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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator.

I am delighted to be joined today by Graham Wood, who is a staff writer at the Atlantic

and a lecturer in political science at Yale. And we're going to be talking about Joe Biden's

visit to Saudi Arabia. Now Graham, Biden will visit Saudi Arabia

next week. There's quite a lot of speculation about the various sort of geopolitical dynamics

involved. Biden has said it's not about the oil, but that's almost certainly not entirely true.

Is that right? Well, it's always about the oil with Saudi Arabia, but it's about a lot of other things too. And only some of them are geopolitical.

It's also a matter of personal grudges, personal distaste, the fact that the crown prince of

Saudi Arabia seems to have almost gone out of his way to slight Biden,

and that Biden has almost gone out of his way to offend the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

So with Saudi Arabia, given that it is in absolute monarchy,

there's one guy at the top who's deputized his son and who his son will soon be king too.

It's always about oil. It's always about oil.

It's always about geopolitics and it's always about personal relationships.

So all these things are going to converge when Biden shows up.

Well, Biden, though, leave said that America, when he was running in 2020,

said that America should treat Saudi Arabia as the pariah that they are.

It's hard to see how you sort of overcome that

in a diplomatic sense. Yeah, once you call someone a pariah, it means they've got to stink on them,

...