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President Joe Biden will visit Saudi Arabia on July 15 and 16 in order to repair the relations between the U.S. and the second largest holder of petroleum reserves in the world.
The four-day trip will also include stops in Israel and the West Bank, the White House announced on Tuesday.
While in Saudi Arabia, Biden plans to meet with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom, a senior administration official told reporters on a briefing call.
During the stop in Jeddah, Biden also is expected to meet with nearly a dozen regional leaders, including MBS, as part of a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
‘All you just got sent to your email addresses everything I’m doing in the Middle East – it lays it all out. I’m focused on labor. You cover the labor speech, and I’ll tell you more about what I’m doing,’ Biden told reporters on Tuesday before he boarded Air Force One for a trip to Philadelphia, where he will address the AFL-CIO.
President Joe Biden will visit the Middle East on July 13 to July 16 where he will make stops in Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia
The trip comes as gas prices in the United States continue to surge, a key domestic issue Biden hopes to tackle going into November’s midterm election.
Over the weekend, the national average for a gallon of gas reached $5 for the first time in American history.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest producer of oil, and as a key member of OPEC plays a large part in setting oil prices worldwide.
The White House announced the trip after Saudi Arabia this month helped nudge OPEC+ to ramp up oil production by 648,000 barrels per day in July and August.
At the time, the White House put out a statement thanking the kingdom, a move that was seen as a step toward trying to thaw the icy relations between Washington D.C. and Riyadh.
Biden also praised the kingdom for agreeing to extend a United Nations-mediated cease-fire in its seven-year war with Yemen. The president called the decison ‘courageous.’
The president is visiting at the invitation of King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement Tuesday morning.
She said Biden will discuss the UN-mediated truce in Yemen, economic security, deterring threats from Iran, advancing human rights, and ensuring global energy and food security.
Earlier this month, the White House said Biden still felt MBS was a ‘pariah’ for what U.S. intelligence says was his role in the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in Turkey in 2018.
Human rights advocates also have encouraged Biden not to make the trip without bringing up Saudi’s treatment of its citizens.
‘Human rights is always a part of our conversations. No doubt it will be part of the meetings that the President has in the region, both in the stop in Jeddah and also, of course, in the stop in Israel,’ the senior administration official said.
Ahead of the stop in Saudi Arabia, Biden will touch down in Israel where he will emphasize the U.S. commitment to the country.
He will also hold a virtual summit with the leaders of Israel, India, and the United Arab Emirates.
While in the West Bank, Biden plans to meet with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and other leaders to reaffirm his commitment to a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, the senior administration official said.
The president will end his trip in Saudi Arabia where he will meet close to a dozen leaders from Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, plus Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.
While in Saudi Arabia next month Biden will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler
The White House has said Biden feels that the crown prince is a ‘pariah’ for his role in the killing of a political opponent, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in 2018
President Joe Biden told reporters that he hasn’t decided whether to visit Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil
The administration didn’t offer details of the president’s expected meeting with MBS.
After Biden took office, it was made clear the president wanted to deal with King Salman and not the crown prince.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden referred to NBS as a ‘pariah’ in the aftermath of Khashoggi’s killing.
The Washington Post journalist was murdered in Turkey in 2018. The CIA has concluded with ‘high confidence’ that bin Salman ordered the assassination.
Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul tainted the crown prince’s image as a reformist.
The last reported meetings between US officials and bin Salman have not gone well.
In September 2021 when Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan traveled to the Kingdom to meet with bin Salman, the crown prince began shouting at Sullivan when Khashoggi’s murder was brought up, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
In a confusing incident on June 12, President Biden told reporters that he hadn’t decided whether to visit Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil.
Then, just seconds later, he said he was indeed planning a trip there.
‘Have you decided whether or not to go to Saudi Arabia,’ Biden is asked by a reporter.
‘No, not yet,’ the president replies on camera.
But moments later, as Biden spoke on the tarmac in Los Angeles at the foot of Air Force One, the president said that he was in fact going.
‘What would be holding up the decision at this point? Are there commitments from the Saudi’s you’re waiting for?’
‘It happens to be a larger meeting taking place in Saudi Arabia. That’s the reason I’m going’, he said. ‘It has to do with national security with the Israelis. It has to do with much larger issues than energy.’
Seconds later as Biden spoke on the tarmac at the foot of Air Force One, Biden said that he was in fact going
The visit would be aimed at bolstering relations with Saudi Arabia at a time when Biden is trying to find ways to lower gasoline prices in the United States.
Gas prices have shot up in recent months amid Russia’s continued assault of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions western countries have imposed on Russian oil, which pulled more than 1 million barrels of oil off of global markets.
In March, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would ban Russian oil and natural gas, warning Americans that ‘defending freedom is going to cost.’
On Saturday, the national average price for a gallon of gasoline reached $5
But gas prices were already high at the time due to increased demand as the economy started to recover from COVID-related shutdowns, as well as increased travel demands going into the summer.
At the same time, though, many oil companies closed a number of their refineries as demand plummeted during the pandemic.
By Saturday, the national average price of gasoline reached $5 a gallon – up 60 cents from a month ago and up nearly two dollars from just one year ago, according to the New York Times.
The average price of gas, meanwhile, was above $4 in all 50 states – and in California, the price exceeds $6 a gallon, while in Minnesota, the price was $4.72.
Energy experts now estimate that for every penny the price of gas increases, it costs Americans an extra $4 million a day, with the average American paying $450 gas month for their fuel needs.
And research by the Bank of America Institute, which uses anonymous data from millions of their customers’ credit and debit card accounts, shows spending on gas eating up a larger share of consumers’ budgets and crowding out their ability to buy other items.
For lower-income households – defined as those with incomes below $50,000 – spending on gas reached nearly 10 percent of all spending on credit and debit cards in the last week of May, the institute said in a report this week.
That’s up from about 7.5 percent in February, a steep increase in such a short period.
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