President Donald Trump opened his four-day Middle East trip on Tuesday by paying a visit to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
After warmly greeting Trump at the Riyadh airport, Bin Salman will treat him with a formal dinner, with both slated to take part in a US-Saudi investment conference later on Tuesday, reports AP.
The US president on Wednesday will join a gathering of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, before leaving Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC+ nations have already helped their cause with Trump early in his second term by stepping up oil production. Trump sees cheap energy as a key component to lowering costs and stemming inflation for Americans. The president has also made the case that lower oil prices will hasten an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But Saudi Arabia’s economy remains heavily dependent on oil, and the kingdom needs a fiscal break-even oil price of $96 to $98 a barrel to balance its budget. It’s questionable how long OPEC+ is willing to keep production elevated.
Trump picked the kingdom for his first stop because it has pledged to make big investments in the US, but Trump ended up traveling to Italy last month for Pope Francis’ funeral. However, Riyadh was the first overseas stop of his first term.
The three countries on the president’s itinerary — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — are all places where the Trump Organization, run by Trump’s two elder sons, is developing major real estate projects.
Trump is trying to demonstrate that his transactional strategy for international politics is paying dividends as he faces criticism from Democrats who say his global tariff war and approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine are isolating the United States from allies.
He is expected to announce deals with the three wealthy countries that will touch on artificial intelligence, expanding energy cooperation and perhaps new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration earlier this month announced initial approval to sell $3.5 billion worth of air-to-air missiles for Saudi Arabia’s fighter jets.
But Trump arrives at a moment when his top regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are far from neatly aligned with his approach.
William Wechsler, senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s decision to skip Israel on his first Middle East visit sends the message that “the governments of the Gulf … are in fact stronger friends to President Trump than the current government of Israel at this moment.”
Trump, meanwhile, hopes to restart his first-term effort to normalise relations between the Middle East’s major powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But Riyadh has made clear that in exchange for normalization it wants US security guarantees, assistance with the kingdom’s nuclear program, and progress on a pathway to Palestinian statehood.