Biden: I Won’t Hold Personal Meeting with MBS

By Staff, Agencies 

US President Joe Biden declared on Friday he was not going to have a meeting with Saudi Arabia's de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman during a trip next month, and that he was only seeing the Saudi crown prince as part of a broader “international meeting.”

Biden’s plan for talks with the crown prince, known as MBS, will be part of his first trip to the Gulf region as president and is seen by rights advocates as at odds with his promise to put human rights at the heart of US foreign policy. 

“I'm not going to meet with MBS. I'm going to an international meeting, and he's going to be part of it,” Biden told reporters on Friday when asked how during his Saudi Arabia trip he will handle the topic of the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and critic of the crown prince.

As a presidential candidate, Biden said he wanted to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” However, his struggle with record-high gasoline prices this year complicated the situation as the US urges oil-producing nations to boost production to offset Russian losses following Western sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.