Jonathan Ernst/Pool via AP
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud arrive to speak to reporters at the State Department in Washington, October 14, 2021.
On the campaign trail in November 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden said in a primary debate that he would make Saudi Arabia “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” The comments came after the Persian Gulf monarchy had been roundly condemned for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
After a year in office, so far the Biden White House is doing anything but making Saudi Arabia a pariah. Instead, the administration has kept Saudi Arabia close, along with the Gulf kingdom’s junior partner, the United Arab Emirates. The two Gulf monarchies, with direct U.S. participation, are deeply involved in a war against Yemen that has drawn criticism for its tremendous humanitarian costs and death toll of 377,000. Biden, however, has not taken moves to constrain the war effort against Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, and is appealing to the Gulf monarchies to increase oil production, to offset rising prices amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Saudi Arabia and the UAE are reportedly responding to those appeals by demanding even more U.S. support for the Yemen war effort.)
That the Biden administration is enmeshed with the Saudis and UAE should come as no surprise. The administration is peppered with appointees who took on their roles after stints at organizations with ties to the Gulf monarchies. According to the Prospect’s analysis, at least 28 top Biden officials—some of whom wield considerable influence—came to the administration by way of groups that have been funded by, work directly with, or have financial relationships to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or both.
The past relationships are raising questions among anti-war advocates about Biden’s backtracking on his campaign-trail promise to end U.S. support for the war on Yemen.
Think Tank Ties
One organization that provided brainpower to the top echelons of the administration is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a policy research think tank. CSIS receives funding from the UAE, according to its website, and it also takes money from Saudi Arabia via Saudi Aramco, the oil company that is majority-owned by the Saudi monarchy. Kathleen Hicks, Biden’s deputy secretary of defense, was hired directly out of CSIS, where she served as vice president and program director. Melissa Dalton, an assistant secretary at the Pentagon, also came from CSIS, where she was in the role of senior fellow and deputy director. On February 7, Andrew Hunter, a CSIS alum, took on the role of assistant secretary of the Air Force, where he is responsible for weapons acquisitions, contracts, and logistics.
CSIS not only gets funds from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but has also published materials aligned with those countries’ interests. In December 2021, the think tank published a report on the Yemen war that called for increased U.S. support for Saudi Arabia. The report refers to the Yemeni rebel group and Saudi opponents the Houthis as a “terrorist” group—an official Trump-era designation that the Biden administration had backed off of but is considering reinstating.
CSIS is just the start. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a liberal hawkish foreign-policy think tank, sent an invoice to UAE officials for $250,000 to support a study on an international arms control agreement that was standing in the way of weapons sales to the Gulf monarchy. And staffers at the think tank have pushed positions that align with UAE interests on the arms sales: In 2017, Ilan Goldenberg, then director of CNAS’s Middle East Security Program, advocated in favor of the arms sales, telling The Washington Post they were a “natural continuation” of a critical defense relationship. This past December, Goldenberg was appointed by Biden to serve as an acting assistant secretary of defense.
At least nine other Biden administration officials are alums of CNAS, whether as former fellows, staffers, or board members. They hold top intelligence positions—such as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, a former CNAS board member, and Deputy Director of the CIA David Cohen—to lower-ranking appointments at the State, Defense, and Treasury Departments.
Finally, there is the RAND Corporation, one of the oldest think tanks in the United States. Christine Wormuth, secretary of the U.S. Army under the Biden administration, was hired directly out of the organization, whose funders include the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Now, RAND is also largely funded by the U.S. military, so there’s little pretense of it being a forum for progressive views. But its infusion with Saudi and UAE money is still worth highlighting.
“We should question their activity and neutrality and whether they would make any effort to take steps toward ending the war in Yemen, given certain financial ties,” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, a professor and Yemeni American anti-war activist, about these staffers. “These people can’t be trusted to make policy that’s just. I already knew that, but this is one additional factor to consider.”
Links With Private Firms
In addition to think tanks, numerous top Biden officials hail from firms or companies that presently or in the past had direct financial ties with Gulf monarchies. Brett McGurk—currently Biden’s deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa—was hired into the administration from Primer Technologies, an artificial-intelligence company. As journalist Jonathan Guyer reported for the Prospect, the sovereign fund of the UAE “has invested heavily in Primer.”
McGurk has fallen under scrutiny for his close relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He was one of two high-ranking officials dispatched in mid-February to Saudi Arabia to urge the monarchy to produce more oil, amid rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine. The trip, which also included a visit to UAE, was aimed at ensuring “the United States is doing everything possible to support the territorial defense of both countries against Iranian-enabled missile and UAV attacks,” according to a statement from the National Security Council.
Many of the Biden administration’s ties come from the shadowy world of consultancy and advisory firms. The Cohen Group, which calls itself a business advisory firm, says on its website that it “assisted Saudi Arabia’s largest public company to win multi-billion-dollar projects in Latin America.” Saudi Arabia’s largest public company is oil company Aramco. However, even if this weren’t a reference to the Saudi-owned Aramco, other statements on The Cohen Group’s website indicate collaboration with a government entity, including the firm’s boasting that it “assisted a US firm to secure an $11 billion Saudi energy and industrial project involving a joint venture with an offshoot of the Saudi Ministry of Energy, Industry, and Mineral Resources.” (The Cohen Group did not respond to an email request for more information about these collaborations.)
At least two high-ranking Biden administration officials were hired directly out of this firm. Among them is Nicholas Burns, Biden’s ambassador to China.
The Cohen Group is not an isolated case. Finsbury Glover Hering, which calls itself “a leading global strategic communications and public affairs consultancy,” counts the UAE among its clients, and Saudi Arabia among its former clients, as noted by Guyer. The firm also supplied its former partner, Liz Allen, to the Biden administration, where she now serves as assistant secretary of state for global public affairs.
After a year in office, so far the Biden White House is doing anything but making Saudi Arabia a pariah.
WestExec Advisors, another firm that played a large role in staffing the Biden administration, has since entered into a relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This happened by way of Teneo, a CEO advisory firm, which bought a minority stake in WestExec Advisors in March 2021. Teneo has counted both Saudi Arabia and the UAE among its high-paying clients.
As Guyer and Ryan Grim previously reported, at least 15 former consultants from WestExec Advisors have been brought into the Biden administration’s foreign-policy and law enforcement positions. Among them are some of the most powerful people in the administration, like Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state.
Now, to be fair, the financial relationship between Teneo and WestExec Advisors was initiated around the time, or after, these officials joined the Biden administration. Alums of WestExec Advisors are still being included in this list, however, because of the high likelihood that Teneo saw the investment in WestExec Advisors as an opportunity to influence the Biden administration. This was acknowledged by Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times, who described Teneo’s purchase of a minority stake as “a move seen as bolstering ties to BIDEN's DC.” After all, it’s common for top bureaucrats to return to their previous private-sector firms once they are finished in public service.
One WestExec Advisors alum is worth highlighting: Barbara Leaf, former ambassador to the UAE. In December 2020, Leaf told Vox reporter Alex Ward that she supported Trump’s proposed $23 billion arms sale to the UAE. “While some worried the sale of advanced fighter jets, drones, and bombs would make the Gulf nation a stronger regional player—perhaps willing to use its newfound might to attack Iran—Leaf told me she didn’t fear that possibility,” Ward reported.
The industry relationships of Biden administration officials don’t stop there. Lloyd Austin III, the secretary of defense, is a former board member of Raytheon, a weapons company that supplies bombs to both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which have used these weapons in the war on Yemen. (In 2018 alone, Raytheon said sales to Saudi Arabia comprised 5 percent of its revenue.)
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are not the only countries that have direct ties to Biden administration officials. But the fact that the Biden administration is acting in the interests of those states, despite the president’s campaign-trail pledges to shift course, raises questions about the impact those relationships have. The Biden administration has recently escalated its support for the UAE and Saudi war in Yemen, including statements expressing backing for military action, and approval of arms shipments to both countries, amid alarming reports of civilian deaths. The Yemen Data Project, a war monitor group, finds that January 2022 was “the most violent month in the Saudi-led air war in Yemen in more than five years.”
Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, an organization that is working to end U.S. participation in the war on Yemen, tells the Prospect that, taken as a whole, these ties “provide critical insights about why the Biden administration has continued to stun opponents of U.S. participation in the Saudi and UAE war against Yemen with their strict adherence to the propaganda narratives of those despotic regimes.”
Paige Oamek contributed research to this report.
