Prince Khalid bin Salman, the son of Saudi King Salman and brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, meets with State Department officials Wednesday on a trip to Washington that the White House would rather not talk about.
Prince Khalid’s visit was not publicly announced by either U.S. or Saudi officials and is the highest-profile visit by a Saudi official since the Biden administration declassified an intelligence assessment surrounding the killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul in 2018. On Tuesday, he met with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin; Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Pariah no more? There is nothing unusual about a representative of a U.S. regional partner meeting with U.S. officials. (Prince Khalid is Saudi Arabia’s deputy defense minister.) However, the lack of fanfare underlines the Biden administration’s wariness in dealing with a government that then-candidate Joe Biden promised to treat as a “pariah” for human rights abuses, chief among them the killing of Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and critic of the Saudi government.
In 2018, Prince Khalid was serving as the Saudi ambassador to Washington—at 29, the youngest to hold the position. In public interviews shortly after Khashoggi’s killing, the prince repeatedly denied Saudi involvement. A CIA intelligence report later alleged that Prince Khalid called Khashoggi personally to assure him of his safety before he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an assessment the Saudi government denies.
A recalibration? Biden initially held true to his promise that “America will never again check its principles at the door just to buy oil or sell weapons,” when he announced a pause in proposed weapons sales to the kingdom; the decision will likely be watered down to a suspension in the sale of air-to-ground offensive weaponry.