Why Big Tech’s glory days are coming to a close.
A wave of significant layoffs is crashing across Silicon Valley.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg cut 11,000 employees, or 13 percent of Facebook. Amazon has confirmed plans to slash as many as 10,000 corporate and tech jobs. Lyft. Robinhood. Stripe. Netflix. Coinbase. They’re all downsizing. And they’re not just axing jobs — they’re also doing away with some of the perks that have become synonymous with working in tech.
Each company has its own, unique problems driving cost-cutting measures. But there are also a couple of macro reasons for the contractions. First, tech companies were pandemic winners. When consumers were stuck at home on Zoom meetings, Peloton rides, and watching Netflix, tech companies’ stock went up. They got huge infusions of cash and used it to expand — a lot, and sometimes in increasingly risky verticals. But as the economy worsens and inflation rises, while pandemic restrictions ease, investors are looking for safer bets, and tech companies are coming back to Earth. Hence the belt-tightening.
The other macro reason for cost-cutting, as Recode’s Peter Kafka argues on Today, Explained, is that the biggest tech companies are now mature. In other words, they can’t provide investors the same kind of massive growth they could in the boom times of the late 2000s and 2010s. And that will have all kinds of ramifications for players in the industry.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
Noel King
What do cost-cutting measures look like at this point?
Peter Kafka
These are cost-cutting measures, but if you talk to people in tech, they’re sort of emotional, cultural resets as well. Google really kicked this off many years ago, saying, “We’re making so much money that we can afford to do this. We’re going to hire all the best talent. We’re going to keep them here by paying them a lot, but also through these outrageous perks: Not just free food but multiple cafeterias at every one of our offices where you can gorge yourself all day. Really elaborate gyms and shuttle buses to take you from your house down to our campus.”
And what you started to see last spring was companies like Facebook and Google saying, “We’re going to tap the brakes on this stuff, too.” Facebook last spring said, “You can still have free food if you stay here and work late into the evening, but we’re not going to give it to you quite so early.” So you really do have to sort of stick around at work. And as petty a thing as, “We’re going to give you smaller to-go boxes so you can’t take the steak we’re giving you and go feed your family with it.” They’re saying, “We don’t want you to think of Facebook that way anymore.” It’s going to be closer to what normal working conditions for lots of people around the US, at least, are used to.
Noel King
How much of an existential shift in tech do you think this time period is?
Peter Kafka
I think it’s a pretty big shift. I think most people who are working in tech have only been there during boom times. The last real deflation in tech was all the way back in 2000, 2001. There’s almost no one working in tech now who was around for that. So if you’ve been working in tech, you’ve only known things going up and to the right. You got paid a lot. There were always companies who wanted to hire you away from the company you were at, so you got paid even more. You knew that you could leave Facebook or Google and go to a startup, and if that startup didn’t work, maybe it would get bought by Facebook or Google.
And all of that comes to a record-scratch stop this year. People say, “Oh, I can’t just walk out. I can’t just leave Facebook or Google and go to a crypto or Web3 startup and make even more money. I might just actually have to sort of do the job that I have right now and be content with that.” And that’s a big cultural reset.
Noel King
Peter, you argue that the fundamental problem underlying a lot of these cuts is one that we love talking about on Today, Explained: the problem is growth — or lack thereof.
Peter Kafka
Yes. There’s a bigger story that goes back a couple of decades. These tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple all had crazy, crazy, crazy growth. They were selling tons of ads. They were selling tons of iPhones. They reflected a big change in the way the world used technology. They were at the front of that. They got rewarded for that.
But those companies aren’t growing at the same rate anymore. Many of them are pretty old now — or their main product is pretty old. The iPhone is 15 years old. Google’s main search ad business is 20 years old. YouTube is 15 years old, more or less. A lot of these companies and products are still very big and very profitable, but they’re not going to grow like gangbusters anymore. It’s hard to extract the rapid revenue and profit gains these companies had for the last couple of decades. And so if you’re Wall Street and you’re looking for growth, it’s harder to find that in Big Tech these days. And Big Tech is less dynamic than it used to be. These Big Tech companies were disruptors, and now they’re kind of the big, established giants. And from a Wall Street perspective, that is less appealing.
Noel King
Do these companies have to grow?
Peter Kafka
You can definitely do it. It helps if you own your own company, if you don’t owe anyone money, if you don’t have shareholders looking for a return, but you can definitely do it. And you can even get away with not growing that much if you’re a certain kind of company that has told investors, “We’re going to grow a couple percent each year, but we’re not going to grow like gangbusters.” That’s a pretty rational way to live life and to run a business. Wall Street, though, often says “That’s fine, but what we want are big returns. We want to make more money, so we want massive growth and we want you to promise us massive growth.” That’s what a lot of these tech companies were delivering on for a couple of decades. And now it’s harder for them to do it.
Noel King
And are the tech companies being honest with investors? Have they gone to them and said, “Look, guys and gals. We’re not going to grow quite as much as we used to.”
Peter Kafka
Yes and no. They have to report their numbers publicly. But if they say, “Look, we’re essentially going to stop growing, period,” or, “We’re only going to grow a little bit for a long time,” that’s game over. Wall Street doesn’t want to hear that. Or Wall Street will say, “That’s fine. But you’re now worth 70 percent less than what you used to be because we want to get that growth somewhere.” So you find lots of companies saying, “All right, things are slowing now, but trust us, X number of years from now, this magic bean is going to sprout, and we’re going to have a new VR headset. We’re going to have a new metaverse. We’re going to grow in markets that don’t exist yet. Trust us, we’re going to get there.” Netflix is going through a version of this where they’re saying, “Yeah, it turns out maybe streaming isn’t quite as big as we thought it was, but we’re also in gaming. That sounds good, right?”
Noel King
What does all of this mean for the founders? They’re old, too, now. What happens to them?
Peter Kafka
One thing that I think is pretty telling is almost all of the men — and they’re all men — who started these Big Tech companies and ran them: They’re not there anymore. There’s different stories in every case — Steve Jobs is dead — but a lot of these guys said, “We don’t want to run these companies anymore.” Amazon, Google, Microsoft all said, “We’re going to bring in professional managers and say, you go for it. We’re going to do other stuff.” We’re going to go buy the Washington Post. We’re going to go, in Bill Gates’ case, try to vaccinate the world. We’re going to do other stuff because frankly, it’s more interesting to do other stuff than to run these big companies. Mark Zuckerberg is the one big exception.
Noel King
Does all of this shakiness mean that the Big Tech companies have less power than they used to?
Peter Kafka
I don’t know that they have less power, frankly. They are much less valuable, but they’re still the most valuable companies in the world. So comparatively, they’re still the big dogs. I think it’s going to be harder for them to get the best and brightest, the most ambitious people, because those people will look around and say, “We as employees, we want to go to places where there’s a lot of growth. That’s fun for us personally. It’s intriguing. It’s also — there’s a lot of financial upside for us. So maybe we’re not going to go work at Facebook or Google or Amazon or Apple. We’ll go do something else instead.”
Noel King
I hear you saying there’s a potential upside here, like a broader upside.
Peter Kafka
Yeah. I don’t want to be pollyannaish about this because people are losing jobs. And people are going to have a harder time paying rent or mortgages or feeding their families. But it’s part real and part fable of Silicon Valley to have this creative destruction where old things get taken down. New, cool things get built in their place. It’s part of the fable and myth of Silicon Valley that has a great deal of truth to it as well. And so there’s lots of folks saying, “All right, we’re going to go make something new. By the way, we made a bunch of money in the last couple of years, the last 10 years. We can afford to not be working at a Big Tech company for a while. Let’s go cast around for a new idea.”
The FDA has given a California startup approval to sell its lab-grown “cultivated” chicken. Now the USDA has to weigh in.
On Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave approval to Upside Foods, a startup based in the San Francisco area, to sell its lab-grown, or “cultivated,” chicken. The product — which is biologically indistinguishable from chicken meat taken from a slaughtered bird — is made by growing animal cells in bioreactors, which are fed a mix of nutrients to develop into fat and muscle tissue. Though the company still needs USDA approval before it can sell to consumers, it’s a major step forward in the race to what could be an ethically and environmentally superior form of meat.
“We evaluated the information Upside Foods submitted to the agency and have no further questions at this time about the firm’s safety conclusion,” the FDA announced in a statement Wednesday. “The firm will use animal cell culture technology to take living cells from chickens and grow the cells in a controlled environment to make the cultured animal cell food.”
In a press release, Upside Foods said it will now work with the USDA to finalize the approval process before it can finally be sold to consumers. If granted USDA approval, their chicken will likely first be sold in small quantities at Atelier Crenn, a restaurant run by Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn, who announced a partnership with Upside Foods late last year.
According to Wired, Upside’s cultivated chicken has been approved through the FDA’s “generally recognized as safe” process, or GRAS, in which the FDA reviews a food company’s production process and final product and gives it a “no further questions” letter if it’s deemed safe to consume.
“Today we are one step closer to your dining tables as Upside Foods becomes the first company in the world to receive the US FDA green light — that means the FDA has evaluated our production process and accepts our conclusion that our cultivated chicken is safe to eat,” Upside wrote on its website.
In late 2020, Singapore became the first country to approve the sale of cultivated meat, a chicken product from the US-based startup Eat Just, which has been sold at a loss in small quantities at a high-end restaurant, a hotel, and through a food delivery service in the Southeast Asian city-state.
The taste of cultivated meat
Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to taste Upside’s cultivated chicken, and a few of its other products, at the company’s Emeryville, California, production facility outside San Francisco. I’ve been vegan for 15 years, but it reminded me of the poultry of my youth — gamy and crispy. Upside Foods’ production facility can produce around 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat a year, and the startup plans to eventually expand to produce 400,000 pounds of meat a year.
The novel meat goes by many names: lab-grown, cultivated, cell-based, and cell-cultured, to list just a few. For years, the “lab-grown” descriptor was accurate, given that efforts hadn’t gone much further than the lab. Now, some of the 100 startups around the world working to get it on your dinner plate are moving out of the lab and into small production facilities as they gear up for regulatory approval. But their offerings are wholly distinct from the vast array of plant-based meat products already on the market, like those from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which are made with plant ingredients like soy, wheat, peas, beans, starches, and oil.
Cultivated meat, on the other hand, is real meat, but made without slaughtering or harming any animals. Startups take a biopsy of a living animal, a minimally invasive procedure, and create cell lines to avoid the need for continual biopsies. The cells are then grown in bioreactors — large stainless steel tanks — meant to mimic the inside of an animal, meaning the cells are kept at a certain temperature and fed a mix of nutrients, like amino acids, sugars, salt, and proteins, to help them proliferate and develop into fat or muscle tissue.
The FDA approval is the culmination of seven years of R&D for Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats, which has attracted more than $600 million in investments, including from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and the meat giant Cargill. And the approval comes almost a decade after the cultivated meat field held its unofficial kickoff in London, when Dutch scientist Mark Post, a pioneer in the industry who co-founded the startup Mosa Meat, debuted a $325,000 cultivated hamburger in 2013.
Since then, cultivated meat companies have sprouted up around the world, concentrated in the US, Europe, Israel, and Singapore, armed with billions in venture capital funding.
Designing the meat of the future
Despite the pending US regulatory approval and enormous R&D war chest, you won’t find slaughter-free meat on grocery store shelves or fast food menus anytime soon; it’s still highly expensive to produce. Since the $325,000 burger in 2013, many startups have claimed they’ve been able to make it at a fraction of that cost, with estimates ranging from the tens of thousands of dollars per pound in the late 2010s down to thousands or hundreds of dollars per pound in the last few years.
Cultivated meat has long been promoted by its boosters as a technology that, if affordably produced at scale, could reduce our dependence on conventional animal agriculture and its multitude of social costs: environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and looming public health threats such as antibiotic resistance and zoonotic risk.
But as the hype around cell-cultured meat has been building over the last decade, so too has the skepticism. Some experts say startups will never be able to produce the stuff in large-enough quantities and at a low-enough price to ever displace conventional meat production. It’s a question of economic, manufacturing, and biological constraints.
Even some startups making cultivated meat are skeptical about the possibility of making 100 percent cultivated meat efficiently enough to compete with slaughtered meat on price, and are going the route of making “hybrid meat” products — that is, products mostly made from plants, with enough cultivated fat or muscle tissue sprinkled in to make it taste meatier than your average veggie burger.
Today’s announcement brings cultivated meat startups a step closer to testing the viability of their technology — and the prescience of their skeptics.
Biden wants to reevaluate Saudi Arabia policy. Here are four questions to guide the review.
President Joe Biden wants a re-evaluation of the United States’s policy toward Saudi Arabia.
In early October, the kingdom announced that, together with the OPEC+, it would cut oil production, effectively raising gas prices and siding with Russia’s best interests. After almost two years of navigating the difficult relationship with the oil-rich autocracy, it was the event that pushed Biden to say, “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done, with Russia.”
Biden “wants to be able to reevaluate in a methodical, strategic, effective way,” clarified national security adviser Jake Sullivan, “rooted in his fundamental interest in making sure that the relationship the United States has with Saudi Arabia serves the American people effectively.” Sullivan in essence suggested that things so far had not been going well.
It marks the third time since taking office that Biden has re-evaluated Saudi policy. On the campaign, Biden promised a harder line. He lambasted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, or MBS, for his role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Once in the White House, Biden broke with Trump by releasing part of the intelligence report, sanctioning some Saudis involved in the killing, and informally pledging not to meet MBS, as part of a re-evaluation.
But as the war on Ukraine changed geopolitical considerations, with high gas prices exacerbating inflationary woes, came the second re-assessment. In spring 2022, the White House announced a surprising turnaround: Biden would travel to Saudi Arabia and, at last, meet MBS face-to-face. “It’s a relationship that is now on steady footing,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in June.
Now that the Biden administration re-evaluates its approach a third time, will it come to a new conclusion? It will be tough to change much. The US, after all, relies on the kingdom as a major oil producer and economic power with important shipping lanes, a close partner in countering Iran and terrorist organizations, and a significant trading partner and number-one purchaser of US weapons. Those perceived shared interests, limited leverage over Saudi Arabia, and the proclivities of Biden’s inner circle weigh in favor of the status quo.
The Biden administration’s call for a re-evaluation may be more of a pause button than a substantive policy review. “Everyone is sort of taking a deep breath,” a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to speak with the press, told me. “The fact that nothing happened immediately is a sign that there’s some second thoughts.” (The White House declined to provide an official to interview or detail the status of the review.)
I asked a dozen former senior officials, several congressional offices, and Saudi and Arab activists what’s possible. The consensus is that major policy change is unlikely. But the Biden administration could establish guardrails to prohibit future escalatory violence from the crown prince and to save political face after the president’s embarrassing trip to Saudi Arabia. And if the US doesn’t do that, activists worry that MBS will emerge with more authoritarian tendencies at home and further license to take brazen actions abroad, all in contradiction of US interests and values.
- What are the interests the US shares with Saudi Arabia?
The first question policymakers ought to ask: Has the world changed enough that the US and Saudi Arabia’s interests have diverged?
Since FDR, the US has found economic and regional stability from the kingdom — which is the world’s second-biggest oil producer, home of Islam’s two largest mosques, maritime neighbor to much of the world’s trade, and perceived partner on counterterrorism. The kingdom, meanwhile, benefits from the backing of the world’s largest military.
Now that MBS has taken Saudi Arabia in directions that often strain that partnership — the most recent one being the OPEC+ decision — the underlying sense in the Biden administration that the kingdom is a partner that can’t be let go hasn’t changed.
In recent years, the interests of Israel, America’s closest Middle East partner, and Saudi Arabia have grown closer, though the two countries do not have formal diplomatic relations. Israel and Saudi Arabia’s alignment over anti-Iranian sentiment continues to bring them closer. The Trump administration helped Israel make diplomatic deals with its autocratic neighbors the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain, which has contributed to a hope among certain US policymakers that Saudi Arabia and Israel could forge an accord.
The Biden administration still sees Saudi Arabia as a partner as US global strategy is refracted through the lens of competition with Russia and with China. MBS has recently met with the leaders of each country, deepening relationships that benefit Saudi Arabia’s export market for energy.
A key question is whether it’s possible to work with MBS to fulfill shared goals. Many in the media, including the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, painted MBS as a reformer in 2017 as the young prince jetted through Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and New York in what in hindsight looks like an influence operation. But now many analysts call MBS a rogue leader willing to break convention to achieve whatever he wants, even by violent and extralegal means. Others who have met him see the 37-year-old crown prince as a McKinsey administrator, focused on data-driven solutions and project management. Some former officials I spoke with said it doesn’t matter who MBS is since the US has no choice over who is Saudi’s leader.
Many of the interests the two countries hold in common are now obscured by the way that Saudi Arabia played US domestic politics in the Trump years — and how Saudi Arabia has since invested in the financial endeavors of former Trump officials Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin. The Saudis have misplayed how polarized America has become under Trump. “They glommed on to Trump, and Trump glommed on to them,” F. Gregory Gause III, an international affairs professor at Texas A&M University, told me.
Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser, explained that the shared interests are nonexistent at this point and that MBS is actively working against the US by partnering with Russia and China. “The reality is that MBS has not moved into the autocratic camps because of something the US did. It’s because that’s where he’s comfortable, and that’s what the reassessment has to take into account,” he told me. “I don’t think there’s anything the US can do to change how MBS is, and Washington has been slow to recognize who he is.”
- What are the points of leverage?
If under Mohammed bin Salman, this is going to be a transactional relationship, then what things does the Biden administration want and what is it prepared to do to achieve them?
“There are so many things that we can do together,” Robert Jordan, who served as the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2002 to 2003, told me. “At the same time, we can also make it clear that there are guardrails, and there are norms, and that that kind of cooperation will be injured by reckless behavior on the part of the Saudis.”
US policymakers then are probably debating how to send a strong message that there will be repercussions for MBS’s moves that affect the US. It was the issue of oil production, not human rights, that pushed the Biden administration to consider how to readjust the relationship. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it last month, “We will keep all of those interests in mind and consult closely with all of the relevant stakeholders as we decide on any steps going forward.”
Congress has the power to hold or suspend arms sales. Saudi Arabia has been the US’s biggest weapons buyer for a decade. The Pentagon has notified Congress of $3.07 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia in 2022, something that could push the president in a different direction. “The most important aspect of Saudi dependence on the US is security, of course, technology that comes with it,” says Hala Aldosari, a Saudi human rights activist.
In response to the OPEC+ decision, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) says that the US should stop approving arms sales to the kingdom and take its Patriot missiles, which are in high demand, from there and send them to Ukraine. Similarly, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) argue that such a pause would show American leverage over Saudi Arabia without detracting from US security interests.
“You may even decide on the back end of that and not resume them,” Rhodes told me. It may lead to a more limited security relationship with conditions attached. “There needs to be a whole new kind of regime around whatever the security relationship is,” he added.
In contrast, James Jones, the retired general who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, argues that the shared interests are too big to set aside. “My recommendation, if I were still a national security adviser, would be to say, ‘Be more consistent and be more declarative in who our friends and who our allies are, and what we’re willing to do to help them,’” he told me.
Biden has at times been critical of Saudi Arabia. Jones says that rhetoric “encourages our friends and allies to consider other options that we would not want them to seriously consider.”
Jones, who recently came under scrutiny for his private firm’s extensive for-profit advisory work for the Saudi Ministry of Defense, said America should maintain those types of relationships with the kingdom. He told me his work, which the Trump administration had approved, “is in our national interest.”
“To suggest that retired military people, who are patriots, can’t engage with the approval of our country to help transform and develop better relations with friends and allies, seems to me a little bit off,” he added.
Cutting back on the arms transfers might encourage Saudi Arabia to turn elsewhere, defenders of the relationship worry. But several Congressional staffers told me that it’s no longer credible to say that such punitive measures from the US would push the kingdom toward China. The Saudis are “welcome to, but they’re not going to do it,” a senior Democratic Congressional aide told me. “China’s not going to come defend them, Russia is not going to come defend them. And they would never be able to switch weapons systems anyways.”
Regardless, suspending arms sales seems to be a far-off possibility right now, unless Congress takes initiative. (In 2019, Congress blocked $8 billion of sales to the kingdom, a move that Trump then vetoed.) The US military is moving ahead with a counter-drone program in Saudi Arabia, the kind of thing that Congress could delay to make a point.
Congress may also weigh writing language into the annual bill authorizing the defense budget that makes US arms sales to Saudi Arabia dependent on the country releasing political prisoners, for example, or other internal reforms. There is also the NOPEC bill, which has passed committee and would give the US attorney general the ability to target OPEC+ with antitrust legislation.
If the administration isn’t willing to curtail the military relationship, its other options are limited. The US could also consider ways to make it more difficult to do business with Saudi Arabia. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has urged US corporations and investors to consider “reputational concerns that can arise from public policy choices made by host countries” and incentives could be established there — though investors nonetheless have rushed back.
A more extreme version of this would involve implementing sanctions on MBS personally, something the Biden administration has yet to do. Another point of leverage is whether the crown prince will be granted immunity, as a head of state, for a civil case against him related to the murder of Khashoggi.
- Could human rights make for better policy?
This is not a values-driven relationship, but a security relationship. Human rights experts say that an emphasis on values might actually make for more pragmatic policy.
Though Khashoggi’s dismemberment and disappearance from the Saudi consulate in Istanbul gripped the world, the direness of the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia is ongoing but overlooked. It’s how someone like Noura al-Qahtani can be sentenced to 45 years in prison in Saudi Arabia only for supporting the release of political prisoners in a tweet.
MBS’s track record exposes how few values are shared by the two countries. Saudi Arabia is un-democratic: there is no free speech and it is risky to criticize MBS; the country has grown more authoritarian with highly centralized decision-making under MBS. The country’s military adventurism in Yemen, a Saudi war enabled by US bombs where thousands of civilians have been killed, shows how risky it is to put in with MBS.
Biden initially resisted meeting MBS, according to Politico, because he reportedly exclaimed that his presidency “should stand for something.” At a 2019 Democratic debate, he said, “We were going to, in fact, make them pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”
Many former officials say that it’s time for the US to move on. General Jones highlights that MBS has overseen liberalizing reforms in the country. “I recognize that the Khashoggi murder was a terrible thing, but the United States did not break relations with Saudi Arabia over that. As a matter of fact, we continue to work with them,” he told me. “To me, helping friends and allies transform, whether it’s on a societal basis, or on a military basis, or on an education basis, whatever it is, is in our long-term interests.”
For Ambassador Jordan, who knew Khashoggi and condemned his murder, human rights conversations with Saudi Arabia are more productive when conducted privately. “Only by having the relationship in place, can we have enough influence on issues like human rights, women’s rights, and freedoms,” he told me.
Several former officials told me that too much focus on human rights will throw off the parts of the relationship that benefit American citizens, namely energy prices. “We all have these views on human rights. [Biden’s] entitled to his, I have mine,” said Victoria Coates, who served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser. “But in this case, they can’t be the driver of my energy policy.”
That may be true, but the energy policy doesn’t seem particularly effective at this point either.
One convincing argument at this table, however, is that democratic values ultimately make for a better foreign policy.
“Countries that are democratic and respect human rights, at the end of the day, are more stable, more peaceful, more prosperous, and better allies,” said Tess McEnery, the executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, who worked on democracy issues for the past 15 years throughout the federal government, including on Biden’s National Security Council.
Whether there’s anyone dedicated to advancing that viewpoint in administration policy debates is another matter.
- Should Biden’s reevaluation extend to his own advisers?
Ultimately, Biden’s policies are only as good as his closest advisers.
In my conversations with administration insiders I got the sense that there are not enough human rights voices at the policy-making decision table. Biden’s nominee for the crucial assistant secretary of state role for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Sarah Margon, has been on hold for more than a year due to Republican stonewalling. That vacancy means the absence of a senior appointee focused on this set of issues.
Earlier this year, the top human rights official at the White House’s National Security Council departed her job. Now, there is no coordinator-level person there. No senior human rights official attended the meetings in Saudi Arabia in July as part of Biden’s entourage, according to the White House’s manifest.
“The NSC Democracy Directorate reliably asserts that democracy and human rights are not just values, but vital national security interests. It remains difficult to get other national security officials on board with this approach,” McEnery told me. “It would require people willing to break with the status quo to implement democracy and human rights as the center of our foreign policy.”
Many progressive sources are particularly incensed by the prominent and influential role played by White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk. Since he has served as a senior official in four subsequent presidencies, it’s easy to criticize him for embodying the structural deficiencies in this relationship (and of Middle East policy more broadly). Yet for every critic of him I spoke with, there was someone impressed by his bureaucratic deft.
But expect members of Congress and activists to further personify Biden’s Saudi policy on him. It may lead to McGurk’s exit after the midterms.
Yet there have been effective diplomats in Biden’s orbit. State Department envoy Tim Lenderking, who has been a frequent flier to Saudi Arabia along with McGurk, has worked to negotiate a ceasefire between the kingdom and Yemen’s Houthis.
To get a sense of what a broader vision of what US policy toward Saudi Arabia might look like, one has to look to the strident words Biden officials were willing to say before they went into government.
When Jake Sullivan was working in the private sector prior to 2020, he was among the strongest voices on bringing human rights into the US-Saudi relationship. Together with Rhodes, he co-founded an advocacy group called National Security Action where dozens of policymakers who would go into the Biden administration met and crafted policy memos. “In the Middle East, Trump and his family have advanced Saudi interests instead of our national interest,” the organization wrote on its website. “Enabling or excusing oppression abroad today only fuels the injustices and instability that endanger us all tomorrow.”
Or as Sullivan told Congress during a February 2019 hearing on US policy toward Saudi Arabia, “I think we have too frequently been willing to say we have to make human rights concerns a fifth, sixth, or seventh tier priority rather than something on the plane with other more fundamental interests that we have, and I think that should change.”
It is significant that someone like Sullivan would take a progressive position when out of government, and then reverses toward what’s perceived as realism when he is chairing meetings. It’s less a statement of individual hypocrisy and more an exemplary case study. (Obama’s advancement of extralegal drone wars and support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, among other non-progressive foreign policies, come to mind.) Little wonder that many in Washington are cynical about whether the US-Saudi relationship could ever change.
Maybe rather than firing his advisers, Biden could encourage them to revisit the big policy rethinks they proposed in the off-season and find ways to make them work today.
For Nancy Okail, an Egyptian activist and president of the Center for International Policy, the fact that Biden has not stood by his pledge to make Saudi Arabia a pariah undermines policy writ large on human rights. “It’d be seriously damaging if these words aren’t translated into concrete and corrective foreign policy measures,” she said.
Every time the Biden administration says it’s re-evaluating a policy and uses strong rhetoric that isn’t matched with new policies, it undermines American credibility in the world.