Biden to talk oil, Iran at Arab summit concluding Middle East tour
Meeting in Jeddah will bring together leaders of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — US President Joe Biden is set to discuss volatile oil prices during a summit with Arab leaders on Saturday in Saudi Arabia, the final stop of his Middle East tour, meant to bolster US positioning and knit the region together against Iran.
The meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city on the Red Sea coast, will bring together leaders of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.
Biden landed Friday in Saudi Arabia, a longtime US ally he once vowed to make a “pariah” over its human rights record, and met with King Salman, de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other top Saudi officials.
Tensions had been high between Biden and Prince Mohammed, especially after Biden’s administration released US intelligence findings that Prince Mohammed “approved” an operation targeting journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose gruesome killing in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate in 2018 spurred global outrage.
Biden now appears ready to re-engage with a country that has been a key strategic ally of the United States for decades, a major supplier of oil and an avid buyer of weapons.
Washington wants the world’s largest exporter of crude to open the floodgates to bring down soaring gasoline prices, which threaten Democratic chances in November mid-term elections.
But Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, tamped down expectations of immediate progress while speaking with reporters on the flight to Jeddah.
“I don’t think you should expect a particular announcement here bilaterally,” he said.
“We believe any further action taken to ensure that there is sufficient energy to protect the health of the global economy will be done in the context of OPEC+,” Sullivan said, referring to the wider bloc of oil producers.
The summit will enable Biden to “lay out clearly and substantively his vision and his strategy” for US engagement in the Middle East, he added.
Biden said his trip “is about once again positioning America in this region for the future.
“We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill,” he insisted.
At the summit, Biden was set to hear a chorus of concern about the region’s stability and security, as well as concerns about food security, climate change and the continued threat of terrorism.
Overall, there’s little that the nine Mideast heads of state agree on when it comes to foreign policy. For example, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are trying to isolate and squeeze Iran over its regional reach and proxies. Oman and Qatar, on the other hand, have solid diplomatic ties with Iran and have acted as intermediaries for talks between Washington and Tehran.
Qatar recently hosted talks between US and Iranian officials as they try to revive Iran’s nuclear accord. Iran not only shares a huge underwater gas field with Qatar in the Persian Gulf, it rushed to Qatar’s aid when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut off ties and imposed a years-long embargo on Qatar that ended only shortly before Biden took office.
Biden was under pressure to discuss the cases of Khashoggi as well as Saudis detained under what critics of Prince Mohammed described as a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.
Late Friday, Biden said he raised Khashoggi’s killing “at the top of the meeting” with Prince Mohammed and “made it clear if anything occurs like that again they will get that response and much more.”
While in Israel he told reporters his motives for visiting Saudi Arabia were “broader” than human rights.
“My views on Khashoggi have been absolutely, positively clear, and I have never been quiet about talking about human rights.”
Also Friday, dozens of British and US lawmakers urged Biden to discuss Egypt’s “extensive architecture of repression” in talks with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.
For Iraq, which has the deepest and strongest links to Iran of all the Arab countries, its presence at the meeting reflects Saudi efforts — supported by the US — to bring Iraq closer to Arab positions and the so-called Arab fold. Iraq has hosted around five rounds of direct talks between Saudi and Iranian officials since Biden took office, though the talks have produced little results.
Martin Indyk, distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the increased cooperation between Israel and Arab countries, driven in large part by threats from Iran, is the most important storyline in the Middle East right now.
“Now there’s a much more clear-eyed perception in Washington of the way in which Iran’s ambitions to dominate the region threaten our interests and our allies and partners,” he said.
Under Biden, Indyk said, the U.S. role in the region has been shifting “from being the dominant power in the region that supposedly took care of all the threats. . . to the role of supporting partners and allies in the region.”
