US President Joe Biden, during his Saudi Arabia visit months ago, did not hold back in expressing his confidence that Saudi Arabia would act to increase the oil supply in the upcoming weeks. However, the little rise in oil output was only embarrassing since it was far insufficient to meet US demand. But it wasn’t everything. After Biden’s visit to the Kingdom, the OPEC+ group’s decision to reduce crude oil output by two million barrels per day in October gave a massive setback to the US and Saudi Arabian ties.
The world was closely watching the Biden-MBS meet, especially after Biden had declared Saudi Arabia a pariah post Khashoggi’s killing in 2018 and the meeting was anticipated to reset the ties between the two nations. MBS, as per Biden, denied involvement in the murder during their meeting in Riyadh. “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it,” Biden said of the crown prince’s response during their meeting. “I indicated that I thought he was.” In the latest, however, after the Biden administration stated that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be granted head-of-state protection, a federal court in the nation’s capital decided to dismiss a civil action against him for the murder of author Jamal Khashoggi.
Biden visited Israel and the West Bank on his tour to the Middle East, which started on 13 July and finished on 16 July. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the severe energy crisis it caused for European nations, Biden paid a visit with some hope. He saw that he needed to change the US strategy of leaving the Middle East and try to rebalance his relationships with regional leaders. But how effective was the visit in the end? Not so much.
The stark contrast: Xi’s red-carpet welcome
The visit to Saudi Arabia by Chinese president Xi Jinping will be very different from that of President Joe Biden. It appears that the Gulf Arab nations have intensified their independent-minded approach. They have recently started veering away from US foreign policy, after decades. For China, the Gulf has disregarded several US cautions regarding expanding alliances with Beijing and Chinese businesses, citing human rights abuses of Uyghur minorities in the Xinjiang region. To the dismay of the US, the military relationship of Saudi Arabia with China is also changing. When the US threatened to supply UAE with F-35 combat fighters over Saudi Arabia’s 5G arrangement with Chinese tech giant Huawei, Abu Dhabi stood by the contract.
The pomp and circumstance surrounding Xi’s travel to Saudi Arabia is sending an implicit message to the US. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a United Arab Emirates expert and visiting senior fellow at Harvard University, told CNN that this is a new Saudi Arabia, a new Gulf and a new reality. “The new reality is that China is rising and Asia is rising and whether the US likes it or not, we have to deal with China,” he added.
