When President Donald Trump first met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in Riyadh this spring, he was beaming with delight. Trump was feted by the Saudi royal family as if he were a royal himself. Surrounded by gold chairs and chandeliers, Trump threw praise at MBS, a man who seven years earlier was accused by the U.S. intelligence community of ordering the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident and columnist at The Washington Post. MBS, Trump said, was an “incredible man,” a “friend” and someone who was willing to spend lavishly to boost U.S. industry. And spend he did; the Saudis agreed to invest $600 billion in the American economy.
Trump and MBS will meet each other again Tuesday, this time at the White House. It will be the crown prince’s first trip to Washington since the Khashoggi affair. The Trump administration is packaging this meeting as a sort of follow-up to the May session, where investment projects will be hammered out and the Middle East’s biggest security topics — maintaining the ceasefire in Gaza, broadening the Abraham Accords and containing Iran’s nuclear program — will be discussed. Expect the usual red-carpet treatment that a visiting dignitary typically receives when they enter the White House complex.
Yet if Trump isn’t careful, he could run the risk of giving more to his Saudi friend than is warranted. MBS is coming to Washington with the geopolitical equivalent of a long Christmas list, and the list includes everything from state-of-the-art F-35 fighter planes to a full-fledged U.S. security guarantee, which would compel the United States to defend Saudi Arabia in the event the Kingdom’s security is jeopardized. While some of these demands may already be in the works, Trump ought to ask himself the obvious question: Are concessions like these appropriate or even necessary to accomplish U.S. security objectives in the Middle East?
The risk is that Trump is so desperate to achieve groundbreaking accomplishments in the region that he’s willing to gift the Saudis whatever they ask for if it improves his ability to make diplomatic history.
Despite allegations from the White House to the contrary, Trump’s major diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East are either stagnating or at risk of collapsing entirely. The ceasefire in Gaza is a perfect example. The truce, struck last month, was supposed to stop the two-year war in the Palestinian enclave, get all the remaining Israeli hostages released and produce a process whereby Hamas is demilitarized, Gaza is reconstructed, the Palestinian Authority is reformed and an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is resurrected. Although the first stage of the agreement is largely complete — notwithstanding the occasional ceasefire breaches — the second stage is now bogged down as Arab states balk at providing their own troops to stabilize Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterates that a Palestinian state is a nonstarter for his government.
As the days go by, the yellow line inside Gaza that Israeli troops withdrew to as part of the ceasefire is now increasingly being seen as a potential new border between Israel and the battered enclave. Hamas, meanwhile, is consolidating its power in the parts of Gaza that Israeli forces no longer control.
Or take Lebanon. Although Trump had nothing to do with negotiating the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, he still inherited it the moment he stepped into the Oval Office. That multipoint deal was designed to end the monthslong war, required a pullback of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in exchange for a withdrawal of Hezbollah forces to the north and would eventually culminate in the Lebanese army demilitarizing Hezbollah. Yet implementation problems happen on a daily basis. Israeli troops still occupy roughly five points inside Lebanon and have increased airstrikes inside the country. In turn, Hezbollah refuses to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state, arguing that Israel’s continued aggression means demilitarization is futile. And the Lebanese government is getting frustrated with the entire endeavor, blaming Israel for deliberately sabotaging the agreement.
Trump, of course, is being briefed about all of this. Although he may not care much about how Lebanon shakes out — the Israel-Hezbollah deal was a Joe Biden administration creation, after all — the last thing Trump wants to see is his ceasefire in Gaza fall apart. If that were to occur, all of those earlier proclamations from the administration about the emergence of a new peaceful dawn in the Middle East begins to look like a cruel joke.
Getting Saudi Arabia’s explicit endorsement, either through a massive aid package for Gaza’s reconstruction or participation in the interim foreign security force that is supposed to oversee Hamas’ disarmament, would therefore be a huge boost to efforts that currently appear to be floundering. The Saudis aren’t going to do any of this for free — if anything, MBS is likely to exploit the issue to extract security concessions from Washington.
Trump may be tempted to bite. What he should do instead is sit down and think this through because bringing Saudi Arabia into the U.S. security umbrella has far more costs to than benefits. After signing off on such an arrangement, the U.S. military would effectively be on the hook for defending a country whose interests aren’t fully aligned with Washington’s own. Americans would also be expected to fight and die on behalf of a foreign nation whose values are dramatically different and whose previous policies in the region — launching a war in Yemen, blockading Qatar and even abducting the prime minister of another country to force his resignation — was the precise opposite of promoting regional stability.
Does Trump, the so-called master negotiator, really think this would be a great deal for the United States?
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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