Saunders: Saudi visit puts Trump’s foreign policy on display

By Debra J. Saunders / Las Vegas Review-Journal

President Trump started the first major international travel of his second term in Riyadh, where he publicly bonded with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Pundits call the crown prince, the nation’s de facto leader, MBS. Trump calls him “Mohammed.”

Trump used the moment to call on the kingdom to join the Abraham Accords —- and thus recognize Israel — “in your own time.”

Do it, Trump offered, and “you’ll be greatly honoring me.”

Trump’s first international travel as president also began in Riyadh in 2017. I was there.

Tuesday, Trump took an overtly personal approach to what usually is a bureaucratic pageant made mind-numbingly boring by diplomatic jargon. Can he break through? I don’t know, but the old way of Washington gray beards negotiating while holding their noses seems to have run its course. At least for now.

So Trump, who very much wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, is mixing it up. He sees business opportunities in the Middle East. A White House fact sheet boasts $600 billion in Saudi investment in the United States, although Trump is pushing for $1 trillion.

“He has a short-term horizon for deliverables,” Farah Pandith, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. She prefers a long-term, deliberate strategy, with the specifics pinned down.

“He’s trying to get what he can get fast,” Pandith warned. And: “He is setting the stage for how he expects to be treated” on the international stage for the remainder of his term. She sees a high bar for the optics of future confabs; with Saudi supersize pomp and circumstance setting a new Versailles-like standard.

To close the Saudi deal, Trump has ignored the elephant in the room: Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post contributor who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018.

The CIA concluded that the Crown Prince ordered the murder, which the royal family denies.

In 2019, Trump told “Meet the Press” he’s “not like a fool” who would refuse to do business with a long-term ally and chase Saudi business to China and Russia. He puts American jobs first.

And you know what? I don’t like it, but he’s got a point. It doesn’t seem smart to chase the Saudis into our national security adversaries’ loving arms.

Trump used the occasion to needle former President Joe Biden for giving America “the worst administration in the history of our country.” Which brought him back to his 2024 victory and his Electoral College sweep of 312 votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’ take of 226.

Trump also compared himself favorably to former President George W. Bush, although not by name, when he told the room, “The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.

“Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way.”

Trump is not going to talk down to the Saudis. He’s not going to do the chilly fist bump a la Biden. He’s going to cut deals. And he’ll throw in some flattery, which works both ways.