WASHINGTON – President Biden has decided that the price of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is too high, according to senior government officials, despite a detailed discovery by American intelligence that he directly approved the murder. by Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Columnist for the Washington Post who was drugged and quartered in October 2018.
Biden’s decision, which during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value”, came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team informed him that there was no how to formally prevent the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or weigh criminal charges against him, without breaking the relationship with one of America’s leading Arab allies.
Officials said there was a consensus within the White House that the price of this breach, in Saudi counterterrorism cooperation and the confrontation with Iran, was simply too high.
For Biden, the decision was a telltale indication of how his most cautious instincts came into play, and will deeply disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the United States was failing to keep up. Crown Prince, known for his initials MBS, responsible for his role.
Many organizations were pressuring Biden to at the very least impose the same travel sanctions against the Crown Prince that the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.
Biden’s aides said that, in practice, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon and denied that they were giving a pass to Saudi Arabia, describing a series of new actions against lower-ranking officials with the aim of penalizing the elite elements of the Saudi army and impose new impediments to human rights abuses.
These actions, approved by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, include the travel ban of the former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief, who was deeply involved in Operation Khashoggi, and the Rapid Intervention Force, a unit of the Saudi Royal Guard.
The declassified intelligence report concluded that the intervention force, which operates under the Crown Prince, directed the operation against Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Mr. Khashoggi entered the consulate on October 2, 2018 to obtain the documents he needed for his future wedding and, with his bride waiting outside the gates, was received by a team of assassins.
An effort by the Saudi government to release a cover story, claiming that Khashoggi left the consulate unharmed, collapsed in days.
The Trump administration acted against 17 members of that team, imposing travel bans and other penalties. Biden, an official said, described the new sanctions the United States is imposing on King Salman, the crown prince’s father, in a phone call on Thursday that was only vaguely described in a White House account of the call.
But the king is 85 years old and in poor health, and it was unclear to government officials how much he absorbed while Biden talked about a “recalibration” of the relationship with the United States.
In an effort to signal a broader application of human rights standards, Blinken is also adding a new category of sanctions, a new name for “Khashoggi ban”, to restrict visas to anyone determined to participate in state-sponsored efforts. to harass, detain or harm dissidents and journalists around the world. About 70 Saudis will be assigned to the first installment, officials said.
That review, officials said, would be part of the State Department’s annual human rights report. Initial bans will apply to Saudis, but officials said they would be used quickly around the world – potentially against Russia and China, and even allies like Turkey, who pursue dissidents who live across their borders.
Biden and his aides have repeatedly said they intend to take a much tougher line with the Saudis than President Donald J. Trump, who vetoed legislation passed by both houses of Congress to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Although Congress had no votes to override the vetoes, Biden announced this month that he was banning billions of dollars in arms shipments to Saudi Arabia because of the continuing war in Yemen, which he called a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”.
The release on Friday of a disqualified summary of American intelligence findings about the Khashoggi murder was also a reversal of the Trump administration’s policies. Mr. Trump refused to make it public, knowing that he would fuel the action for sanctions or criminal action against Prince Mohammed.
But in the end, Biden came to essentially the same position in punishing the impetuous young crown prince as Trump and then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Although officials say there is no doubt that Prince Mohammed ordered the death and imprisonment of dissidents and other opponents, a ban would make it impossible to negotiate with the Saudis in the future.
He was, they concluded, simply too important for American interests to punish him.
Such prohibitions against world leaders are rare. A study by officials looking to determine how to deal with the Crown Prince found that the United States acted against opponents like Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad; Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea; President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; and Robert Mugabe, the former prime minister of Zimbabwe. But none were chiefs of important allies.