Career diplomat Michael Ratney has been chosen by President Joe Biden to be the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, according to an April 22 White House statement.
The announcement of Ratney’s selection comes less than a month after The Guardian reported that U.S.-Saudi relations were at “an unprecedented low.” Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had refused to help Biden cope with one consequence of the War in Ukraine: soaring oil prices, the paper said. Both Arab nations had been “unusually frank about their refusal to step in” and had even refused to take phone calls from Biden, wrote the paper’s Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov.
