The US state department refuses to say whether the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is one of the Saudi officials subject to US visa restrictions under the new “Khashoggi ban”. The ban got its name from the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered in 2018. A US intelligence assessment was declassified and reported that this act was approved by the crown prince. The Biden administration has said 76 Saudi nationals are subject to restrictions under the ban. The ban also covers those that have been deemed to have some involvement in Khashoggi’s murder. Ned Price, the state department spokesperson, laid out a “recalibration” of US relations with Saudi Arabia which he stressed was “not a rupture”.
My opinion is that the Biden administration is clearly trying to make up for some of the integrity and the respect that the state department lost when this incident first occurred, and there wasn’t a great deal done about it. I think that this is Biden’s “hardline” approach to Middle East and United States relations, showing that in his first 100 days in office he will be taken seriously by foreign countries the United States is currently contending with. Journalists reporting in other countries have a right to feel safe, and I think this is Biden’s halfway point between acknowledging the crime and doling out some sanctions, and going into punishment mode on the Saudis. Not confirming if the Crown Prince was actually banned also feels like this administration is keeping this on the backburner.
The connection to class is that we discussed the phases of the Cold War and the shatterbelt zones of the world. The main reason for United States involvement in Saudi Arabia was the attacks on the Twin Towers, and we succeeded in defeating Al-Qaeda and dismantling the Taliban. But today’s Saudi-US relations can be traced all the way back to when the CIA armed Mujahideen forces during the Soviet invasion of Iraq. The Taliban was formed from the remnants of the Mujahideen after the Soviet-Afghan war. Containment theory prevented the spread of communist influence and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. America suffered 9/11 after allowing the formation of the Taliban from the Mujahideen, but much worse events could have come from a Soviet controlled Afghanistan.