Saudi Arabia hosts Ukraine meeting as U.S. advances Saudi-Israel normalization roadmap

Laura Rozen is Al-Monitor’s diplomatic correspondent, and her Substack is a great one to follow if you’re interested in Middle East diplomatic history. She often includes interesting details here that don’t make it into the final drafts of her reporting. It seems from this that the Sullivan-MBS talks were reasonably fruitful. I wonder what will ultimately come of them.

 
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is leading the American delegation to a Saudi Arabian-hosted meeting on the Ukraine crisis in Jeddah this weekend involving some 40 nations. China’s special envoy for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui will also attend the Jeddah meeting, the Chinese foreign ministry said.

“China is willing to work with the international community to continue to play a constructive role in promoting a political solution to the crisis in Ukraine,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a statement today (Aug. 4).

The Ukraine meeting in Jeddah comes as some U.S. officials came away more optimistic from a meeting last week (July 27) between Sullivan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) on a possible framework for Israel-Saudi normalization, U.S. and Saudi sources said. But, U.S. sources cautioned, this is a complex process with a lot of moving parts, and they still have a way to go. In addition, US President Joe Biden is still not thought to have decided if he thinks the initiative is viable.

Some White House officials believe that Saudi Crown  Prince Mohammed bin Salman “has made a strategic decision to go for Israel normalization while Biden is in office, mainly because he understands that he only gets what he wants with a Democratic president,” a Saudi expert  source, speaking not for attribution, said in an interview Friday (Aug.4). “U.S. officials say now that he’s bought into it. The goal is to try to get a deal done by the first quarter of 2024.”

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The Cosmopolitan Globalist cross-posted a post from Diplomatic, by Laura Rozen