Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the day-to-day leader of Saudi Arabia, reportedly mocks President Joe Biden (D) behind his back and questions his mental fitness for office.
The report from The Wall Street Journal comes after The New York Times reported that the kingdom scuttled a secret deal that it had with the Biden administration to produce more oil before the midterm elections.
The report said that the crown prince “mocks President Biden in private, making fun of the 79-year-old’s gaffes and questioning his mental acuity,” and says he has not been impressed with Biden for years and preferred dealing with the previous administration.
It’s worth noting that Biden repeatedly attacked the crown prince and the country while on the campaign trail, the administration has taken a stand against Saudi Arabia in their war in Yemen, and they are working with Saudi Arabia’s top enemy in the region: Iran. The Wall Street Journal added that Biden refused to talk to the crown prince for over a year and when he went to Saudi Arabia, officials there did not feel like Biden wanted to be there.
“Rarely has the chain of broken expectations and perceived insults and humiliations been greater than they are now,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran U.S. diplomat in the Middle East. “There’s almost no trust and absolutely no mutual respect.”
The administration has repeatedly claimed that a trip to the kingdom in July was not about oil, but a new report from the Times outlined the “secret deal” that the administration falsely thought that they had secured.
Biden officials began meeting with the Saudis in the spring and allegedly secured a “private oil deal” in which the kingdom would get the OPEC oil cartel to increase their output of oil by 400,000 barrels per day starting in July instead of the previously planned September.
The officials then believed that they had gotten the kingdom to agree to increasing production by an additional 200,000 barrels per day starting in September and lasting the rest of the year.
OPEC announced on June 2 the administration’s desired action for an accelerated timeline of the additional 400,000 barrels per day. That same day, Biden announced that he was making a trip to Saudi Arabia.
When Biden got to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on July 15, the price of oil was starting to come down.
When he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudis presented the administration with charts that showed that the price of oil had fallen and promised they would increase oil production to a staggering 11 million barrels per day, which the report noted the country “had reached for only a few months in total over the past several years.”
Biden’s team thought they secured the deal, but Saudi officials were privately telling others that they had no plans to go through with it.
The report noted that the first warning came in August when OPEC announced only a 100,000 barrel increase in oil production, half of what was expected. Several weeks later, OPEC announced it was cutting the 100,000 barrel increase.
The administration then learned that the kingdom was going to cut production and they desperately tried to stop them, but nothing worked.
The report effectively said that the Biden administration was clueless as to why the kingdom stabbed them in the back on their “secret deal.”
The Journal noted that the fractured relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia presents numerous risks for the U.S., including “counterterrorism operations, efforts to contain Iran and Israel’s deeper integration into the region.”