Saudi crown prince gets warm embrace from Trump, US business

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump feted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday.

Trump has tightened his embrace of the 40-year-old crown prince he views as an indispensable player in shaping the Middle East in the decades to come.

The two leaders have unveiled billions of dollars in deals and huddled with aides to discuss the tricky path ahead in a volatile Middle East.

“They have been a great ally,” Trump said of the Saudis on the eve of the visit.

Ahead of Prince Mohammed's arrival, Trump announced he has agreed to sell the Saudis F-35 fighter jets.

Trump's announcement is also surprising because some in the Republican administration have been wary about upsetting Israel’s qualitative military edge over its neighbours, especially at a time when Trump is depending on Israeli support for the success of his Gaza peace plan.

But the unexpected move comes at a moment when Trump is trying to nudge the Saudis toward normalising relations with Israel.

The president in his first term had helped forge commercial and diplomatic ties between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates through an effort dubbed the Abraham Accords.

Trump sees expansion of the accords as essential to his broader efforts to build stability in the Middle East after the two-year Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

And getting Saudi Arabia — the largest Arab economy and the birthplace of Islam — to sign on would create an enormous domino effect, he argues. The president in recent weeks has even predicted that once Saudi Arabia signs on to the accords, “everybody” in the Arab world “goes in.”

But the Saudis have maintained that a clear path toward Palestinian statehood must first be established before normalising relations with Israel can be considered. The Israelis, meanwhile, remain steadfastly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday approved a U.S. plan for Gaza that authorizes an international stabilization force to provide security in the devastated territory and envisions a possible future path to an independent Palestinian state.

The leaders certainly will have plenty to talk about including maintaining the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, mutual concerns about Iran’s malign behaviour, and a brutal civil war in Sudan.

And the Saudis are looking to receive formal assurances from Trump defining the scope of US military protection for the kingdom, even though anything not ratified by Congress can be undone by the next president.

Prince Mohammed, 40, is also looking to reestablish his position as a global player and a leader determined to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil by investing in sectors like mining, technology and tourism.

To that end, Saudi Arabia is expected to announce a multi-billion dollar investment in US artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, magnets and the two countries will lay out details about new cooperation in the civil nuclear energy sector, according to a senior Trump administration official who was not authorized to comment publicly ahead of the formal announcement.

“I think the challenge for us as Americans is to try to convince someone like MBS that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia ought to look more like South Korea than, say, China,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, speaking at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event on Monday.

“That, ultimately, political repression of political dissent is not good for business. It’s not good for attracting foreign direct investment, it’s not good for your image if you’re a tourism destination.”

But this week's warm embrace by Trump might provide a counterfactual to that argument for the crown prince.

In addition to White House pomp, the two nations are also planning an investment summit at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday that will include the heads of Salesforce, Qualcomm, Pfizer, the Cleveland Clinic, Chevron and Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural gas company, where even more deals with the Saudis could be announced.