Biden will visit Saudi Arabia reversing his judgment

The reopening of pilgrimages to Mecca, after the two-year suspension due to the pandemic, precedes the visit of American President Biden to Saudi Arabia. The expected number of pilgrims is around one million and a visit to the holy city of Islam is mandatory for Muslim faithful at least once in their life. The pilgrimage of these days is the most important of the year and for the anniversary, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman intends to exploit all the potential that he can obtain, especially at the political level. If in normal conditions, for the Arab country the religious celebration brings an increase in earnings and provides greater legitimacy to Riyadh within the Islamic world, this year the pilgrimage could be functional, if not for rehabilitation, at least for a sort of suspension of the judgment on the crown prince in relation to the murder of the dissident journalist in Turkey, of which Bin Salman was accused of being the instigator. Precisely for this fact, US President Biden himself had described Saudi Arabia as a pariah. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia a trial was held in which some members of the secret services were sentenced to death for the death of the journalist, but this did not serve to eliminate doubts about the crown prince, despite an increase in his public activity and the the granting of some reforms towards women, which actually seemed more apparent than substantial; however, the international situation with the war in Ukraine which led to the sanctions, especially on energy supplies, imposes the need to resume relations with the Saudi regime, above all to facilitate the increase in oil supplies from Riyadh to American allies penalized by the blockade from imports from Russia. This is a clear episode of realpolitik, which, in order to achieve immediate objectives, sacrifices the condemnation of one of the most repressive countries in the world, which, among other things, is the protagonist of the fierce war in Yemen, where Saudi interests have unarmed civilians sacrificed and which has created one of the most serious health and hygiene situations in the world. Moreover, a similar case is represented by the sacrifice of the Kurdish cause, which with its fighters has practically replaced the American soldiers against the Islamic State, in favor of Erdogan, a dictator clearly in difficulty within his country, who seeks rehabilitation international with its diplomatic action for the resolution of the war between Kiev and Moscow. International analysts predict that Biden, precisely to justify his visit and with it the rehabilitation of the Arab country, will be committed to praising the reforms promised by Bin Salman to reform the rigid state structure of the Islamist type. If these political twists have always existed and have also been justified by contingent needs, however, it is necessary to arrive, albeit not immediately but progressively, at a fixed point where certain nations that have certain conditions can no longer be among the reliable interlocutors. The discourse is certainly very broad because it involves various sectors, if not all, of the political and economic aspects that concern Western democracies. The case in question highlights the peculiarity of providing international credit to an instigator of an assassination, a crime committed on the ground of a foreign country and also against the freedom of the press, a person who has violated a series of rules that cannot qualify him as interlocutor up to the standards required, however the moment of necessity, also due to a possible, even if not probable, potential collaboration with enemy states, obliges the highest Western representative to validate the promise of any improvements in laws, which in all likelihood , they will be only facade operations. From a diplomatic point of view it can represent a success, but from a political point of view, it represents a sort of delegitimization, not of the single American president, but of the whole West. The need to eliminate relations of this type, or, at least, to have them from a point of strength, must be developed in a programmed and progressive manner with a general policy capable of investing both political and economic aspects, starting right from within the West. , maintaining the peculiarities of the individual States but finding non-derogable common points regulated by international agreements and treaties regularly ratified by national parliaments.