At a Democratic primary debate in 2019, Joe Biden addressed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen by vowing to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah”. He was addressing his constituents in the Democratic Party. Among American liberals, anti-Saudi sentiments rose largely due to Donald Trump’s close ties to Riyadh’s leadership and moral outrage surrounding the Khashoggi case. All that made the then-presidential hopeful’s Saudi-bashing rhetoric popular among many voters who helped him defeat Trump the following year. Yet no realistic analyst at the time genuinely believed that Biden, if e…