Bobby Ghosh, Columnist

In US-Saudi Reset, the Kingdom Holds All the Cards

Biden’s efforts to isolate the oil-producing nation come up short as soaring gasoline prices bolster Riyadh’s leverage.

June 14, 2022 at 4:06 PM UTC

Bobby Ghosh is a senior editor in the digital weekend team. Previously, he was a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, where he wrote mostly about international affairs and culture.

Lost leverage.
Photographer: Tasos Katopodis/UPI/Bloomberg

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The White House has confirmed that President Joe Biden will visit Saudi Arabia next month, where he is expected to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That’s the same prince Biden vowed to make a pariah for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist.

The Biden administration is trying to spin this as a reset of US-Saudi relations, with the implication that the president is magnanimously repealing the prince’s pariah status.