In Mideast, Trump finds his comfort zone: Business first, then policy
-
Howard LaFranchi Staff writer
On his first international trip of his second term, President Donald Trump has indeed spent some of his four-day visit to Gulf Arab countries on diplomatic matters.
He met Wednesday in Saudi Arabia with Syria’s post-Assad-era President (and former Islamist rebel leader) Ahmed al-Sharaa, a day after pledging to lift punishing U.S. sanctions on the civil-war-devastated country.
Stating in an hourlong speech in Riyadh that the United States “has no permanent enemies,” Mr. Trump spoke of the potential for prosperous U.S.-Iran relations if Tehran turns away from decades of violent and destabilizing regional behavior.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump’s pretrip agenda for his visit to the Middle East indicated that business would take priority over diplomacy. Yet amid all the business fanfare, the outlines of an emerging Trump foreign policy could be discerned.
And he has given some hints of a Middle East policy with a lighter U.S. footprint and reduced pressure on partners for diplomatic results. A comment in his Riyadh speech that Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel “in its own time” was telling.
But for the most part, America’s businessman president has carried out his visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates like a business trip.
Pursuing his “America First” orientation, the president announced hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. defense industries and hundreds of billions more of Gulf investments in American artificial intelligence and microchip enterprises. (Notably, Mr. Trump’s billionaire emerging-technologies adviser and top donor Elon Musk was on the trip.)
“Palace in the sky”
But Mr. Trump also mixed America’s business and family business in ways no U.S. president ever has – and to an extent that has even raised alarms among some of his staunchest and most influential supporters. Widespread opposition to his acceptance of a $400 million jet – a “palace in the sky” – as a gift from Qatar and under the pretense that it would serve as a new Air Force One, will greet him when he returns home Friday.
If President Trump chose to repeat his first-term innovation and make the Gulf the first international destination of his second term, regional experts say, it’s because that’s where the money – and a style of business Mr. Trump understands and emulates – is.
“Trump sees the Gulf as a lot of countries with a lot of capital, with leaders willing to roll out the red carpet and host him in gilded rooms in a manner he believes he deserves,” says Elizabeth Dent, a senior fellow and expert in U.S. foreign and defense policy in the Gulf at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “All the deals he’s announcing fit with his ‘America First’ approach, giving him big flashy investments he can bring home and tout to his base.”
In Qatar, Mr. Trump announced what he crowed is “the largest order of jets in the history of Boeing” – a Qatar Airways deal to buy up to 210 Boeing planes.
Meeting the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, in the royal court building, the proprietor of the glitzy Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, surveyed the palace’s marble and complimented the emir: “This is what they call ‘perfecto,’” he said.
President Trump again chose the Gulf “because this is his happy place,” says Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. With its glittering real estate “owned by people with connections to the rulers, in the president’s mind [the Gulf] is the world as it should be.”
Foreign policy outlines
Still, amid all the business fanfare could be discerned the outlines of an emerging Trump foreign policy that scales back commitments, resorts to military intervention rarely but with overwhelming force when applied, and sees foreign partners in terms of what they can do for America, some experts say.
“They are advancing a more limited set of U.S. responsibilities, but using hard power more in carrying them out,” says Daniel Benaim, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Arabian Peninsula Affairs. “They are trying to do fewer things, but trying to do them more forcefully – and looking for partners to fill in the gaps.”
As evidence, he points to Mr. Trump’s bombing of Yemen’s Houthis – a targeted military intervention the president ended once he said he’d received Houthi leaders’ assurances they would no longer target American-flagged cargo ships in the Red Sea and adjacent shipping lanes.
Underpinning it all are Trump’s “three big legacy issues” involving the Middle East, says Mr. Benaim, now an associate fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. He lists Iran and reaching a new deal on its nuclear program, Saudi normalization with Israel, and an Israel-Hamas war ceasefire.
“Some [issues] have seen some progress” even since the administration came in, Mr. Benaim says, pointing to initial U.S.-Iran talks, while “Some [like Gaza] are even farther off.”
The U.S. reportedly presented Iranian negotiators with a written proposal for a nuclear deal when the two sides met Sunday. Iranian officials denied the reports. President Trump said in Riyadh Tuesday that he had presented Iran with an “olive branch” to resolve the nuclear issue, but said it was an offer that would “not last forever.”
Saudi normalization with Israel also seems less imminent than it did in January, when many Trump aides were suggesting a region-realigning Saudi-Israeli rapprochement could be the administration’s first big foreign policy win.
The long-sought diplomatic breakthrough now seems to be on hold – largely because of Israel’s return to intense warfare in Gaza and the ever-darkening prospects for a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue, an outcome Saudi Arabia continues to demand.
To make, not impose, peace
Mr. Trump repeatedly cast himself as a peacemaker but not as a peace-imposer, repudiating his predecessors – Republican and Democratic alike – who sought to remake the Middle East in the West’s image and according to Western values.
Lauding Saudi leaders for achieving “a modern miracle the Arabian way,” he used his Riyadh speech to blast the “neocons” and “nation-builders” who “failed” in “Kabul and Baghdad” and elsewhere.
“It’s crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western intervention or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs, no,” the president said.
For some regional experts, Mr. Trump’s “all business all the time” approach to the Gulf states – and to Saudi Arabia in particular – in the early months of his second term is part of a reassuring shift from a more traditional vision of a close partnership that the first Trump administration pursued.
“The United States should have a normal relationship with Saudi Arabia. We don’t need to treat them as a pariah state as President [Joe] Biden sought to do at first,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting a realist U.S. foreign policy.
But at the same time, he says, President Trump in his first term was “too close to the Saudis, giving them the sense they were a core ally we would henceforth intervene to defend,” he says. “I sense a more cautious approach [to the region] this term. It’s going to be, ‘We do business with them, but we do not pledge to fight for them,’” he adds.
Ethical issues
Yet while he supports what he considers to be Mr. Trump’s more realist defense relationship with the region, Mr. Friedman laments the weakening of a longstanding firewall between the nation’s business in international relations and the president’s personal business.
Citing not just Qatar’s gift of a $400 million jet but also billions of dollars of Gulf investments in a Trump family cryptocurrency venture, he says, “It’s depressing to witness such a collapse of ethics and anti-corruption laws and norms.”
Over the short week that Mr. Trump has been away from Washington, the saga of the “palace in the sky” has become the focal point of a firestorm over the presidential family’s business dealings and susceptibility to influence-peddling.
Critics note that the plush jet would require a costly and time-consuming security upgrade and systems makeover that could mean it would only serve as President Trump’s Air Force One for a year at the end of his term – if at all. That means the jet, which Qatar would actually gift to the Trump presidential library, would essentially become Mr. Trump’s in his postpresidential private life.
All of this is proving to be too much even for some of the president’s most ardent supporters in MAGA world.
In his podcast on The Daily Wire this week, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro cited the taint of the jet deal and called on his listeners to honestly consider its implications. “I think if we switched the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we’d all be freaking out on the right,” he said.
