Weekend Box: Biden strikes oil, Online Safety & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business, and cultural news from around the world.
WILL BIDEN STRIKE OIL?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word Realpolitik as “a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations.” For a clearer definition, consider US President Joe Biden’s trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia this weekend.
Officially, Mr Biden is visiting to attend a summit of regional leaders in Jeddah where important issues like Middle East cooperation and the threat from Iran will be discussed. Unofficially, the President’s arrival in the Kingdom that he once threatened to make a “pariah” is a recognition of the country’s strategic importance as the world’s biggest producer of oil.
Global oil prices have spiked in recent months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and earlier entreaties to the Saudi Government to increase the oil supply – such as the notable visit of UK prime minister Boris Johnson in March – fell on deaf ears. The Saudis, led by their de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), saw an opportunity to reset relations with the United States and will now be rewarded as Air Force One touches down following the first direct flight to the Kingdom from Israel.
Yet this is the same Mohammed Bin Salman named in a US intelligence report as the architect of the brutal killing of US citizen Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul in 2018. This led the US to place travel bans and sanctions on senior Saudi officials and to withhold military aid to the Kingdom when President Biden took over the White House in January of last year.
This hard line has held for more than a year with frosty relations exacerbated by Mr Biden’s determination to view Saudi Arabia’s King Salman as his true counterpart and main interlocuter, rather than the younger Crown Prince who has long run the nation at his father’s behest.
But then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a spike in world oil prices, and an uptick in petrol prices in the US that took them to an all-time high.
The President argues that his trip is designed to achieve a wider set of objectives, including stronger relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and a strengthened alliance against the threat from Iran, but it’s unlikely he would be making this visit if it weren’t for the oil price and Mohammed Bin Salman’s reported refusal to take his calls when the crisis first struck. Air Force One has therefore been called into action against the backdrop of much criticism from US Republicans and Democrats, as well as activist groups, who have collectively accused the President of rowing back on his earlier strong rhetoric and putting his values-based foreign policy at risk.
Mr Biden took to the pages of Jamal Khashoggi’s former newspaper the Washington Post to explain his actions. “As president, it is my job to keep our country strong and secure,” he argued. “We have to counter Russia’s aggression, put ourselves in the best possible position to outcompete China, and work for greater stability in a consequential region of the world. To do these things, we have to engage directly with countries that can impact those outcomes. Saudi Arabia is one of them,” he said.
Some have welcomed this reset in relations between the two countries. “I think the mistake that the Biden administration made was it took its campaign rhetoric into the administration and that hit a wall of realism,” said Saudi analyst Ali Shihabi.
A reminder perhaps that, as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously put it, you campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
ONLINE SAFETY BILL SHUT DOWN
The last time the Weekend Box addressed the Online Safety Bill, it had just been introduced to parliament after years of debate and delay. This week, as the leadership contest heats up, the bill’s aim to usher in a ‘new era of accountability’ for social media platforms was put on pause. Again.
News broke that the bill, which ministers had hoped to move through the House of Commons before MPs go on their summer break on July 21st, has now been dropped from the parliamentary schedule amid a leadership contest and confidence vote by the opposition.
While waves of relief will be rippling through Silicon Valley, this is a hammer blow to those campaigning for greater online regulation. Andy Burrows, the head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, said that the delay meant families would “continue to pay the price for the failure and inaction of tech firms who have allowed harm to fester.”
Since it was first proposed by Theresa May’s government in 2019, the Online Safety Bill has been marred by setbacks as it tries balance appeasing civil liberties groups with addressing the concerns of child protection groups who say it doesn’t go far enough. The bill, which has been heavily amended since its inception, has tried to be many things to many people and as a result, this mammoth piece of legislation has become unmanageable. With 213 pages and 126 pages of Explanatory Notes, it has been criticised by all camps for being vague, confusing, and even contradictory. Even if it is passed by the next prime minister and implemented in 2024, it will be nearly seven years since its conception – light years in the tech world.
With the leadership contest in full swing, it is now political putty for those in the race. While favourite Penny Mordaunt has confirmed that she would continue with the bill if she became leader, Kemi Badenoch delighted Tory backbenchers with her comments that we should not be ‘legislating for hurt feelings.”
However, what we can all agree on is the industrial scale of abuse online must be addressed urgently by the government. Whether this is a case of stripping back the Online Safety Bill or starting from scratch, this is a problem for the next Prime Minister. For now, while online harms fester, it is resigned to political limbo.
THE POPE & THE PATRIARCH
As the war in Ukraine continues, Pope Francis has declared plans to meet face-to-face with one of the most vocal supporters of Russia’s invasion, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. This will only be the second time the two have met.
In an interview that aired on Monday on the Spanish-language television network Univision, Pope Francis confirmed he would attend the 7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, in mid-September. During the interview, the pontiff also announced his intentions to meet with Patriarch Kirill, the Bishop of Moscow and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, with whom he claims to be on good terms. This will be the first in-person meeting of the religious leaders since their joint signing of the Havana Declaration in 2016, in what was seen as a ground-breaking moment of dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
With “resolving global crises” on the agenda for the meeting in Nur-Sultan, it is possible that the Russia-Ukraine war will be a subject of discussion between the pope and the bishop, although their attitudes on the conflict are known to diverge. While Pope Francis has condemned the Russian soldiers’ “cruelty,” Patriarch Kirill has defended the war as an attempt to unite the peoples of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, claiming it is “God’s truth” that they are “one people.”
In an interview earlier this year, Pope Francis recounted that Patriarch Kirill spent approximately half of a Zoom conversation between the two reading justifications for Russia’s invasion from a sheet of paper. The pontiff expressed his disapproval at the time. During the Univision interview, he suggested that the Patriarch’s view on the war has been “conditioned by his homeland in some way.”
What Patriarch Kirill makes of this remains to be seen. Perhaps we will find out following their meeting in September. The Weekend Box will keep an eye on the story as it develops.
AIMING FOR THE STARS
This week we saw the first images and results from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful telescope ever built. These five initial images demonstrate the breadth of what the JWST will discover for us; from measuring the properties of atmospheres of planets around other stars, to nebulae hosting the birthplaces of new stars, to galaxies. Perhaps the most extraordinary observation for astrophysicists was the deep field, where the JWST was able to map galaxies to close to the dawn of the universe, not long after the Big Bang.
Even before the dust settles on the first results from the JWST, NASA is already looking to the future.
The next NASA flagship astrophysics observatory is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) and it is due to launch in 2027. According to Roman's Project Scientist Julie McEnery (speaking exclusively to Audley), Roman will be complementary to the JWST. Whilst the JWST will tell us about the very early universe, the large surveys provided by Roman will tell us how the universe grew, evolved, and changed from that point on. Roman will also be complementary to Hubble. Thirty years after its launch, Hubble continues to provide us with stunning, detailed images of the universe. When Roman launches later this decade, it will generate much larger images while matching Hubble’s crisp infrared resolution.
Julie describes the complementary capabilities of the three NASA flagship missions: Hubble views the cosmos in infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light, providing a more comprehensive and high-resolution view of individual objects. The Roman Space Telescope will expand on Hubble’s infrared observations specifically, using a much larger field of view to create enormous panoramas of the universe with the same high resolution. Webb will also conduct high-resolution infrared observations, peering across farther stretches of space with a narrower field of view.
Roman is named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer – also known as the 'Mother of Hubble.' In a time when women were discouraged from studying maths and science, Roman became a research astronomer and was instrumental in taking Hubble from an idea to reality and establishing NASA’s programme of space-based astronomical observatories. As lead scientist on the next major mission, Julie is proud to be continuing Nancy's legacy.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audley.uk.com.
For now, that’s the weekend box officially closed.