U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud spoke by phone this week to discuss Saudi Arabia’s efforts to prolong a fragile, Saudi-brokered truce in Yemen, the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday.
The discussions also touched on Iran’s nuclear program and the Ukraine crisis, it added.
The call comes as relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia warm, with President Biden mulling a potential visit as soon as early June, SUSTG has learned, as part of his planned trip to the region.
Additionally, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed efforts to avert the economic, environmental, and humanitarian threats posed by the Safer oil tanker in the Red Sea region.
The FSO Safer is a floating oil storage and offloading vessel that is moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Al Hudaydah. The ship holds more than 1.14 million barrels of oil, more than four times that which spilled from the Exxon Valdez tanker off the coast of Alaska. The tanker is in decay and at significant risk of spilling some or all of its oil, causing a potential ecological and environmental disaster.
The tanker’s decay allowing oil to spill would cause severe damage to fishing communities on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, causing further devastation to the war-torn country.
In the event of a spill, the cleanup alone is expected to cost $20 billion, according to one estimate.
