WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Saudi Arabia this week for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman amid a U.S. push for progress toward normalizing relations between the Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia despite the ongoing Israeli carnage against Palestinians.
Talks on normalization had been put on ice in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s assault on Gaza, but conversations have resumed in recent months.
A U.S. official said Sullivan planned talks with the crown prince to check in on the issue but did not expect a major breakthrough.
A second U.S. official said Sullivan would consult broadly on a number of matters.
“He has not been to Saudi Arabia in some time and there’s a lot to discuss,” the second official said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on March 21 that the United States and Saudi Arabia had made “good progress” in talks on normalizing ties between the kingdom and Israel, without providing a timeline for concluding a deal.
As part of a normalization deal, Saudi Arabia wants to clinch a mutual military pact with Washington and get U.S. support for its nuclear program.
Washington’s efforts for adding Saudi Arabia to the list of Arab countries that have signed the so-called Abraham Accords come at a critical time when U.S. President Joe Biden is seeking re-election and the U.S. government has been left embarrassed by the kingdom’s bolstering of ties with Iran and Syria, and its further gravitation toward China.
The UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco signed U.S.-brokered normalization agreements with Israel in 2020, drawing condemnations from Palestinians who slammed the deals as “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.”