Senior Brookings Institute member Michael O’Hanlon told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that President Joe Biden will not make Saudi Arabia “an outcast” because that would mean cutting the economic and military relationship that states United have with the Saudis.
“The world economy still needs that Saudi oil, even if we don’t need it here in the US itself, and the Saudis need our military protection, and we don’t want them to lose a war against Iran,” O’Hanlon explained during an interview on Thursday night. “We are not going to make the Saudis a pariah nation, if what you hear by that word, like me, is North Korea or Iran itself or some other extremist government.”
In 2018, NBC News learned that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the attack squad that lured Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, killed him and cut his body to pieces . In November 2019, Biden promised to make the Saudis “pay” for Khashoggi’s death during a Democratic debate.
“We were actually going to make them pay the price and actually make them the outcasts that they are,” said Biden.
O’Hanlon explained that the US-Saudi Arabia relationship has undergone previous tests, including the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“This is a relationship, after all, that went through September 11th, when we know that the Saudis tolerated the Wahhabist tendency of Islam and a preaching approach in many of their mosques that actually motivated many kidnappers and other extremists, but both sides need each other, “said the foreign policy expert.
Joel Rubin, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration and executive director of the American Jewish Congress, told The News with Shepard Smith that Biden understands that American-Saudi relations are “too important” to be lost.
“Biden will work to maintain this link at the strategic level, with the respect that an ally of almost eight decades deserves,” said Rubin. “But he is also very likely to report the kinds of concerns about Saudi activities in Yemen, about human rights and Khashoggi’s death that motivated him to label Saudi Arabia as an ‘outcast’ in the presidential campaign.”
The White House has confirmed that President Joe Biden spoke to King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia as he prepares to disqualify and disclose a US intelligence assessment that allegedly will implicate the king’s son, MBS, in Khashoggi’s brutal murder .
O’Hanlon told presenter Shepard Smith that Biden’s call with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was a form of “symbolic resistance” as opposed to speaking to MBS. He noted, however, due to the king’s age, “the king may not last that long, so he will have to figure out how to deal with Mohammed bin Salman.”
Rubin warned that it will be very difficult for the United States to maintain direct diplomatic relations with the MBS.
“With the release of the intelligence report on his guilt over the death of Jamal Khashoggi, Congress will only increase the pressure – in a bipartisan way – to block the United States’ involvement with him, his assets and the institutions he controls,” said Rubin. “This is just the beginning of the difficult issues, and now that Donald Trump is no longer president, he will have no one in the White House to protect him.”
The former president refused to release the intelligence report and publicly sowed doubt that MBS or the Saudis were involved in Khashoggi’s death. Trump praised arms sales between the two countries. In 2018, he even displayed a graph in the Oval Office displaying billions of dollars in military equipment that the Saudi government planned to buy.
O’Hanlon told Smith that the “symbolic price” against MBS should be as high as possible.
“I would try to treat you personally as a bit of a persona non grata,” said O’Hanlon. “He’s a guy who likes to rub his elbows in the corridors of power and high finance economics, and I think we should at least deprive him of that.”