For the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, Saudi Arabia got a free pass from the United States. Trump not only praised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to as MBS, but refused to punish him after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that he had played a direct role in the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “I saved his ,” the U.S. president later said of MBS on a taped phone call with the
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, using a word I would rather not repeat.
On the campaign trail, candidate Joe Biden signaled that he would pursue a very different approach to Saudi Arabia. And his administration’s decision last month to release a two-year-old redacted report from the director of national intelligence (DNI) naming MBS as the main culprit in Khashoggi’s murder was a welcome step toward justice. So was the decision to impose sanctions on 76 unnamed Saudis, including the country’s deputy intelligence chief. Yet Biden stopped shor