• President Joe Biden gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a fist bump.
  • Ahead of their first face-to-face meeting, Biden wouldn't say whether he'd shake MBS' hand.
  • Biden called Saudi Arabia "a pariah" after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.

President Joe Biden greeted Saudi Crown Price Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump on Friday.

Biden had previously dodged a question on whether he would shake the de-facto Saudi ruler's hand.

Video of the first face-to-face meeting between the president and Prince Mohammed — often referred to as MBS — showed a brief fist bump before the two men headed inside.

In a November 2019 presidential debate, Biden vowed to make the kingdom  a "pariah" following the 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

"We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are," Biden said at the debate.

Last year, the Biden administration released a declassified intelligence report that explicitly implicated MBS in Khashoggi's murder. The administration slapped sanctions on a number of Saudis in concert with the release of the report, but stopped short of imposing any economic penalties on MBS.

Biden's first trip to the Middle East since taking office has come as gas prices have surged in the US, leading the president to seek an increase in oil production from Saudi Arabia. It also comes as the Biden administration works to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, an agreement the Saudis have frequently criticized. 

Critics of the president's visit to Saudi Arabia say he's undermining his pledge to recalibrate US-Saudi relations on top of his vow to have a foreign policy centered on human rights. 

"A presidential trip to Saudi Arabia right now is going to be confirmation, validation not just that it's business as usual but that MBS got away with murder," Aaron David Miller, a former US diplomat who advised multiple secretaries of state on the Middle East, told Insider last month.

"I don't think there's any way to change that optic," Miller said, underscoring that Biden is sending a "pretty powerful signal that it's OK now to do business with MBS" by meeting with him in Saudi Arabia.

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