After reducing oil production in the United States, Joe Biden has been forced to seek oil deals with other nations, including two Middle Eastern countries that are currently giving him the cold shoulder.
The leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have declined recent White House requests to arrange phone calls with Biden, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Out of dissatisfaction with the Biden Regime’s policies in the Gulf, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan have both declined White House requests to speak to Biden in recent weeks, U.S. and Middle East officials told the WSJ.
“There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,” a U.S. official said of the planned phone call between that president and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].”
Reportedly, Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed did take phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after snubbing Biden. And they both spoke with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the WSJ.
Back in February, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that a call between Biden and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud would take place soon, and the Biden administration “recalibrating” how it engages with foreign leaders after the Trump years.
Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. had much warmer relations with President Trump, “who sided with them in a regional dispute with Qatar, pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that they had opposed, made his first trip abroad to Riyadh in 2017 and stood by Prince Mohammed after the killing of [Saudi journalist Jamal] Khashoggi,” the WSJ noted.
Saudi Arabia had a famously cool relationship Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama. In the Spring of 2014, as the Obama regime was finalizing its nuclear deal with Iran, then-Saudi King Abdulah neglected to dispatch “top royals” to the airport to greet the then-president when arrived for talks with Saudi officials. A state dinner that was planned, was called off, and after only two hours, Obama abruptly left the king’s desert oasis outside the capital of Riyadh with no top royals to see him off.
In May of 2015, only two of six Arab monarchs (from Qatar and Kuwait) made it to summit hosted by Obama at the presidential retreat Camp David in Maryland. King Salman pulled out at the last minute after saying that he would attend.
The bad blood between Biden and the kingdom go back to the 2020 presidential election, when the then-Democrat candidate vowed to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” state because of its alleged involvement in Khashoggi’s assassination in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.
There is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia,” Biden said during a presidential debate in 2019. Biden has also publicly scolded Saudi Arabia over the war in Yemen and “cut off the flow of some weapons Riyadh could use to target Houthis,” the WTJ reported.
Biden further alienated the Saudis by reversing the Trump administration’s decision to put the Houthis on America’s official list of global terrorist groups, which Saudi leaders say “emboldened the Yemeni force and thwarted efforts to broker a cease-fire,” according to the WSJ.
Both Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. are also reportedly alarmed by the Biden regime’s revival of the Iran nuclear deal, which has apparently entered the final stages of negotiations.
Biden’s Iran deal is a more reckless and dangerous version of Obama’s Iran deal, according to former State Department official Gabriel Noronha in Tablet.
Anyone seeking to gauge the imminent outcome of the international talks over Iran’s nuclear program being held in Vienna should take a look at reports from late January that three top U.S. diplomats had quit—largely in protest over the direction set by U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who serves as the U.S. government’s chief negotiator.
Having served for two years in former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Iran Action Group, I knew that this development was tantamount to a public cry for an intervention. Such resignations—not of conservative dissenters, but of career staff and President Joe Biden’s own political appointees—should have been cause for Biden or Secretary Antony Blinken to recall Malley and investigate.
Noronha, the Special Advisor for Iran in Trump’s Department of State, says the deal being negotiated in Vienna by notorious Hamas defender Robert Malley, “is dangerous to U.S. national security, to the stability of the Middle East, and to the Iranian people who suffer most under that brutal regime.”
With Robert Malley in the lead, the United States has promised to lift sanctions on some of the regime’s worst terrorists and torturers, on leading officials who have developed Iran’s WMD infrastructure, and has agreed to lift sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) itself. In exchange, Iran will receive fewer limitations than those imposed under the JCPOA, and the restrictions on its nuclear program will expire six years sooner than under the terms of the old deal. And that’s just the beginning.
The Biden administration is set to end the sanctions against the Islamic Republic as soon as the deal is finished, which will unleash dozens of notorious terrorists on the world, Noronha warned.
This would lift sanctions on nearly all of the 112 people and entities sanctioned under that authority, even if they were sanctioned under other legal authorities as well. This move is significant because the United States has used this authority to sanction some of the most evil people you can possibly imagine. Malley and his Russian go-betweens in Vienna have agreed that these people should now be free to roam around the world despite their murderous pasts, unshackled from any restraints on their financing, and plotting new terror attacks.
After taking these hostile actions against Saudi Arabia and U.A.E, the Biden regime now needs friendly relations with the countries to broker an oil deal as prices push over $130 a barrel for the first time in almost 14 years.
Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are the only two major oil producers that can pump millions of more barrels of more oil—a capacity that, if used, could help calm the crude market at a time when American gasoline prices are at high levels.
But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved between their group, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and a group of other producers led by Russia. The energy alliance with Russia, one of the world’s top oil producers, has enhanced OPEC’s power while also bringing the Saudis and Emiratis closer to Moscow.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden stood by his view that Saudi Arabia should be treated like a “pariah” state and that the leadership had little redeeming social value.
The Atlantic magazine asked Prince Mohammed last week if he felt “misunderstood” by Biden. “Simply, I do not care,” the prince replied. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America. Go for it.”