America has long looked down its nose at the players in the Midddle East…
Unease with Authcratic leadership and support for Isreal , no matter , what has now come back to haunt America’s political problem tied to energy costs…
The Biden admin is now scrambling to ‘recalibrate’ things….
And get Iran to agree with a nuke ‘deal’….
Biden & Co. ARE having problems with Democrat’s who want to continue pursuing ‘conduct’ policy vs dealing with the reality of the America econmic issue’s right now…
President Biden, who described Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” state during his campaign, has not yet met or even had a conversation with the de facto Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman’s Emirati counterpart, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, was said to be livid when weeks passed without a high-level U.S. visit or immediately positive response to requests for more air defense supplies after the first of a series of Houthi missile attacks hit the UAE on Jan. 17, according to people familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
In an effort to get the relationship back on track, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday met with the Emirati crown prince in Morocco. Blinken was effusive as they shook hands for the cameras, saying he was “grateful for the time today, and actually I’m grateful for the time every day, because the partnership between our countries truly matters to the United States.” The UAE, he said, was “a leader in the region, increasingly a leader in the world.”…
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A meeting, or even a phone call, with bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince — identified by the CIA as having ordered the 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi — would be problematic for Biden’s already tenuous relations with many in Congress, where the crown prince is regularly denounced. Biden was willing to meet him at last year’s Group of 20 conference in Rome or at the climate summit in Scotland, but bin Salman declined to attend the gatherings. The White House would not have objected, people familiar with events said, if the crown prince had picked up the phone during last month’s call between his father, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, and Biden….
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But the Arab states and others in the region share a concern about U.S. priorities regarding Tehran, said James Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador who served as the Trump administration’s envoy to defeat the Islamic State. Calling on the administration to take steps that would prove to gulf allies that Biden is willing to embrace more than harsh rhetoric about Iran, Jeffrey described the action as “a football game where your team never scores any points and keeps on losing the ball, but the coach keeps yelling” that the team can win….