In September 2021, Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with bin Salman.
In order to achieve your ideal of freedom and independence, you may act like a despot as you try to convince and to impose your views, whether smoothly or forcefully.
Peter Theroux, a former National Security Council director who worked on the Saudi portfolio during the 2000s, recalls being aghast at the vicious sermons still being preached by government-paid imams years after September 11.
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But some of the others in his jails are bad hombres indeed, and pardons cannot be meted out selectively.
That they no longer wanted something thrilling and extraordinary was exactly the point.