Biden gets it wrong, then right, then wrong on Saudi Arabia

The liberal media and various hangers-on have attacked Joe Biden for his meeting and fist bump with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The outrage stems from the fact that MBS is believed to have ordered the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who contributed op-eds to the Washington Post.

Naturally, the Post is leading the charge, but many other liberals are also participating. Even Stephen Colbert has joined the party.

These critics are being foolish. It’s part of a U.S. president’s job to engage with leaders of powerful or influential nations. That’s why our presidents have met personally with far worse leaders than MBS.

Roosevelt and Truman met with Stalin, one of history’s most prolific murderers. Nixon met with Mao, who rivals Stalin as a mass murderer. Trump met with Kim Jong-un, another communist butcher. Though it’s fair to question the outcomes of one or more of these engagements, each president was justified in engaging.

So is Biden. Saudi Arabia isn’t a leading global power like Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. It doesn’t possess nuclear weapons like North Korea. However, it’s a major supplier of oil and a key player in Middle East affairs. In fact, Saudi Arabia is a leading member of the coalition through which the U.S. hopes to counter Iran, our deadly enemy in the region and one of our main adversaries in the world.

Accordingly, the U.S. needs to keep up relations with the Saudis. Given his past pronouncements regarding MBS (about which more later), Biden had good reason to meet with the Saudi leader to patch things up.

This entailed a fist bump, at a minimum. Anything less would have been an insult. Better no meeting than a snub.

Why, given the long history of presidents meeting savage dictators, is Biden under attack from liberals for meeting MBS? Because Khashoggi worked for the Washington Post. Liberals will allow a president to overlook the deaths of millions of kulaks, the gulag, and the “cultural revolution.” The murder of one man associated with the Washington Post is another matter.

The butchering of Khoshoggi is good cause for the Post to be on the warpath, but it doesn’t justify general liberal outrage. And it certainly provides no basis for determining U.S. foreign policy.

The Post complains that Biden didn’t get much from his meeting with MSB. The Saudi leader made no public commitment to pump more oil, it says.

But diplomacy is a process. Fence mending ordinarily precedes significant concrete results.

Nor is oil the only matter as to which the U.S. desires cooperation from Saudi Arabia. We want the Saudis on the side of Israel and the other Middle Eastern nations generally aligned with us and against Iran. We don’t want them tilting towards Russia and China, as MSB seemed to be doing recently.

It’s impossible to know what progress, if any, Biden made on these fronts. But clearly, it was worth trying to make some.

There are, however, valid criticisms to be leveled against Biden’s dealings with MSB. First, during his presidential campaign, Biden needlessly lashed out at Saudi Arabia and its crown prince. He even vowed to make the Kingdom “a pariah state.”

An experienced foreign policy hand, which is what Biden tried to pass himself off as, would have refrained from blasting so strongly an important world player that’s more or less aligned with the U.S. He would have anticipated the need for Saudi help if he became president.

It’s true that Biden’s attack on Saudi Arabia occurred during a debate among Democrats at a time when Biden was struggling. During the debate, Bernie Sanders, called Saudi Arabia a “brutal dictatorship” and “not a reliable ally.”

But Biden didn’t need to engage in one-upmanship with Sanders. Tough-sounding but more measured rhetoric would have sufficed.

Biden’s visit and fist bump were intended to undo the damage Biden’s rhetoric caused. Unfortunately, Biden may have undermined this objective with his post-meeting comments.

Biden said that at the outset of the meeting, he let MBS know that he holds him “personally responsible” for the killing of Khashoggi. Biden added that when the crown prince repeatedly denied responsibility during their meeting, he responded that U.S. intelligence contradicts this denial.

But Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, told Fox News he did not hear Biden tell MBS that he directly blamed him for the killing of Khashoggi. Al-Jubeir said he only heard Biden talk generally about the need to respect human rights.

It’s possible that MBS agreed at the meeting that Biden would give a face-saving statement about holding the crown prince responsible and that Biden agreed the Saudis would deny in some fashion that this occurred. But absent such an agreement, Biden has managed to create more controversy with the Saudis — both by bragging (maybe honestly, maybe not) about attacking MSM on human rights and by clashing with the Saudi minister about what happened at the meeting.

This is the opposite of what Biden journeyed to Saudi Arabia to accomplish.

I don’t think Biden can have it both ways with the Saudis. He can’t be a fierce critic of their human rights record and still expect them to be a reliable strategic partner willing to reject Russian and Chinese overtures. He can’t play the crusader and still be an effective pragmatist.

By attempting this feat, he risks, as Sen. Tom Cotton says, creating “the worst of both worlds” — demonstrating fecklessness and insincerity on the human rights front while alienating an important U.S. partner.

Another example, it seems, of Biden’s mindlessness and incompetence.