Former Vice President Joe Biden has joined most congressional Democrats in calling for an end to U.S. support for a Saudi Arabia-led coalition's brutal war in Yemen.
But Barack Obama, whose administration launched that cooperation with the Saudis, has been silent. Reporter Akbar Ahmed explored this rare split between the ex-president and his onetime No. 2. We asked him about it.
How did this story come about?
Collaboration! Joe Biden made surprisingly tough comments about Saudi Arabia in the last Democratic debate, saying he'd treat it as a "pariah" — a break with the policies of President Donald Trump and the administration Biden served in. After that happened, my editor said we should investigate whether Obama had weighed in as the kingdom had become increasingly unpopular. I soon found that his team had no interest in doing so and that he hadn't spoken about the two major Saudi-related issues that have drawn global attention and criticism from nearly every major Democrat: the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen, which Obama directed the U.S. to support. After talking with editors and sources, I decided the most fruitful thing to do would be to track down as many people close to Obama as possible — particularly those who'd taken the stand he hadn't.
What did you find that was most surprising?
I was surprised how allergic the Biden camp was to talking about this, by which I mean both the official campaign and closely connected outsiders. It's clearly an area in which they've decided they can go further than Obama. Why not do that as assertively as possible? Thinking about that (and talking about it with people on background) helped me explore their calculus in the piece.
I was also surprised by how frank Susan Rice, Obama's former national security advisor, was in her view of the importance of the former president weighing in on the Khashoggi murder. "The Khashoggi thing is over a year old," she said. That's the kind of dismissive comment about a major human rights story that's quite common in the foreign policy establishment. But decision-makers rarely say that sort of thing in public — in part because leaders from both parties have long tried to project an image of American ethical leadership.
Finally: I should be used to this by now, but it still kind of surprises me how many people from the former administration still want reporters to treat them as though they're in government and the stakes of revealing their views are dramatically high and potentially risky. You shouldn't have to be on background that much — particularly about issues you've already publicly weighed in on!
What was the hardest thing about reporting, writing or editing this piece?
Because I was drawing a clear chain of responsibility to the Obama administration and they have an obvious incentive to deflect and a convenient foil to use in doing so — namely President Trump — I needed to be as clear as possible about what the Yemen policy has actually looked like and the extent to which it changed under Trump. I don't think I could have done the story the way I did if I hadn't been closely covering the policy right from the outset, which prepared me to deal with a barrage of statements, public and private, that claimed Obama's policy was different from Trump's because he has different values. That might be true, but I knew that what former Obama officials were calling "doubling down" after their tenure was not quite the expansion or change they want people to think it was. In fact, Trump has accepted some limitations on Yemen that the Obama team considered but resisted. All of that matters immensely for the kind of reckoning around Yemen that's essential for honesty about America's past and better choices in its future.
Do you think the next Democratic president will really have a policy towards Saudi Arabia that differs from what Obama/Biden did? Why or why not?
They almost certainly will have to given the way nearly every part of the party establishment, from longtime policy folks like Jake Sullivan (a top Biden advisor) to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), are calling for a reassessment of U.S.-Saudi ties. I don't think it will be the "pariah" treatment that Biden talked about. And it's possible that the primary shift will be rhetorical, especially if current attempts at Saudi-Iran rapprochement stumble and the Iranians again look like an imminent threat to the kingdom (a prospect some Democrats raised this week in rejecting tough measures on Saudi in the annual defense bill). But because of a confluence of factors — remarkably high public disdain for the kingdom (which sometimes manifests in unhealthy ways), the way de facto ruler crown prince Muhammed bin Salman has made the Saudi-American relationship a personal one between him and Trump and Jared Kushner, rather than a broad strategic one, and shifting U.S. interests on matters like the global energy market — I think the stage is set for some kind of real change.
What do you want readers to take away from this story?
That honesty matters. That it's not a weakness but in fact a strength. A lot of the responses I've received attacked me for focusing on an Obama failure. I hope given the evidence I provided on Obama's own people recognizing their unhelpful and morally dubious role on Yemen and the opportunity that any change in administration represents for a chance to do better that readers understand the value of reckonings around painful issues.
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