Only a few years ago, Washington was calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its headline-making human rights violations. Western business leaders cancelled investments in the kingdom. Celebrities and sports stars took flak for doing events there.
With its oil and its regional clout, however, Saudi Arabia proved too useful for the Biden administration to push the kingdom away for too long. And just a few weeks into the second term of Donald Trump, who nurtured a cosy relationship with the kingdom when he was last in office, Saudi Arabia’s stock is once again on the rise – even if Trump’s approach to the region is not always to the Saudis’ liking.
This week, all of the diplomacy is in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital. On Friday, Arab leaders were gathering to hammer out a counterproposal meant to persuade Trump not to deport all of the roughly two million people in the Gaza Strip to Arab countries, mainly Egypt and Jordan, and transform the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.
On Tuesday, senior US and Russian officials met in Riyadh for opening talks over ending the war in Ukraine and re-establishing normal relations, another major foreign policy priority of Trump’s. The Russian delegation was based at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, once locked up hundreds of powerful businessmen and royal family members in an early quest to consolidate power. (Saudi Arabia said it was a crackdown on corruption.)
This time, Saudi Arabia was presenting a very different image, facilitating the talks on Tuesday with a lunch menu of Arab and western specialities that included a “symphony of scallop, shrimps and salmon” and knafeh cheesecake, according to Russian state television.
“Country of peace,” read the hashtag accompanying some social media posts about the Tuesday talks from government and state media accounts. Others had a hashtag calling the kingdom “capital of world decisions”.
Meeting Trump’s handpicked envoys in Riyadh on Monday night, Crown Prince Mohammed told them: “We would be more than glad to work with you and with President Trump and his administration. I believe we can achieve positive things, for Saudi Arabia and for many countries around the world.”
Trump also spoke late on Wednesday at an investment summit in Miami Beach hosted by Saudi Arabia’s affluent sovereign wealth fund in which he praised Riyadh’s role in the Russia-US talks.
The Saudis’ big week in international diplomacy has been long in the making. The Arab world’s traditional leaders, including Egypt, Iraq and Syria, are weakened by years of internal turmoil. Under Crown Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia has taken advantage of its size, wealth and status as the guardian of some of Islam’s holiest sites to fill that gap.
The high-profile diplomacy “serves to showcase the kingdom’s global influence and regional leadership,” said Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow for Middle East Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a policy analysis group. He noted that waning US influence on the global stage had allowed “agile actors” such as Saudi Arabia to step up.
Analysts, including some close to the royal court, said a canny Saudi strategy to cultivate relations beyond the United States during the years of strain with the Biden administration had paid off in the US-Russia talks on Tuesday.
In recent years, Saudi Arabia has built economic links with China and avoided taking sides in the war in Ukraine. Its neutrality allowed it to help broker prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, and Russia and the United States, and to host Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – though Zelenskiy cancelled a planned visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday out of frustration at being excluded from the previous day’s talks.
Saudi Arabia has also positioned itself as the biggest prize in Israel’s pursuit of normalised relations with Arab neighbours, giving the Saudis leverage to push for a defence pact with the United States. As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified after the Hamas-led October 7th, 2023, attack, the Saudis also increasingly conditioned the deal on a pathway toward statehood for the Palestinians, a long-held dream for most of the Arab world.
Its continuing talks with the US and Israel over normalisation, along with the fact that it is expected to help fund any reconstruction of Gaza, has made Saudi Arabia a natural choice to convene Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on Friday to discuss a reconstruction proposal for Gaza that they hope will serve as an alternative to Trump’s ideas for the territory.
The proposed grand bargain between Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US was first shepherded by the Biden administration. President Joe Biden saw opportunity in the agreement even though, as a candidate, he declared Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its bombings of civilians in Yemen and Saudi agents’ gruesome killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident.
Still, it is Trump, whose first visit to a foreign country in his first term was to Saudi Arabia, who has elevated the Gulf kingdom to the status of trusted friend and partner in global affairs.
“Trump is recognising them as the Arab leader,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They wanted to be treated like that, and under Trump they are being treated like that.”
Trump has said the kingdom was chosen for his potential first meeting with Putin since returning to the White House because of the two presidents’ relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed. Trump proposed the country in his phone call last week with Putin as a venue, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman.
“We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be,” Trump said last week.
Yet if Trump handed Saudi Arabia an unqualified win by selecting it to host the US-Russia talks, his return to the White House has also imperilled another major priority for Crown Prince Mohammed: securing a defence pact and help with developing a civilian nuclear programme from the US in exchange for normalising relations with Israel.
Forcibly expelling Palestinians from Gaza, as Trump has proposed, would be not only a war crime that violates international law, according to experts, but would also erase any remaining hope of a Palestinian state on existing Palestinian land. The Saudi population overwhelmingly supports Palestinian statehood, and Crown Prince Mohammed has shown he will not go against its wishes: the Saudi government responded to Trump’s proposal by announcing that it would not normalise with Israel without a Palestinian state being established.
The precondition, which the Saudis have insisted on for the past year, is “non-negotiable and not subject to compromises”, the Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement this month.
Given Israel’s opposition to Palestinian statehood, the chances of a Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal, along with the Saudi-US defence agreement, look increasingly remote, at least in the near term, Ibish said.
Even so, Saudi officials may have reaped benefits on that front from the time they spent with senior Trump administration officials in Riyadh this week.
Fostering ties with US secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Michael Waltz and, especially, Steve Witkoff, a long-time friend of Trump’s who serves as his special envoy to the Middle East, may help Saudi Arabia in its dealings with the US over Gaza and normalisation, Saudi political analysts said. Crown Prince Mohammed spoke to Rubio about Gaza and Ukraine on Monday.
Witkoff, who, like his boss, is a New York property magnate, has emerged as a key figure at the heart of Trump’s foreign deal-making. He stepped beyond his ostensible job title to attend the Russia-US talks in Riyadh on Tuesday and help secure the release last week of Marc Fogel, an American teacher held in Russia since 2021.
[ Steve Witkoff visits Jerusalem to discuss next phase of Gaza ceasefireOpens in new window ]
Witkoff will “undoubtedly listen carefully to what the Saudis have to say about Gaza,” said Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi analyst. “Although there were initial disagreements regarding Gaza, I believe they will find a way forward.”
In any case, the two countries’ relationship does not hinge only on normalisation, the defence pact or Palestinian statehood, especially under Trump. That was amply demonstrated in late January, when Crown Prince Mohammed told Trump that Saudi Arabia intended to bolster its investment and trade with the United States by at least $600 billion over the next four years. −This article originally appeared in The New York Times
