Brookings Institute senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that President Joe Biden will not make Saudi Arabia “a pariah” as this would mean that the economic and military relationship the US has with the Saudis will become broken.
“The world economy still needs that Saudi oil, even though we don’t necessarily need it here in the US, and the Saudis need our military protection, and we don’t want them to lose a war against Iran,” O’Hanlon explained during a Thursday night interview. “We’re not going to make the Saudis a pariah nation if what you hear with that word, like me, is North Korea or Iran itself or some other extremist government.”
In 2018, NBC News heard that the CIA concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had ordered the hit squadron that lured Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, murdered him and cut his body to pieces. In November 2019, Biden pledged to make the Saudis “pay” for the murder of Khashoggi during a democratic debate.
“We would basically make them pay the price, and basically make them the pariah that they are,” Biden said.
O’Hanlon explained that the US-Saudi relationship has passed previous tests, including the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
After all, this is a relationship that has gone through 9/11 when we know that the Saudis tolerated the Wahhabi tribe of Islam and a preaching approach in many of its mosques that actually motivated many of the hijackers and other extremists, but the two sides need each other, ” said the foreign policy expert.
Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration and the executive director of the United States Jewish Congress, told “The News with Shepard Smith” that Biden understands that US-Saudi relations are “too important” to to lose.
“Biden will be committed to maintaining that connection at a strategic level, with the respect that an ally of nearly eight decades deserves,” said Rubin. “But it is also quite likely that he will voice the kinds of concerns about Saudi activities in Yemen, about human rights and the Khashoggi murder that motivated him to call Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ on the path of the presidential campaign.”
The White House confirmed that President Joe Biden spoke to King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia as it prepares to release and release a U.S. intelligence review allegedly involving the king’s son, MBS, in the brutal murder of Khashoggi.
O’Hanlon told host Shepard Smith that Biden’s phone call with King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was a form of “ symbolic pushback ” rather than talking to MBS. However, he noted that given 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 US to maintain direct diplomatic relations with MBS.
“With the release of the intelligence report on his guilt in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Congress will only increase pressure – in a two-pronged way – to block US involvement in him, his assets and the institutions he controls” Rubin said. “This is just the beginning of the tough questions, and now that Donald Trump is no longer president, he will have no one in the White House to protect him.”
The former president declined to release the intelligence report, raising public doubt that MBS or the Saudis were involved in Khashoggi’s murder. Trump praised the arms sales between the two countries. In 2018, he even held up a card in the Oval Office detailing the billions of dollars in military hardware the Saudi government planned to acquire.
O’Hanlon told Smith that the “symbolic price” against MBS should be as high as possible.
“I would try to treat him personally as a bit of a persona non grata,” said O’Hanlon. “He’s a man who likes to rub his elbows in the corridors of power and high financial economics, and I think we should at least keep that from him.”