President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said he would travel to Saudi Arabia this weekend, in a new sign of the administration’s determination to smooth over rocky ties with the kingdom.
(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said he would travel to Saudi Arabia this weekend, in a new sign of the administration’s determination to smooth over rocky ties with the kingdom.
And Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to visit in June for a meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, the Islamic State terrorist group, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sullivan, who confirmed his trip in a Thursday evening speech organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that he would meet as well with representatives from India and the United Arab Emirates and discuss “new areas of cooperation between New Delhi and the Gulf.”
Sullivan added that he would meet with the Saudi “leadership” without being specific. The people, who asked not to be identified discussing the plans in advance, said that his meetings would include Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Sullivan called the administration’s Middle East policy both “realistic and pragmatic.” He said it is clear-eyed about “eschewing grand designs and unrealistic promises of transformational change” but at the same time “ambitious and optimistic” about what can be achieved.
He listed accomplishments, including a truce in the long civil war in Yemen, which drew in regional powers and led to a humanitarian crisis.
A State Department spokesman said the department had no travel for Blinken to announce. The Saudi government didn’t respond to request for comment.
Sullivan’s meeting marks the first of its kind among the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India. Key themes will be diversifying supply chains and investments in strategic infrastructure projects, including ports, rail and minerals, one of the people said.
The consecutive trips by high-level US officials highlight that the administration is determined to get past the frostiness that has defined relations between Washington and Riyadh. As a candidate, Biden had said he would treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The two nations lashed out at each other last year when Saudi Arabia agreed to cut OPEC+ crude output in defiance of US wishes.
Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ partners cut output again last month, in a move the Biden administration said was ill-advised. In another sign of increasingly tenuous US influence over Saudi Arabia, Chinese President Xi Jinping helped deliver a deal in March to resume diplomatic ties between Iran and the kingdom.
Some US officials believe that engagement with Beijing poses no threat to the US-Saudi relationship.
“I’m not worried about the Chinese supplanting US influence in Saudi Arabia, which goes back generations and is personally felt by the Saudi royal family,” David Marlowe, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director of operations, told a conference at Vanderbilt University on Thursday. “It’s an opportunistic move on their part, but I don’t worry that that’s somehow going to shift power in the Middle East.”
Marlowe described Chinese engagement in Saudi Arabia as “100% transactional” — and said the Saudis understand that too.
Before Sullivan’s trip, Amos Hochstein, Biden’s senior adviser for energy and investment, and Brett McGurk, National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East, met with UAE leaders last week, including Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, according to people familiar with the meetings.
Earlier: Saudi Feud Leaves the US Asking If Relations Are Beyond Repair
Sullivan spoke to the crown prince on April 11, pointing out progress to end the war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s “extraordinary efforts” to pursue a road map to peace, according to a White House statement. The two sides also agreed to “accelerate contact” on issues including clean energy and infrastructure investment.
The US has also been working closely with Saudi Arabia in Sudan. Biden thanked Riyadh in a statement on April 22, saying the kingdom was “critical to the success of our operation” to extract US government personnel from Khartoum.
–With assistance from Matthew Martin and Katrina Manson.
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