Biden is between a very big rock and a very hard place. He’s darned if he does (meet MBS), darned if he doesn’t (try to convince the Saudis to drill more oil). The greatest existential threat to America was the presence of Donald J. Trump as its president; I’ll be forever grateful that Joe Biden got into the race and beat Trump.
As much as it pains me to listen to self-proclaimed “realists” like John Mearsheimer, who is characterized in a Wikipedia article as “developing the theory of offensive realism, which describes the interaction between great powers as being primarily driven by the rational desire to achieve regional hegemony in an anarchic international system,” I can’t help but conclude that the limitations of an international body like the United Nations are sewn into their very fabric. Might does truly make right. Simply put, Russia — whether or not it should have claimed the veto power of its predecessor Soviet Union — not only has the gas that some western nations need but nukes that we all fear. This is, I suppose, realism.
Maybe Trump doesn’t need another Roy Cohn; he seems to have mastered the Cohn playbook anyway.