Obama defends U.S.-Saudi ties

U.S. President Barack Obama has defended the U.S. government’s willingness to cooperate closely with Saudi Arabia on national security issues despite increasing concerns over human rights abuses in the kingdom.

U.S. President Obama on Tuesday cut short his visit to India in order to meet with the new Saudi king in capital Riyadh and offer his condolences on the death of King Abdullah last week.

Saudi Arabia’s status as one of Washington’s highly important allies has often trumped concerns over human rights in the country and “terrorist” funding that reportedly flows from the kingdom.

The U.S. president has said that applying steady pressure over human rights during his visit has been most effective.

“Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counterterrorism or dealing with regional stability,” Obama said in a CNN interview that aired in advance of Obama’s arrival in Riyadh.

Obama has suggested that during his visit he would not be raising concerns regarding about Saudi Arabia’s flogging of blogger Raif Badawi, who was convicted of insulting Islam on an online forum for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes.

Badawi is due to undergo 50 lashes every week after Friday prayers, which will continue for 20 weeks until his punishment is complete.

The United States had previously appealed to Saudi Arabia to cancel the sentence.

Despite differences the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have worked closely on issues concerning the region. Most recently, the kingdom joined the U.S. in launching airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group.

Obama has acknowledged that U.S. willingness to pursue closer ties with Saudi Arabia has in light of the kingdom’s human rights record has often made American allies uncomfortable.

The U.S. president has said that he will continue ties with Saudi Arabia saying: “The trend-line is one that I will sustain throughout the rest of my presidency.”

Since Obama already congratulated King Salman on his accession via telephone on January 24, the meeting with new Saudi king in capital Riyadh could be more substantive.

It is not the first time the two men have met. Salman was at King Abdullah’s desert camp outside Riyadh when Obama visited in March 2014 and also held talks in the Oval Office when he visited Washington in April 2012, before his appointment as crown prince later that year.

The U.S. readout on the latter meeting was a model of brevity and generalities: the two men affirmed the strong and enduring partnership between their countries and discussed a range of bilateral and regional issues.

There are many reports that the seventy-eight-year-old Salman is no longer up to the job mentally.

President Obama will doubtless meet with other top officials as well, including Salman’s half-brother Crown Prince Muqrin and their nephew Muhammad bin Nayef (a.k.a. MbN), the new deputy crown prince.

But the more interesting prospective attendee will be the king’s son Muhammad bin Salman (MbS), newly promoted to defense minister and head of the royal court.

Still in his early thirties, MbS — as he will doubtless become known — has emerged out of nowhere in the past two years to become his father’s closest advisor.

Apparently a bureaucratic infighter par excellence, he is credited with forcing the removal of four deputy defense ministers in fifteen months.

The last to go was Prince Khaled bin Bandar, who resigned in June 2014 after just six weeks on the job. Khaled, who is yet to be replaced, was subsequently made head of intelligence by the late king. One certain absentee is veteran foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, who is recovering from recent back surgery in the United States.

Some media outlets like Palestine Samaa TV have said Saud al-Faisal will be replaced with Prince Sultan, one of King Salman’s sons.

The meeting will likely be an opportunity for King Salman to raise the profile of some of his other sons, a well-established prerogative of being monarch. Prince Khaled bin Salman is an F-15 pilot who took part in coalition raids on the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group targets in Syria last September.

Prince Sultan, head of the antiquities and tourism commission, was the first Saudi astronaut. Prince Abdulaziz is the long-serving assistant oil minister. Prince Faisal, who has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, is the governor of Medina, the holiest city in Islam after Mecca.

One test of the meeting’s success could be the presence or absence of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to Washington who served as head of intelligence until U.S. officials forced his removal last April because of differences over tactics against the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

King Abdullah retained him as a special advisor, and he was a fixture of many top-level Saudi meetings, but his presence would be anathema to the U.S. side.

Whatever the final communiqué says, the subjects most likely to be discussed are Syria, Iran, ISIL, and oil prices.

The most interesting question for President Obama will be whether King Salman and his team of advisors have an order of priority that differs from King Abdullah’s. The answer is unlikely to be shared publicly but could be reflected in U.S. policy in the coming months.