When Joe Biden took over the White House from Donald Trump last year, there was no country whose relationship with the US changed more suddenly and more drastically than Saudi Arabia.
As a candidate, Biden had vowed to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” amid mounting evidence Saudi officials were behind the 2018 murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi; within a month in office, Biden had declassified US intelligence pointing to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, as having been behind the killing.
But amid skyrocketing oil prices and record inflation at home, the US president — who had once characterised the “battle between democracies and autocracies” as the central guiding principle of his foreign policy — has been forced into a sharp U-turn.