The Biden administration told a US judge last week that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, should be granted immunity in a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That decision effectively ends one of the last efforts to hold the prince accountable for Khashoggi’s assassination by a Saudi hit team inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
It is an act of weakness and political cowardice by Joe Biden’s administration, which staked its reputation on holding Khashoggi’s killers accountable and centering its foreign policy on human rights, rather than accommodating autocrats. Biden has done neither. Even worse, he has capitulated yet again to what he views as a realpolitik pressure to make nice with the 37-year-old prince who could well be Saudi Arabia’s king for decades. But Biden can’t seem to collect on that quid-pro-quo arrangement and claim a political victory, as Prince Mohammed has snubbed the US president at every opportunity.
In July, Biden swallowed his pride and traveled to Saudi Arabia, trying to reset his relationship with a regime he called a “pariah” as a presidential candidate. Biden greeted Prince Mohammed with an embarrassing fist bump, hoping that the photo op would convince the Saudis to increase oil production and lower gasoline prices, easing pressure on US consumers struggling with record inflation. By October, the Saudi-led Opec+ cartel did the opposite of what the Biden administration asked – it decided to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, which will mean higher global fuel prices this winter.
After the humiliating announcement by Opec+, Biden vowed last month to impose “consequences” on Saudi Arabia, but his administration hasn’t offered any specifics and it has gone quiet on the issue in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Prince Mohammed coordinated his decision with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who needs higher oil prices to fund his war against Ukraine. The prince also apparently acted to damage the Democrats ahead of this month’s US midterm elections, out of a preference for dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress and the potential for Donald Trump to return to power.
Biden’s latest capitulation centers on a lawsuit filed in a US district court by Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancee, and Dawn, a Washington-based human rights group that was co-founded by the murdered Washington Post columnist. In July, John Bates, the judge hearing the case, asked the Biden administration to advise him whether Prince Mohammed should be granted sovereign immunity, which under international law is normally extended to a president, king or head of government. The US state department’s ruling that the prince qualifies for immunity – based on his recent elevation to the post of prime minister – will most likely lead Judge Bates to dismiss the case.
It did not have to turn out this way. The Biden administration could have decided not to weigh in on the case over the summer, when Prince Mohammed’s status was ambiguous. Instead, the administration asked the judge for an extension, probably hoping to leverage the immunity question while negotiating with the Saudis over oil production. On 27 September, days before the court-imposed deadline, King Salman announced that he would make an exception to Saudi law, under which the king also serves as prime minister. Salman decided to elevate his son and heir to the role, which would entitle the prince to sovereign immunity as a “head of government”. Clearly, it was a ploy to avoid accountability for the Khashoggi killing, since Prince Mohammed has served as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler for the past five years, while his father remains the official head of state.
Thanks to the Biden administration’s immunity decision, Prince Mohammed now has a level of protection from US legal actions that even Trump did not offer him. The prince’s lawyers started seeking immunity in US federal courts in August 2020, when Saad Aljabri, a former top Saudi intelligence official, sued the crown prince in Washington. Aljabri alleged that the royal had dispatched a hit squad to kill him in Canada in 2018, just weeks after Khashoggi’s murder. The Trump administration declined to grant Prince Mohammed immunity in that case, and the suit was ultimately dismissed by a US judge who argued that his court did not have jurisdiction over the matter.
With the prince now shielded from legal action stemming from his regime’s human rights abuses, he will feel far more comfortable traveling to the US and Europe – anywhere he could have faced judicial accountability. And he will be emboldened to crack down more brutally on Saudi dissidents and political opponents, both at home and abroad.
In fact, instead of showing leniency or accommodating his critics, Prince Mohammed has followed the same playbook since he rose to power with his father’s ascension to the Saudi throne: he seeks to assert his strength and brutal authority, even after he gets what he wants. After Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July, the prince did not try to offer conciliatory gestures on human rights, but instead doubled down on his repression. In August, Saudi courts imposed prison sentences of 34 and 45 years on two Saudi women for their social media posts. Last month, the Saudi regime sentenced a dual Saudi-US citizen to 16 years in prison for critical tweets that he had posted while living in Florida.
After being repeatedly humiliated by Prince Mohammed, Biden continues to abandon his stated principles in the hopes of appeasing an autocrat who disdains him. Biden has failed to live up to his promise to put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, and a pledge during the 2020 presidential campaign to seek accountability for Khashoggi’s murder, when he declared: “Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil”.
Today, after nearly two years in power, the Biden administration is still providing weapons and military support to Saudi Arabia, and the US has now shielded the crown prince from any meaningful accountability for Khashoggi’s killing. Despite his lofty rhetoric, Biden is repeating the same mistakes of previous American administrations, supporting a dysfunctional US-Saudi partnership based on keeping oil prices stable and negotiating multibillion-dollar weapons deals.
And Prince Mohammed is far from a pariah – he’s rebuilding his image as a world leader, beyond the reach of the law.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now.