US President Donald Trump gave Saudi Arabia's crown prince a lavish reception in Washington, offering a defence agreement that includes cutting-edge warplanes and absolving him of the murder of an American journalist.
Less clear was what Trump got in return.
The US leader greeted Mohammed bin Salman with a dozen flag-carrying soldiers on horseback, a Marine Corps band playing from the White House balcony and a flyover by the F-35 fighter jets the Saudis have long coveted. The White House later said the two countries signed a loosely worded defence cooperation pact, and Trump designated Saudi Arabia as a “major non-NATO ally” at a dinner in honor of his 40-year-old ally.
The pomp matched that with which the Crown Prince greeted Trump on his visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. In exchange, Trump got a vague promise for the Saudis to invest as much as $1 trillion in the US — up from a previous pledge of $600 billion. That adds to trillions of dollars in similar pledges that Trump has received in trade deals with other partners, and which experts say may never materialise.
It was a victory for MBS, as Saudi Arabia's de facto leader is known, who has sought to repair and deepen ties with the US while using closer relations with China as leverage. Trump repeatedly praised the Crown Prince, calling him a “very good friend of mine” and saying he'd done incredible things “in terms of human rights and everything else.”
“I do think it's lopsided,” said Frederic Wehrey, a former Air Force officer who is a senior fellow in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The US is surrendering enormous leverage here by giving up so much, so quickly.”
In addition to the sale of F-35 fighter jets, the US agreed to green-light the first deliveries of advanced artificial intelligence chips to a Saudi Arabian firm, according to people familiar with the deal. That came despite US national security concerns about economic ties between Saudi Arabia and China.
Later Tuesday, Trump said Saudi Arabia would buy “nearly $142 billion worth of American military equipment and services.” He gave no details and it's not clear how Saudi Arabia will pay for all that hardware given it amounts to nearly 15% of the country's annual gross domestic product.
Image Boost
Just as important, Trump offered Prince Mohammed's image a much-needed rehabilitation in the seven years since the killing of commentator Jamal Khashoggi. A US intelligence report concluded that MBS authorised the killing of the Saudi insider turned Washington Post columnist, who was dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a team that included officers of the prince's protective detail.
“He knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that,” Trump said, criticising a journalist who asked about it as “insubordinate.”
The Khashoggi assassination — as well as civilian casualties as a result of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen — hung over US-Saudi relations for years, including in the second half of Trump's first term. Former President Joe Biden called MBS a “pariah,” though he later softened his tone and started negotiations on a sweeping defense pact.
To be sure, the lush pageantry of the Oval Office meeting obscured the scarcity of hard details and timeline on some of the agreements. While a fact sheet was released laying out the broad framework of deals, there was no signing ceremony, and negotiations beforehand had been fraught.
Even the upgraded security partnership is fuzzy. Saudi Arabia and other nations covet the “major non-NATO ally” designation, and while it is a major prize in terms of status, the roughly 20 countries with that designation often struggle to realise its full benefits.
While a potential sale of marquee warplanes and oil-fuelled investment pledges helped bolster the impression of a much closer US-Saudi relationship, Trump was unable to get Saudi Arabia to normalise ties with Israel by signing onto the Abraham Accords he's championed since his first term. And Saudi Arabia did not — at least, as of yet — obtain a mutual defense pact similar to that of fellow Gulf state Qatar.
Strategic Failure
“The fact he was able to come to Washington and to be received at the White House was a win for him,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, a Washington-based Saudi human rights advocate. “But the trip so far has failed on a strategic level.”
As with many of the initial announcements on deals that Trump reaches with partners, it wasn't immediately clear how fast Saudi Arabia will be able to reap the benefits of US promises. The pledge to sell F-35s will kickstart a long negotiating process that likely won't see planes delivered for several years — if ever. National security officials in Washington are wary about the technology being shared elsewhere, particularly with Beijing.
While the announcements on Tuesday allowed both leaders to claim wins, the biggest deal between the two sides — the complex security and diplomatic agreement that requires the cooperation of the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel — may still take years.
The Saudis envision a deal that would see the US offer Senate-ratified security guarantees to the kingdom, in return for Riyadh normalising diplomatic ties with Israel.
Given the devastation caused by Israel's war in Gaza, Saudi Arabia says normalisation is also conditional on concrete steps toward Palestinian statehood.
“The big thing the Saudis want is a mutual defense treaty and that's only going to be available if there's a whole packaged deal involving normalisation,” said Michael Ratney, who was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Biden administration and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Khashoggi's murder was “a horrific incident,” he said. “But even the Biden administration sort of figured that as horrible as it was, it can't be a reason not to pursue things where we have fundamental national security interests.”
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