most powerful and active person in the kingdom. And Biden had had a really difficult relationship with him, a very chilly relationship since he came into the White House for a number of reasons. Biden, I think for one, really wanted to turn the page on the Trump administration. And Donald Trump and his son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner had had

very chummy relationships with Prince Mohammed. Biden was interested in sort of lessening American commitment in the Middle East. He was interested in accelerating the transition to renewable energy, which didn't really need Saudi Arabia for as one of the top oil exporters. And then I think personally, he was also very disgusted by the Saudi human rights record. Breaking news tonight on a very dark subject, the murder of American-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Saudi journalist who was killed in a very, very grisly manner by Saudi agents in 2018, was still a recent memory.

Biden spoke very passionately about it during his election campaign. Khashoggi was in fact murdered and dismembered, and I believe in the order of the crown prince. And largely because of that said that if he were elected president, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. He would treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah. Once he was in, a big change of tack in U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia. He talked about recalibrating the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The White House says that from now on, President Biden will conduct state-to-state business directly with King Salman, which means not with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And personally said that he would just never interact with and never talk to Prince Mohammed. Yet there he was on Friday night meeting with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, doing precisely the opposite of what he said he would on the campaign trail. Exactly. So when everybody finds out that this trip is happening, of course, the big question is, is Biden actually going to go and shake the hand of this prince whom he had vowed to isolate and ostracize and punish for his connection to these grievous human rights violations. So what actually happens is Biden lands in Jeddah. He gets out of the airplane. He climbs into his

armored presidential vehicle. He drives to the palace. He arrives there. And of course, waiting on the carpet is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to receive him. So Biden opens the door. He gets out and he very quickly makes a fist and sort of makes it clear to everybody that there will be no handshake. Prince Muhammad clearly sees what's going on. He too makes a fist. There is a very quick fist bump. They sort of look each other in the faces. It's unclear from the images if anybody says anything. The entire interaction is incredibly brisk, appears to me at least quite chilly, and then they both turn and Prince Muhammad leads him into the palace.

So Ben, before we actually get into what happened in that meeting inside the palace, could we take a step back? I mean, what do we need to know about Mohammed bin Salman? He's a guy you wrote an entire book about. So help us understand how he came to be so important in Saudi Arabia. So Mohammed bin Salman is a prince who really came out of nowhere in 2015. And the way it all starts is that the previous Saudi king dies. King Salman, who is the current king, comes to power. And very quickly, everybody starts noticing

that he is delegating tremendous power to this rather young son of his, who is not his oldest son, which would usually be the way that it's done, but one of his much younger sons and actually a son from his second wife. And how old is he at this point? When he comes in, he's 29 years old.

Oh, wow. So that is quite young. Yeah, he's quite young. And I think what surprised a lot of people is there were plenty of other princes-in-waiting who had many more classic qualifications. I mean, some of his older half-brothers, one of them has a PhD from Oxford. Another was the first Arab to go to space. And Mohammed bin Salman, he had never studied outside the kingdom. He had never held a significant government position that drew any notice. He had never run a large company or done anything like that. I mean, he doesn't really have any experience that would lead any sort of outside person to delegate all of this power to him. But for whatever reason,

King Salman decides this is the person that I want to run the kingdom for me. He is given oversight of the kingdom's economy. He is given oversight of the kingdom's economy. He's given oversight of the national oil company. He's given oversight of the military. And all of this power just keeps flowing into the hands of Mohammed bin Salman. And what are the Americans thinking of him at this time? Well, this is during the Obama administration, and there's a lot of sort of puzzlement. I think people are a bit confused. There's a lot of questioning about where exactly this is going. I mean, is this somebody who, because of his youth and because of his obvious ambition, is going to end up being an incredibly impressive new kind of leader in the Middle East? Or

is he somebody, because of his inexperience and some would say his impulsiveness, is just going to cause a bunch of problems that we're going to have to clean up after? So I just think a lot of people in the Obama administration were really scratching their heads saying, you know, we're just going to have to kind of see where this goes. And what had the Obama administration's approach been to Saudi Arabia up until this point? So the United States has had a partnership with Saudi Arabia since the end of the Second World War. And that eventually settles into an equation that is basically that the United States can count on Saudi Arabia's oil, really in exchange for

being included under a protection umbrella. And so that the kingdom is able to know that the United States will help them out if they're ever subject to foreign attacks. This includes massive weapons sales to the kingdom. And Obama, you know, he doesn't want to sort of tear up this historic relationship, but he does want to change it or at least modify it. He's quite clear that he does not have change it or at least modify it. He's quite clear that he does not have a lot of personal fondness for Saudi Arabia, largely because of the treatment of women and other human rights issues. And there's also just a broader sort of drifting apart that's happening in the relationship. Some of this is because the United

States just doesn't need Saudi Arabia's oil as much as it used to because of the rise in domestic oil production. We have a lot more of our own oil, and so we don't need to count on them in the same way. And Obama is also reacting to what I think was pretty wide voter sentiment, which was just a general fatigue with American involvement in the Middle East. There was this sense that this was a region that was full of problems, that was full of wars. And Obama really wants to step back from some of that to lessen American engagement and very much speaks about shifting the American focus in foreign policy elsewhere in the world. And so what does Mohammed bin Salman do during this time? I mean, the U.S. is kind of in some ways turning its attention elsewhere.

What does he start to do after he becomes the anointed, one who's really going to run the show? do after he becomes the anointed, one who's really going to run the show. So Mohammed bin Salman makes it very clear that he has an incredibly dramatic vision for the future of the kingdom. And that is not an overstatement. He's somebody that has this maximalist view of Saudi Arabia, and he wants to put it into motion and just make the kingdom a very different place than it used to be. Can you describe for us how did it used to be? You've spent lots of time in Saudi Arabia.

Explain to us what it was like. Well, during my early trips to Saudi Arabia, which started in 2013, it was a place that was very much ruled according to this incredibly austere version of Islam that put big restrictions on the society. I mean, you could go to the mall and mannequins wouldn't have heads because under this version of Islam, they thought that it was wrong to have creations that were too close to the human body. You would be driving in a taxi and you would see a billboard for some brand of milk or yogurt or cereal or something like that.

And you would have a happy family sort of gathered around a dining table. And all the female figures would be pixelated because they didn't want anybody to see the women. And of course, there was the women driving ban, which was one of the best known things about Saudi Arabia was that for many decades, women were just completely banned from getting in a car and driving around. So that's just an incredibly restrictive society. So what does Prince Mohammed say he wants to do? And how is that different from the Saudi Arabia you just described? So Mohammed bin Salman comes in and he makes it very clear that he wants to do a complete overhaul of the way that the economy works, of the way that the society functions, and of really the kingdom's entire place in the world.

Since then, I think the things that have drawn the most notice, that have really struck people the most on the ground, have been the social changes. One of the first things that he did was take the power to arrest away from the religious police. These were the guys who were on the ground to enforce the very austere version of Islam that I talked about earlier. They would patrol malls, they would patrol public places, parks, and make sure that, for example, men and women who were not related to each other were not interacting and socializing. They would police the way that women were dressed to make sure that their bodies were properly covered and their hair was properly covered. And really in one fell swoop, he just says,

you guys are done. No more power. You can't do this anymore. And so that very much paves the way for all of these other things that he wants to do to really open up the society in a way that it had never been before. He brings in movie theaters in all these Saudi cities so that all the Saudis who used to get on airplanes on the weekends

and fly to Dubai or wherever else to go see a movie, they could stay home and do it. He creates an entire new branch of the government whose job is to create an entertainment industry. And so they start bringing in musicians and magicians and people to do concerts. They bring in the Harlem Globetrotters. They bring in pro wrestling.

They bring in monster truck rallies. It's just this idea that you want Saudis to enjoy being in the kingdom and to stay in the kingdom and spend their money. He finally revokes the ban on women driving, which had been in place for many, many decades. And all of a sudden, women can go out and get driver's licenses and get behind the wheel and take their children to school or go to work. So this is a major, major change. And all of these changes really take Saudi Arabia by surprise. I mean, it was a country that was used to operating a certain way. And it really just strikes a nerve with the younger Saudis. Roughly two-thirds of Saudis are under age 30. And most of them are just incredibly excited about this. They're excited to see these changes happening in their country. They're excited

to see these new opportunities and just to feel their country is becoming something that they want to be a part of. Okay, so these are pretty big departures from how things had been done in this pretty rigid insular country. But surely there had to be more than that. I mean, did he face any opposition? So very early on, while Mohammed bin Salman is doing all of these different efforts to open up the cultural space and the social space, he's also very much consolidating his power inside the kingdom. As soon as his father puts him in charge of the military. This morning, Saudi Arabia is bombing rebels who have been sweeping through Yemen.

He launches basically a Saudi-led air campaign bombing Yemen. Airstrikes continued around the capital this weekend, though Saudi officials denied that their helicopters had on Sunday killed more than two dozen people, mostly civilians. That spirals very quickly into a very terrible war, lots of human rights violations and killed civilians. Remarkable times in Saudi Arabia. There's been sweeping arrests of senior politicians

and business leaders and members of the royal family. He starts going after other members of the royal family. At this time, there's still some sense that there are other princes who could be contenders to succeed his father on the throne, and he finds various ways to elbow these people aside, just basically make sure that they're not going to pose any sort of a threat to him. You know, the most famous of these was the famous Ritz-Carlton episode.

The rich and famous arrested in yesterday's corruption crackdown, sleeping on mattresses. He basically sent out the security forces to detain a few hundred of the kingdom's richest and most powerful businessmen and princes. This luxury hotel has become a gilded prison. Threw them in a luxury hotel and tried to take away most of their money. Wow. At the same time,

there's this whole wave of social repression. Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has launched a crackdown against activists, religious figures, and opponents in recent months. Human rights watch, the Saudi Arabian authorities have arrested dozens of people, including prominent clerics.

Any criticism of the royal family carries a prison sentence in Saudi Arabia. Many of these people are detained without any charges. Some of them are put on trial and prosecuted for charges that I think a lot of human rights organizations would certainly think are trumped up. The Saudi Arabian Traffic Department releases a video showing women in Riyadh receiving their driver's licenses. But some women's rights activists will not be behind the wheel, but behind bars. And, you know, one of the things that catches a lot of attention is that they arrested a bunch of the women activists who had actually been campaigning for years to lift the driving ban. Lujain Hathloul was the first to be arrested in a government crackdown.

Security forces then swept up blogger Iman Al-Nafjan. And this seemed very strange to people outside the kingdom. I think people wondered, well, they want the same thing that he wants. And so why are they getting arrested? And I think that the general view is that he didn't want these women who had been campaigning to be taking victory laps on social media or to be interviewed by the press talking about all the work that they had done to put this on the agenda. He wanted to get all the credit for it. And it becomes a very sort of scary place for people where people are getting in trouble for things that they wrote on Twitter or things that they maybe said in a gathering that they thought was private wow

but it really takes a much larger crime to really catch the world's attention and make people outside aware of all of this repression and this is when you have the killing of jamal khashoggi This killing is so grisly and it's so personal in nature that it really just sets off this alarm. And so this is one of the things that just really gets a lot of people to take a close look at Mohammed bin Salman and wonder, what is he doing with all this power and where exactly is it that he wants to take the kingdom? Okay, so he's loosening things up culturally, but he's also really tightening the screws politically. I mean, consolidating his own power and jailing dissidents and even having people killed.

And that's all the things that he's doing at home in Saudi Arabia. But what about outside the country? How is he changing Saudi Arabia's position in the world? So another main part of the vision that he's trying to lay out for the future of Saudi Arabia is that he really believes that the kingdom needs to claim what he sees as its rightful place as a major player in global affairs. He wants it to stand up and kind of take its place among the other major world economies and other major political players. He starts building more

relationships with other countries that the kingdom had not had in the past. President Vladimir Putin welcomes the king of Saudi Arabia, who's on an historic visit to the Kremlin. His father takes a trip to Russia, meets Vladimir Putin. They're trying to reach agreement on whether to extend a deal on oil supplies. A lot of this has to do with oil because both of their countries are major oil producers.

So Mohammed bin Salman very much follows up on this. This is President Putin, Vladimir Putin, rather than his Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Well, they look pretty chummy at today's meeting. And then I think what also draws a lot of attention is that he makes a great outreach to China. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been on an Asia trip all week. He visits China a number of times. He hosts Chinese officials in the kingdom. The delegation cemented a 10 billion US dollar deal for a refining and

petrochemical complex in China. China is very important to the kingdom because it's become over time the greatest purchaser of Saudi oil. But the talks actually extend beyond that. They start talking even about military equipment that Saudi Arabia could buy from China. And they start talking about technology. The Chinese offer to come and build 5G networks in the kingdom, which is something that Saudi Arabia would very much like to have. But this kind of sets off alarms in Washington and they start warning the Saudis that, you know, this gives China kind of an entry into a country that has long been seen as a close American partner. And they warn the Saudis that they worry these networks can also be used for stealing information and espionage and other things like that. Part of the attraction of countries like China and Russia for Saudi Arabia

is that these are fellow autocracies. These are countries whose leaders are not going to give Mohammed bin Salman lectures about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, for example. They're not going to sort of get involved in, you know, the fact that he is arresting domestic critics for things that they said on social media. These are things that the Chinese and the Russians really don't care about and things that often do kind of serve as an annoyance in the relationship with the United States. So by the time Biden arrived in Saudi Arabia this past weekend to go into this meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, the relationship was no longer just about security and oil, but there were all of these other new aspects that had come in

and that was going to make this whole interaction much more complicated than it would have been in the past. We'll be right back. So Ben, tell us about the meeting between Biden and Mohammed bin Salman on Friday. I mean, once you get past the fist bump, what did they actually talk about? So this meeting happened behind closed doors and we don't really know what the mood was or what exactly was said.

I know it's late, but thank you for being here. But Biden did give a speech afterwards talking about it. And thanks to many months of quiet diplomacy by the staff, we've accomplished some significant business. He said that they had made progress on a number of fronts. As you saw this morning, the Saudis will open their airspace to all civilian carriers. One of the things that he announced was that Saudi Arabia would allow direct flights from Israel and overflight of civilian aircraft from Israel. That is a big deal. This is a significant change because many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, had long boycotted Israel by not allowing its flights to fly over their territory.

Saudi Arabia is actually quite a big country, and so this would require some significant detours. They got this out of the way. We agreed to work together to deepen and extend the Yemen ceasefire. He spoke about the ceasefire in Yemen. And it's been in place more than three months, resulting in the most peaceful period in Yemen in seven years. The ceasefire has been in place since April. It had been agreed upon by the warring parties that had recently been extended. So, you know, he said that he would continue to work with the Saudis to keep it in place. And finally, one of the most concrete things to come out of this meeting was actually indirectly about China. Saudi Arabia will invest in new U.S.-led technology to develop and secure reliable 5G and 6G networks.

Biden announced that the United States was going to cooperate with Saudi Arabia to build 5G and 6G networks inside the kingdom. This new technology solution for 5G called Open RAN will out-compete other platforms, including from China. So this is very clearly an effort by the United States to show Saudi Arabia that we can help you get the technology that you need and that you don't need to go to China for it. But what about Jamal Khashoggi? I mean, did they talk about that? Biden said he would bring it up, right?

Well, it's definitely clear that they talked about it. Respect to the murder of Khashoggi. The question is, what exactly was said? I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it. Respect to the murder of Khashoggi. The question is, what exactly was said? I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now. Biden, the story that he tells about is that he confronted the crown prince very directly and that he said, I believe that you're responsible for this crime. He said he was not personally responsible for it and he took action against those who were responsible.

That the crown prince basically denied it and said, I didn't order it. And Biden said, well, I think that you did. For an American president to be silent on an issue of human rights, is this inconsistent with who we are and who I am? I'll always stand up for our values. So that's a quick summary of tonight's outcomes. The Saudis came out with quite a different version of it and said, no, actually, it wasn't that contentious. It did come up briefly in the context of human rights, but that was about it. And so we don't really

know what was said. I mean, it's clear that Biden wanted to show to his audience that he had done what he had said he was going to do and be tough on the crown prince, whereas the Saudis, the priority here is really to say it was addressed. We want to leave it in the past and we want to move on with the relationship. So, Ben, at the beginning of this conversation, you told us that Biden had two very specific things he wanted to address in the meeting, Iran and oil prices. So what happened with those two issues? Let's start with Iran. So there's no reason to think that Biden came out of this meeting with very specific, concrete results on either of these. The context for Iran is that the United States has been trying to get back into the international agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program. By all accounts, basically, these talks are not going very well. I think most people believe that this is just not going to happen. And so the United States is looking around for a plan B. If we can't sort of get Iran into an agreement, we have to find some other way to deter it and to keep its activities in the Middle East in check. Saudi Arabia is also very concerned about Iran, but there was no reason

to think that Biden walked out of this meeting with any new sort of very specific plans that he had come up with. Okay, and what about oil? On oil prices, nobody wanted to make an announcement on oil prices. I mean, Biden certainly wouldn't want to talk about it because he was trying to play down the idea that this trip was about oil prices. And the Saudis wouldn't want to talk about it because they want people to stop thinking of them as the world oil pump. So nobody made any announcements.

There is a fairly good chance that the Saudis will actually increase oil production. But it's not going to be anything that dramatically reduces prices or that does it anytime very soon, partly because the Saudis are very close to the amount of oil that they can produce. They don't really have the possibility to just open the taps and put a bunch more oil in the market. And so there's no reason to expect that we're going to see drastic reductions because of this meeting in the prices that Americans see when they drive to their gas stations in the next few weeks. Ben, what's your sense of how effective this meeting was

overall for Biden? Was his calculation to meet with Mohammed bin Salman worth it? Well, I think in the short term, it was a blow. He had basically set himself up in a staring contest with another world leader and he lost. He said that he was not going to meet with this guy. He was not going to talk to him. And next thing you know, he's getting off the plane in Saudi Arabia to go talk to him about things that are very important for the United States. And so I think politically it was a blow for Biden. And in terms of sort of what he accomplished during the meeting, it's hard to see that any of this is going to make a huge difference in the short term.

You know, we'll have to wait and see sort of how things work out with Iran and how things work out with oil. But he definitely did not get back on the plane with things that he can come back and show to Americans as big victories from this trip. And for Mohammed bin Salman, this is really a coup. This is a victory. He has effectively won the staring contest with the president who said he was going to ostracize him, who was going to treat him as a pariah. Mohammed bin Salman basically doubled down, stuck to his guns, bided his time. And sure enough, when the time came, the president of the United States came to meet him inside of his own palace. So he can very much take this to his domestic audience and he can show them, here I am interacting openly with the president of the United States and really kind of market this as a sign of approval and validation that will give him a lot of momentum going forward to do whatever it is that he wants to do next inside of Saudi Arabia. So in short, the meeting was a win

for Mohammed bin Salman, not so much for Biden. Yes. Ben, thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Thank you. which he failed to persuade West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin to back the legislation. The admission that he was giving up on a climate deal was a significant retreat from one of the signature goals of his presidency. In recent months, rampant inflation has put new political and economic pressures on Biden and brought his approval rating to record lows. Biden said he would push climate initiatives forward himself through executive actions, but such moves are far less permanent than laws.

And on Sunday, an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives released a report that found, quote, systemic failures in federal, state and local police response to the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It was the most complete account yet of the halting and haphazard response to the massacre, in which 21 children and teachers were killed. The report found that a better police response would not have saved most of the victims, as most suffered mortal injuries when they were shot by a high-powered AR-15-style rifle in the early moments of the shooting. But the report did say that it was, quote, plausible that the victims who died on the way to the hospital could have been saved had the police response been faster. Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Banja, Eric Krupke, and Sydney Harper. It was edited by Anita Batajow, Lisa Chow, and MJ Davis-Lynn.

Contains original music by Marian Lozano and Rowan Nemesto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi.

See you tomorrow.