Crown Prince Mohammed, far from being isolated by the US, has just secured an end to the four-year US ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
President Joe Biden came to power having pledged to make Saudi Arabia’s maverick new ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, a global pariah.
But as Biden nears the end of his term in office, having endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor in November’s US election, Saudi-US relations are closer than they have been for years.
Crown Prince Mohammed, far from being isolated by the US, has just secured an end to the four-year US ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
The deal means that air-to-ground missiles, whose transfer was suspended to pressure the Saudis to end the war in Yemen, will be delivered to Saudi bases soon.
That’s in addition to valuable new security pledges the Crown Prince secured from the Biden administration back in May, as well as agreements from the US to back Saudi civilian nuclear technology.Biden looks to Saudi for help
As little as three years ago, a group of Democratic lawmakers were calling for MBS to be sanctioned after a declassified US intelligence report found that the crown prince ordered the assassination of dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2017. Saudi Arabia has denied the accusation.
Analysts say that MBS has navigated increasing regional and global chaos to emphasize Saudi Arabia’s importance to Washington.
The Gaza conflict between Israel and Hamas, which erupted after last year’s October 7 terror attacks, has disturbed Saudi Arabia, Giorgio Cafiero, CEO at Gulf State Analytics, told Business Insider.
It has threatened to expand into a wider regional conflict while empowering its arch-regional rival Iran and its proxies in the «Axis of Resistance.»
«There is something to be said about how the Biden administration has looked to the kingdom for help in terms of Washington’s efforts to contain these conflicts and prevent their further spread, which has given Saudi Arabia’s leadership an opportunity to further underscore to the West how Riyadh is a capital which the US and European countries must work with to advance their interests in the Arab-Islamic world and beyond», said Cafiero.A relationship that began with mistrust
Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power was marked by audacity and brutality, allegedly forcing the resignation of then-Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri in 2017 and imprisoning of some of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful figures in a luxury hotel in a demonstration of force that roiled the region and the kingdom.
