JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — President Joe Biden on Saturday will lay out his strategy for the Middle East as he closes out the final leg of a four-day trip meant to bolster the U.S. in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, Biden will meet with heads of state from six Arab Gulf countries, plus Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq for a regional summit. It comes a day after he championed steps toward normalizing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia and sought to rebuild cooperation with the Saudi king and crown prince after once promising to make the kingdom a “pariah” for its human rights abuses. holster U.S. positioning and knit the region together against Iran. When he speaks to the Gulf Cooperation Council and its Arab allies, the White House said, Biden, will offer his most fulsome vision yet for the region and how the U.S. can cooperate with it.
His first Middle East trip comes 11 months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and as Biden aims to reprioritize the U.S. away from the Middle East’s ruinous wars and ongoing conflicts stretching from Libya to Syria.
“It’s a strategy fit for purpose for 2022 as opposed to the two decades of major land wars that the U.S. fought in this region over the course of the 2000s,” Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters in a preview of the speech.
Energy prices — elevated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — were expected to be high on the agenda. But Biden aides tempered expectations that he would leave with a deal for regional producers to immediately boost supply.