Since the pandemic started, we’ve had trouble with greetings. Shaking hands went from habit to risk. Forget the kiss hello. Elbow bumps became a thing, as did the awkward dance as one figures out the other’s tolerance for hugs.

Thrust the mechanics of hygiene onto the theatrics of international relations, and you might send mixed signals. In diplomacy, does a fist bump somehow convey less respect than a handshake? Or is it casual and colloquial, and therefore friendlier? How do you greet a leader whose state you vowed, during your presidential campaign, to make a “pariah”?

On Friday at 6:33 p.m. Saudi Arabia time, President Biden emerged from his armored limousine at Al Salam Royal Palace in Jiddah, buttoned his suit jacket, stepped onto a lilac-colored carpet and extended his right fist toward Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince — who, according to U.S. intelligence officials, approved the operation that led to the dismemberment and murder of journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the oil-rich kingdom, in 2018 (bin Salman has denied this).

The prince met Biden’s knuckles with his own, thereby causing a snit online.

Ben Hubbard of the New York Times described it as a “chilly fist bump.”

Republican congressman Michael Cloud (Tex.) called the fist bump “a slap in the face for Texas oil and gas workers.”

“If we ever needed a visual reminder of the continuing grip oil-rich autocrats have on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, we got it today,” tweeted Democratic congressman Adam Schiff (Calif.). "One fist bump is worth a thousand words.

Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancee, shared what she thinks he would’ve tweeted in reaction to the fist bump: “Hey @POTUS, Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.” (“I’m sorry she feels that way,” Biden said in response, adding: “I didn’t come here to meet with the crown prince. I came here to … deal with security and the needs of the free world, in particular the United States.”)

Within half an hour of the fist bump, the Saudi Press Agency tweeted a photo of it — an indication that the kingdom saw it as a useful image.

“We’re focused on the meetings, not the greetings," a senior Biden administration official told reporters earlier. But neither the public nor the press has full access to those meetings. What we’re left with, in many cases, are the optics of the greetings.

On Wednesday in Jerusalem, Biden hugged Holocaust survivors. Earlier Friday in Bethlehem, Biden shook hands twice with the president of the Palestinian Authority. On the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Biden shook hands with Israel’s prime minister and president. Then, after the two-hour flight to Jiddah, Biden gave one fist bump and several handshakes to Saudi officials who greeted him.

Then he met the crown prince. Their fist bump was not followed by a stationary pose for the cameras; the pair transitioned immediately into a brisk walk indoors. This might have been coordinated in advance, says Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In some ways the fist bump avoids the potential complications of a first meeting where there’s some other kind of greeting,” Alterman says. “From a White House perspective, if you’re very concerned with the imagery that comes out of the first meeting, this one seems to be pretty well-controlled.”

In 2018, for example, Donald Trump was photographed shaking the hand of dictator Kim Jong Un multiple times, sometimes with a backdrop of U.S. and North Korean flags — a tableau of friendliness toward an autocratic regime that the current administration might not want to convey.

“The fist bump is yet another sign that this is not the president’s comfort zone, and this is not a warm bilateral relationship,” Alterman adds. “And it may not become a warm bilateral relationship under the president. But it will be a relationship.”

As a politician, Biden has a history of enthusiastic human contact — kisses, shoulder rubs, face cuppings — that has been curbed somewhat by covid. The fist bump, meanwhile, did not spring into politics from the realms of hip-hop and sports (Tiger Woods was a practitioner) until June 2008, when Michelle and Barack Obama shared one as he claimed the Democratic nomination for president in St. Paul, Minn.

“It thrilled a lot of Black folks,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said then, because the Obamas were not stifling their “cultural Blackness.” Some commentators were struck by the intimacy of the gesture; a Fox News anchor infamously invented the nonsensical term “terrorist fist jab.” Obama went on, as president, to dole out fist bumps to legislators as he walked into his State of the Union addresses.

Rustin Dodd, a writer at the Athletic, has theorized that the origin of the fist bump might rest in boxers’ ritual of bumping gloves, or with baseball player Stan Musial, or in pro basketball in the 1970s, or as an outgrowth of the dap in the Black Power movement.

But context matters, as do the individuals engaging in the fist bump.

A husband and wife engaging in a close-range horizontal fist bump during a celebration means something wholly different from a president and crown prince engaging in a distanced vertical fist bump on an official visit during a pandemic.

Aboard Air Force One this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the U.S. delegation was “seeking to reduce contact and to increase masking” and that Biden’s trip was “a strategic decision” to avoid “an American vacuum” in the Middle East that benefits China and Russia, and to align with “a policy of recalibrating, not rupturing, the relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

But the fist bump was still a focus during a brief news conference after Biden’s meeting at the palace.

“You’re coming under a lot of fire for your fist bump with the crown prince,” a reporter said to Biden, who immediately deployed gestures that could not be misinterpreted: an exasperated smile and dismissive chuckle.