Senior US officials say the their country has sent messages to Saudi Arabia, seeking to “reset” their relationship.
The US also wants the two countries to move on from the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, CNN has reported.
President Joe Biden had vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over Khashoggi’s murder, while releasing intelligence report last year, accusing Saudi Crowned Prince Mohammed bin Salman of orchestrating Khashoggi’s killing.
But officials say Biden, who is under immense pressure to crack down on Russia and lower domestic gas prices amid inflation that’s rising at the fastest pace since 1981, has set aside his moral outrage to pursue warmer relations with the Kingdom amid the dramatic global upheaval spurred by the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Both sides have decided that for the sake of achieving peace and stability in the Middle East, we need to move past it,” said one senior US official, referring to Khashoggi’s murder. The Saudis, for their part, consider the Khashoggi case closed—and have made that clear to the US, officials said.
That doesn’t mean forgiving and forgetting, the sources noted. Biden, they said, does plan to raise Khashoggi’s murder directly with MBS, as the crown prince is known, when they meet as soon as next month. And some officials inside the administration still believe more should be done to hold MBS accountable for the crime. But the shift is now well underway after months of meetings in Riyadh between two of Biden’s top national security advisers, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, and Saudi officials, including MBS. And it is already sparking outrage, with Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, accusing Biden of losing his moral compass.
“President Biden’s decision to meet MBS is horribly upsetting to me and supporters of freedom and justice everywhere,” she said in a statement to CNN.
