The complications of keeping campaign promises.
It was a fraught fist bump.
As you heard on Monday’s episode, President Biden’s chosen greeting for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia became a diplomatic drama.
After years of bombastic foreign policy tweets, analyzing the subtleties of Mr. Biden’s behavior feels like a throwback to the tan-suit era — a time when diplomacy was in the details.
But this wasn’t the only fist bump Mr. Biden gave on his tour of the Middle East. He also extended one to Prime Minister Yair Lapid while disembarking from Air Force One in Israel.
Below, Rachelle Bonja, the lead producer of the episode, looks more closely at Mr. Biden’s Middle East tour and explains the significance of a few diplomatic decisions we didn’t get the chance to discuss on the show.
The big idea: Biden’s human rights dilemma
The Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper on our episode with Ben Hubbard, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief, about President Biden’s foreign policy.
At the beginning of his campaign, President Biden set out a clear goal: to make human rights the center of American foreign policy. He promised to return to a previous era of international relations, before Donald J. Trump introduced an “America first” doctrine and withdrew from international agreements. However, Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia quickly became a test of one of his boldest campaign promises.
In both countries, Mr. Biden was under pressure to keep his commitment to speak out against human rights abuses, specifically by condemning the recent killings of journalists.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden was explicit about how he felt the United States should deal with Saudi Arabia after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a former Washington Post columnist. (American intelligence officials have determined that the crown prince approved the operation to assassinate Mr. Khashoggi.)
Mr. Biden said that his plan was to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”
But when the war in Ukraine drove American gas prices over $5 a gallon, Mr. Biden’s approach to the crown prince, who manages the country’s oil reserves, shifted focus.
Although Mr. Biden said Friday night that he had confronted the crown prince over the murder during their closed-door meeting, the Saudi government disputed the nature of the interaction. Now the president is being criticized for his apparent compromise on human rights.
But this wasn’t the only human rights dilemma Mr. Biden faced on his trip.
Before he arrived in the Middle East, the president had not publicly addressed the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. Ms. Abu Akleh was a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was fatally shot in May while wearing a press vest and covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank for the network. Several investigations, including one by The New York Times, found that the bullets had come from the location of an Israeli Army unit.
The United Nations’ human rights office concluded that “the shots that killed Abu Akleh and injured her colleague Ali Sammoudi came from Israeli security forces and not from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.
Despite pressure from Ms. Abu Akleh’s family and others to address the killing, Mr. Biden did not mention Ms. Abu Akleh’s death while he was in Israel.
Instead, in Jerusalem, the president reaffirmed his commitment to Israel as an ally and as an “independent Jewish state.” He called for a “lasting negotiated peace between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people.”
Mr. Biden later visited Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, where he spoke about Ms. Abu Akleh and called for accountability in her killing: “The United States will continue to insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death and will continue to stand up for media freedom everywhere in the world,” he said.
Ms. Abu Akleh’s family has called for a joint investigation of her killing. While Israel had previously offered to examine the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh in the presence of Palestinian and American representatives, the Palestinian Authority has refused a joint investigation, citing distrust of the Israelis. Mr. Biden’s decision to call for an investigation only while speaking in the Palestinian territories has stoked accusations that the president is trying to shield Israel from scrutiny.
The two visits highlight how Mr. Biden has compromised on his previously stated commitments — a contradiction pointed out in a tweet by Hatice Cengiz, Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée.
If he were alive, she wrote, Mr. Khashoggi might have tweeted at Mr. Biden, asking: “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.”
From the Daily team: Your weekend playlist
Here is some further listening on the Middle East and its leaders to add to your weekend playlist.
Nine Days in Gaza: Last summer, a two-week outbreak of violence occurred between Israelis and Palestinians. We spoke to a resident of Gaza City, Rahf Hallaq, about her life and what the conflict was like for her.
Biden’s Saudi Dilemma: More than a year before last week’s meeting with Prince Mohammed, Mr. Biden took the bold step of releasing an intelligence report that implicated the crown prince in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi.
The Disappearance of a Saudi Journalist: Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has promoted himself to the West as a reformer determined to create a more free and open society. The killing of Mr. Khashoggi changed that. (From 2018.)
On The Daily this week
Monday: What did the meeting between President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tell us about relations between the countries they lead?
Tuesday: Has the era of global cooperation over planet-warming emissions ended?
Wednesday: How abortion bans are restricting miscarriage care.
Thursday: A prosecutor who worked on the Mueller inquiry discusses the possibility of criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump.
Friday: As the Great Salt Lake dries up, Utah is facing an “environmental nuclear bomb.”
That’s it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
