In his New York Times column Nikolas Kristof calls out President Biden:
The United States government publicly identified Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia as the murderer of an American resident, and then President Biden choked.
Instead of imposing sanctions on M.B.S., Biden appears ready to let the murderer walk. The weak message to other thuggish dictators considering such a murder is: Please don’t do it, but we’ll still work with you if we have to. The message to Saudi Arabia is: Go ahead and elevate M.B.S. to be the country’s next king if you must.
All this is a betrayal of my friend Jamal Khashoggi and of his values and ours. But even through the lens of realpolitik it’s a missed opportunity to help Saudi Arabia understand that its own interest lies in finding a new crown prince who isn’t reckless and doesn’t kill and dismember journalists.
What that tells us is that there’s more to U. S. support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia than Trump’s cozying up to dictators and getting rid of Trump changed little in that area.
It’s a neat illustration of the contradictions in the Biden Administration’s goals. We had actually stopped importing oil from Saudi Arabia. That was largely a consequence of fracking and the promise of ease in bringing in oil from Canada. The Biden Administration’s green policies are signalling an end to that which will have the unwanted secondary effect of maintaining the importance of our relationship with Saudi Arabia. It is the source of much evil.
Update
The editors of the New York Times are critical but not as hard on him as Mr. Kristof:
Earlier this month, the president announced that he was banning billions of dollars in arms shipments to Saudi Arabia for its continuing war in Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster. In conjunction with the publication of the intelligence assessment, the administration this week announced more travel bans against Saudi officials involved in the Khashoggi operation, and the State Department added a new category of sanctions, named “Khashoggi ban,†to withhold visas from anyone involved in state-sponsored efforts to harass, detain or harm dissidents and journalists around the world.
But when it came to penalizing the crown prince personally, Mr. Biden ended up in the same place as his predecessor. In effect, Mr. Biden acknowledged that relations with Saudi Arabia, an ally against the ambitions of Iran, a tacit ally of Israel, a trade partner worth tens of billions of dollars and an oil producer with the ability to seriously disrupt the world economy, were too important to American interests to risk by punishing the all-powerful prince.
or, said another way, at least he’s not Trump so that’s something.
