By Bonnie Kristian
President Joe Biden took a defensive tone in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia on Friday. “I have never been quiet about talking about human rights,” he said at a news conference in Israel on Thursday. But his reason for going to Saudi Arabia, he said, was much broader: to promote U.S. interests and reassert our influence in the Middle East. And anyway, Biden added, he was “going to be meeting with nine other heads of state. It’s not just — it happens to be in Saudi Arabia.”
That’s a shorter version of the argument the president has made for weeks since his first official Middle East visit was announced with a tour stop in Riyadh. As a 2020 candidate, Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state for the regime’s murder of U.S. journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Biden touted his administration’s reversal of “the blank-check policy (toward Saudi Arabia) we inherited” from the Trump administration. But the bulk of his op-ed played defense, pushing back on widespread criticism that cast this trip as a betrayal of Biden’s promises and ideals motivated by a desperation for oil.
There’s merit to that charge. The Saudi state’s human rights record is gruesome, and the visit is unquestionably a reversal for Biden. But most criticism of the trip is wrongly aimed: Diplomacy is not what’s wrong in Washington’s handling of Riyadh; it’s the long-term U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and ongoing U.S. support for the Saudi military, including its brutality in Yemen.
Confusion around the purpose of diplomacy is a regular and unfortunate feature of American foreign policy debates. Diplomacy is not just for friendly countries. Yes, sometimes our diplomatic conversation partners are friendly countries with ideals and styles of government similar to our own. But diplomacy also includes far more difficult discussions with far less savory states. Indeed, those more complicated situations are where it’s needed most: to address conflicts of interest without resorting to sanctions or war.
This piece was originally published in Cichago Tribune on July 18, 2022. Read more HERE.