Since then, Mohammed bin Salman – Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, who, according to US intelligence officials, approved Khashoggi’s assassination – has managed a near complete rehabilitation of his increasingly autocratic regime.

Prince Mohammed has met with Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders; he’s positioning Saudi Arabia as a global tourism destination; and he’s plowing ahead with plans to build Neom, his $500bn futuristic city in the desert.

Trump dropped the pretense that the US-Saudi alliance is anything more than a transactional arrangement based on keeping global oil prices stable, common security interests in the Middle East, and negotiating large weapons deals.

After Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, disrupting global oil markets, the prince seized his opportunity to pressure Biden into becoming a supplicant seeking lower gasoline prices for American consumers.

Then last October, as the world braced for a surge in fuel prices due to the Ukraine war and sanctions against Russian oil, the Saudi-led Opec Plus cartel decided to cut production by 2m barrels a day – the opposite of what Biden administration officials had pleaded with the Saudis to do.

After the shock of that embarrassing announcement, which threatened to raise gas prices around the US midterm elections, Biden vowed: “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done.” Yet, a few months later, the US administration quietly dropped any pretense of holding Prince Mohammed and his regime accountable.

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