What Trump really wants from cosying up to Saudi

It is easy enough for diplomats to sit around a table and force a smile. It is similarly not tricky to issue a bland statement saying such talks have begun “constructively”.

It is much harder to forge from such moments a lasting end to the war in Ukraine, and build momentum for even more ambitious goals in the Middle East.

For watchers of international diplomacy, it was no surprise Saudi Arabia offered to host talks between the US and Ukraine, and the US and Russia, as part of Donald Trump’s peace initiative.

In recent years, it has become a growing regional player, matched only by Turkey, and with close ties to many nations, primarily because it provides 15 per cent of the world’s oil.

Its ambitious young Crown Prince, 39-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, is trying to rebrand a country with a shoddy human rights record as part of its so-called Saudi Vision 2030, and diversify its economy towards international investment and tourism. Hosting high level talks such as these, are part of that.

For Trump, 78, Saudi Arabia was a natural place to turn to this week.

In 2017, during his first term, he travelled to the royal court in Riyadh and was awarded the King Abdulaziz al Saud Collar, said to be the nation’s highest civilian honour. It is also shinier than the golden escalators at Trump Tower down which the former reality TV star descended to launch his political career in 2015.

Two years later, Trump refused to comment to reporters on a finding by US intelligence that MBS had ordered the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and instead praised the crown prince as a “friend of mine”.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, left the White House to start a private equity firm said to have received a $2bn investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by MBS. Kushner also heaped praise on the prince, calling him a “a visionary leader”.

“Saudi Arabia is now the most important power in the region, and is locked at a rivalry with Turkey for influence that reaches beyond the beyond the region,” Thomas Lippman, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, told The i Paper. “This is the sort of meeting that used to take place in Geneva.”

What does Trump want from MBS this time around? Money is an obvious answer. In January, MBS said the kingdom wants to invest $600bn in the United States over the course of Trump’s term – which the US president promptly said should be boosted to $1trn.

Oil is also on Trump’s mind. Having rejected the shift away from fossil fuels initiated by Joe Biden, Trump also wants Saudi Arabia to remain a regular supplier of oil – although he has demanded that Saudia Arabi and OPEC bring down costs.

But Trump also wants the kingdom’s help to push for a broader peace settlement in the Middle East, once a ceasefire is in place between Israel and Hamas.

Before the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year, the US was among those pushing for Israel and Saudi Arabia to finally have formal diplomatic relations, something that has never happened. Behind the scenes, relations have been getting better and both are keen to ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

Trump would have loved nothing more than being associated with a diplomatic coup involving the world’s most influential Arab nation, that would have put in the shade even the achievement of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw Israel start diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

No such deal can happen without some sort of statehood for the Palestinians.

Trump has been infuriating many countries with his proposition for the Palestinians to leave Gaza and allow the US to turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has backed an alternative $53bn plan spearheaded by Egypt and supported by Jordan and Qatar, that would rebuild Gaza by 2030 without forcing its population to leave.

Lippman says he is not certain Trump can get what he wants as the talks play out this week.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “will go wherever he has to go, to try to save his country”, he said, “but Zelensky says he’s not going to sign off on a deal that hives off part of his country without at least some kind of security guarantees.”

By contrast, Trump’s positions are entirely transactional: “They’re not based on principle or humanitarian aspirations or anything else.”

And what about a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia in which the two countries would officially recognise each other?

Lippman, the author of seven books including Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, said: “Saudi Arabia is not going to formalise any arrangement with Israel in the absence of a deal that’s acceptable to the Palestinians.

“I don’t know what’s going on in their heads.”