President Donald Trump is relying on his relationships and reputation to deliver his foreign policy, from the Middle East to the Russia–Ukraine war.
But although those relationships and that reputation helped him during his Middle East trip, his first major foreign trip of his second administration, they create political risk for him should Russian President Vladimir Putin drag out his three-year war against Ukraine.
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Trump’s four-day trip to the Middle East, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, underscored the president’s relationships with Arab leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It also emphasized his desire to keep previous disagreements in the past, unlike his predecessors, such as former President Joe Biden, who called on the kingdom to be approached as a “pariah” for bin Salman allegedly directing the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” Trump said in Saudi Arabia. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment — my job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.”
For the Gulf State leaders, Trump’s reputation for dealmaking and appreciating demonstrations of respect preceded him. For example, the three countries tried to please the president with billion-dollar agreements complete with personal touches like a mobile McDonald’s and having Lee Greenwood perform.
“Trump puts a premium on personal relationships, but keep in mind that the leaders were eager to make these deals,” Steven Cook, a Middle East and Africa studies senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a message to the Washington Examiner. “1) the U.S. is a good investment, and 2) they want to stay on the President’s good side.”
As such, Trump returned to the White House on Friday with those investment promises, including another $200 billion from the UAE overnight for, among other pledges, a $14.5 billion commitment from Etihad Airways to purchase 28 U.S.-made Boeing 787 and 777X airplanes with GE engines. But the president also comes home with raised expectations regarding his personal involvement in negotiating the end of the Russia-Ukraine war, a development he said he would accomplish on day one of his second administration.
Trump had implored Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Putin’s counterproposal of meeting in Turkey this week after the United Kingdom and the European Union threatened to increase sanctions on Russia should it not participate in a 30-day ceasefire. Putin, himself a political pariah who has a cordial relationship with Trump, declined to attend in the end, instead sending low-level representatives in his stead. Those representatives agreed with their Ukrainian counterparts to a prisoner swap and more talks, potentially between Putin and Zelensky, a disappointing outcome, despite the two sides sitting down with one another for the first time since the start of the war.
“Nothing’s gonna happen until Putin and I get together,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One en route to the UAE. “He wasn’t going if I wasn’t there. And I don’t believe anything’s gonna happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together. But we’re going to have to get it solved because too many people are dying.”
That is on top of Iran disputing Trump telling reporters on Air Force One en route to Washington that Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff has dispatched the U.S.’s own proposal to Tehran related to a new nuclear deal. The U.S. and Iran have not agreed on whether Tehran should be able to enrich its own uranium.
“Yeah, they have a proposal, but, more importantly, they know they have to move quickly or something bad, something bad’s going to happen,” Trump said Friday during the same exchange with reporters.
When evaluating Trump’s second first major foreign trip, Danielle Pletka, a foreign and defense policy studies senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued it is “not clear” that the president “solved the problems that are plaguing the world originating in the Middle East.”
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“Fundamentally, he is a mercantilist of the old school, and operates accordingly,” Pletka, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, told the Washington Examiner. “The biggest challenge to Donald Trump is that not everybody else sees the world that way, and the Middle East is full of ideologues for whom money means little.”
For Pletka, “if money and purchases” from the U.S. are the metric, then sure,” the trip was a success.
“If solving the problem of Islamism and Iran’s nuclear weapons program, less so,” she said, not to mention the Israel–Hamas war.
Cook, the senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was less critical.
“I certainly believe that based on what the president and his team set out to do, the visit to the Gulf was a success,” Cook said. “There were announcements of significant investments in the United States, mega arms deals, and a variety of joint projects. Moreover, the president laid out — in a fairly compelling way — his vision of what American foreign policy in the Middle East will look like.”
But Cook did advise caution with respect to “whether the deals materialize and what events conspire to impinge on the president’s vision of a foreign policy that is situated firmly in his version of economic statecraft.”
Mona Yacoubian, a senior adviser and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, had reservations about the agreements, noting “specifics were lacking and the deals were overshadowed by concerns over potential conflicts of interest around Trump family businesses.”
To that end, Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) plan to force a vote in the Senate on Trump’s $3.5 billion arms deals with Qatar and the UAE to protest the president’s apparent willingness to accept a $400 million Boeing 747 plane from Qatar as a temporary Air Force One, the most expensive presidential gift in history, and the UAE’s $2 billion contribution to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company. The White House has remained adamant that the plane would be under the purview of the Defense Department before it is transferred to Trump’s presidential library at a later date.
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Regardless, Yacoubian, a State Department and United States Agency for International Development alumna, told the Washington Examiner Trump’s Middle East trip “certainly fulfilled the administration’s stated ambitions and even produced a couple surprises — namely the president’s announcement that the [U.S.] would ease Syria sanctions and his meeting with Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara.”
“The meeting was significant as the first between an American and Syrian president in 25 years,” she said of the Syrian who was once on the U.S.’s terror watch list for his leadership role within al Qaeda before distancing himself from the terrorist organization.