President Donald Trump is resetting America’s alliances. The highest bidder typically comes first.
The president’s first major foreign trip took him across the Middle East, where he made few of the traditional demands of the region’s leaders to move closer to American values.
“They were starving for love because our country didn’t give them love,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he left Qatar for the United Arab Emirates.
Trump’s trip previewed the next four years of American foreign diplomacy, with a new emphasis on dealmaking and partnerships in the Gulf region that zags away from the “go-it-alone” strategy that defined the president’s first term.
And his first post-trip diplomacy effort this week will showcase this new approach: a conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin as Trump seeks an end to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.
In Trump’s new vision of American power, he is the personal force behind deals and peace agreements. And in his quest for high-dollar investments and regional stability, he may be altering who on the U.S.’s long list of allies comes first.
“I’m just thinking we have a president of the United States doing the selling,” Trump said Friday in the UAE. “You think Biden would be doing this? I don’t think so.”
Sources close to the White House say Trump intentionally debuted his new style of diplomacy in the Gulf.
“You’re seeing a very big shift here with the Gulf region,” said one Republican source who attended last week’s official dinner in Qatar. “Think about it: The Russia-Ukraine negotiations were in Saudi, the Israel-Gaza-Hamas negotiations were in Qatar. That’s where negotiations are happening. That’s where economic developments are happening. Negotiations with Iran are happening out there. So they’re playing into a significant shift in dynamic where the Gulf is becoming [a top] partner for the U.S. on security and financially.”
Elliott Abrams, who served as special representative for Iran and Venezuela during Trump’s first term, said he sees clear goals in Trump’s new global approach.
“I think that Trump foreign policy seems to have two main aspects. One is his narrow definition of U.S. interests, which are primarily financial and commercial, and the other is building on person-to-person relationships, particularly with, frankly, nondemocratic leaders,” Abrams told NOTUS. “So the personal part is very strongly emphasized on this trip.”
In a whirlwind trip, Trump secured trillions in investment commitments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Though some of those commitments were vague, others have already been underway, while a few have drawn doubt from experts if they’ll ever really be seen through.
In addition to the hefty commitments, the White House moved to normalize relations with Syria. With Qatar’s encouragement, Trump dropped sanctions on Syria and met with President Ahmad al-Sharaa — the first meeting between the leaders of the two nations in 25 years.
He laid the groundwork to advance talks with Iran, frequently discussing with Gulf state leaders nuclear negotiations and making threats should Iran not comply.
Overseas, the trip was defined by pomp and progress toward a new kind of relationship with the Middle East. But at home, a different theme dominated the news, particularly with Democrats seizing on the ethical issues posed by Trump’s business dealings and his desire to accept a plane from Qatar.
“He’s visiting these three countries first because they’re the three countries that are willing to pay him off,” Sen. Chris Murphy told NOTUS. “It’s fundamentally corrupt foreign policy. It’s not about what’s good for the United States, it’s just about what’s good for Donald Trump’s pocketbook.”
One former Trump administration official said: “This will be the legacy of the trip. I don’t know if anybody else will remember the investments.”
All told, the stage was set for a new era of American foreign policy in the Middle East, one that is less focused on what Trump called “interventionism” and is instead centered on cultivating regional stability and economic prosperity through partnerships with the wealthy Gulf states and their leaders.
“They prefer someone who’s not going to preach to them,” said Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University — or “interfere in their domestic society and affairs.”
The president made it a point not to dictate how the countries’ leaders, who lean more authoritarian than democratic, should live their lives or wield their power.
“He doesn’t want to do the George W. Bush nation-building stuff and interfere in every little aspect that they’re doing. He wants them to be able to work things out in a peaceful manner,” the Republican source said, adding that’s why Gulf nation leaders like Trump. “They like that Trump’s transactional, too. They can do brass tacks and get a bunch of deals where both sides make a lot of money and get a lot of resources that they need.”
As for human rights and democratization, Stephen Yates, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow and former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, said many traditional strategies have failed and that Trump’s new style of foreign policy has the potential to be more effective.
“I think his answer to that has been, if you are able to wind down intractable conflicts, if you are able to reorient the nodes of power and influence in key regions away from feuding and fighting,” he said, “you have contributed in a meaningful way to the right to rise for people in that region.”
There’s one thing Trump didn’t do on his trip that spoke volumes: He did not stop in Israel or meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though he touted progress made in negotiations with Israel’s rival Iran and heard pleas from Gulf leaders to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and deliver more aid for Palestinians.
“It is striking if you compare — his first trip in May 2017 was also to Saudi Arabia. But that trip also included Israel,” Abrams said. “In what he’s doing now, in elevating the commercial and financial aspect, he gives the Gulf countries a great advantage over Israel as allies and partners, and the Israelis are also very worried about the terms of any deal with Iran. So I think it is true that right now he’s embraced the Gulf countries more than Israel.”
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill told NOTUS they applaud Trump’s trip, calling it historic and a projection of strength. But many were also less than supportive of dealings with Qatar. Sen. Josh Hawley said he’s “fine” with the country wanting to be close with the U.S., but that it needs to be used to the U.S.’s benefit.
“We should use our leverage,” Hawley, a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said. “Qatar needs us. They want us. We should come up with a long list of things they can do to prove that they’re really useful. And they can start by quitting sheltering the Muslim Brotherhood. Quit harboring the terrorists that want to destroy Israel. Quit threatening U.S. interests. There’s a lot they could do for us.”
The relationships could also be leveraged to advance U.S. efforts to counter China. Haykel, who has been in communication with Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, said the trip was not just about investments but also about shoring up strategic alliances that started under the Biden administration.
“The U.S. has been for some time, not just with Trump, telling the countries there that if you want to have our military systems, you also have to not engage with China on technology that has relevance to our military equipment,” Haykel said. “Trump is just an accelerant of what was already very much the case in the last few years of the Biden administration.”
And though Trump is at the very beginning of his term, his legacy — would he be remembered as having laid the path toward warmer relations and bigger investments in the Gulf? — was clearly on his mind.
“Somebody’s going to be taking the credit for this,” the president said Friday. “You remember, press, this guy did it.”
—
Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS. Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.