President Joe Biden’s efforts to work with the Saudi royal family to increase global oil production were thoroughly rebuffed Monday, further exemplifying the frosty relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia during the president’s first 14 months in office.
The Saudi Foreign Ministry declared Monday morning that the country “will not bear any responsibility for any shortage in oil supplies to global markets” and admitted that the attacks carried out by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels against Saudi oil production facilities over the weekend would prevent the country from meeting its daily production commitments for an unknown length of time.
Gas prices in the U.S. remain elevated, and the Saudi statement comes as the Biden administration has repeatedly petitioned Riyadh to surge oil production to protect the global supply in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
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National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk and State Department senior adviser for energy security Amos Hochstein traveled to Saudi Arabia shortly before the war in Ukraine broke out to discuss a “range of issues,” including the global energy supply, according to the White House.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed to reporters in March that Biden himself also spoke with Saudi King Salman about potentially boosting oil production should Russia halt its European sales. The White House has not given any indication that any of those conversations had yielded commitments from Saudi Arabia to boost oil production.
Furthermore, recent reports indicate that Saudi Arabia is considering accepting the Chinese yuan as payment for its oil, which would significantly devalue the dollar in the global energy market.
Given Saudi Arabia’s hesitance to surge oil production, many questioned why Biden signed off on the transfer of a “significant” number of Patriot interceptor missiles to the country over the weekend. The Biden administration indicated that the tranche of munitions was aimed at helping Saudi Arabia prevent additional rebel attacks against its energy infrastructure.
Fred Fleitz, the chief of staff for former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, told the Washington Examiner, however, that he doubts the Saudis will acquiesce to the Biden administration’s oil proposals no matter how much the administration tries to sweeten the deal.
“President Trump understood, with regard to Saudi Arabia, that the United States must have productive relationships with friendly and strategic countries who are not democracies and sometimes have less-than-stellar human rights records,” Fleitz, the current vice chairman of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute, said in a statement. “On the other hand, President Biden and his administration have been hostile to Saudi Arabia almost from the day he entered office, with sanctions related to the Khashoggi killing, pushing forward a dangerous new nuclear deal with Iran, and actually snubbing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in February 2021.”
“This is why the Saudis are reevaluating their relationship with the United States and considering a closer relationship with China,” he continued. “This is another serious foreign policy blunder by Biden and his national security team.”
The Trump administration, specifically senior adviser and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, saw moderate success in addressing key Gulf issues by communicating with Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne and the man many view as Saudi Arabia’s shadow regent. The Saudis were key partners throughout the Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements the Trump administration brokered with Israel and a number of majority-Muslim countries.
Biden, however, outlined his desire to reset the U.S.-Saudi relationship shortly after entering office in 2021. In addition to revoking the terrorist designation for the Houthi rebels, Biden publicly stated that he would communicate directly with the king, not the crown prince. He did not, however, include the crown prince on the sanctions list brought over the abduction and murder of former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, though intelligence indicates he was personally involved in Khashoggi’s disappearance.
In turn, the crown prince has repeatedly publicly slighted the Biden administration.
“Simply, I do not care,” he told the Atlantic when asked what he thinks of Biden’s views of him. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America.”
The crown prince reportedly shot down attempts to set up a dialogue between himself and Biden to discuss energy security in recent weeks, though the White House has vehemently denied those reports.
“That report is inaccurate, so let me start there. The president did speak with the Saudi king just a few weeks ago,” Psaki told reporters March 10. “There were no rebuffed calls, period.”
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“The president’s focus is really on our relationship moving forward: where we can work together [and] how we can work together on economic and national security here at home,” she continued. “He looks forward to that continuing.”
