SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
saudi arabia
Trump’s Middle East Focus: From the Axis of Evil to the Axis of Plutocrats
Trump’s foreign policy trip marked a stark pivot away from what had long been a neoconservative version of Middle Eastern policymaking in Washington. Will the result be peace or just profit?
May 30, 2025
Colorful career criminal Willie Sutton once may (or may not) have been asked why he robbed banks. “Because that is where the money is,” he supposedly replied. A similar principle may explain the first foreign trip of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, which was not to a traditional U.S. ally in Europe. Rather, he set off to visit the capitals of the Gulf hydrocarbon potentates Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In royal palaces there, he feasted and was offered hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in American companies and opportunities for the Trump Organization, too. Qatar even courted controversy by giving him a $400 million Boeing 747-8 plane to serve as a future Air Force One.
And the publicity was regal. Strikingly missing, however, was a side trip to Israel or any evident consultations with the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If Israel gets in the way of deal-making with the Gulf plutocrats, it could become an annoyance that Trump might feel he can’t afford.
Instead, Israel was frozen out and blindsided by Trump’s pronouncements. On the eve of his trip, the president took the Israelis by surprise when he abruptly announced that he would halt his (costly and fruitless) bombing campaign against the Houthis of Yemen. Israeli leaders then had to listen to Trump proclaim that the U.S. “has no stronger partner” than Saudi Arabia, with which he brokered a $142 billion deal for American arms. The United Arab Emirates has a sovereign wealth fund of $2.2 trillion, while Saudi Arabia’s is $1.1 trillion and that country’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has already deposited $2 billion of it in the investment firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has $526 billion. And such sums don’t even include those countries’ vast currency reserves, earned by selling petroleum and fossil gas.
And in that single, several-day trip, President Trump managed to realign U.S. Middle Eastern policy to center on—and yes, it should be capitalized!—an Axis of the Plutocrats, Gulf sheikhs who are using their galactic fortunes to reshape the region from Libya to Sudan, Egypt to Syria, and who are hungrily eyeing new investment opportunities in areas like the emerging artificial intelligence industry.
Syria: A Very Strong Background
Oh, and while he was traveling Trump revealed that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s bin Salman had indeed convinced him to lift American sanctions on Syria, a step distinctly opposed by the Israelis. While in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he even held a surprise meeting with fundamentalist Syrian President Ahmad al-Shara, who had once led an al Qaeda affiliate. Asked about whether the Israelis opposed the step, Trump replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask them about that.” In fact, The Associated Pressreported that, in an April meeting with Trump, Netanyahu had specifically pleaded with him not to lift those sanctions on Syria, since he claimed he feared that the new fundamentalist government there might eventually stage an attack on Israel.
Trump appears to have been entirely unmoved by Netanyahu’s plea. After meeting al-Shara in Riyadh, the president summed up his view of the former guerrilla and supporter of hardline Salafi Islam this way: “Young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.” On recognizing Damascus’s new government and issuing a waiver on those congressionally mandated sanctions, Trump observed, “Now it’s their time to shine… So, I say, ‘Good luck, Syria.’ Show us something very special.” It’s worth noting that al-Shara claims he wants good relations with all his country’s neighbors and is open to peace with Israel.
You wouldn’t know it from Netanyahu’s heated rhetoric, but during the Syrian civil war of the last decade, Israel did give medical help to the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) that al-Shara founded and led when it was fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime. Since al-Shara’s group sometimes persecuted the heterodox Druze minority in Syria, this step outraged Israel’s own Druze minority, some of whom at one point attacked an ambulance taking a wounded Syrian rebel to an Israeli hospital, while the group’s leaders lobbied Netanyahu to cease aiding the al Qaeda-linked outfit.
Netanyahu’s recent suggestions to Trump that al-Shara, now in control of much of Syria, poses a threat to Israel, were therefore wholly disingenuous. Moreover, the jackboot is entirely on the other foot. As soon as the revolution in Damascus succeeded, Netanyahu ordered an orgy of destruction, bombing naval ships in the Syrian port of Latakia and military installations across the country, leaving Syria virtually helpless. Israeli troops then marched into Syria, occupying swathes of its territory and taking control of a dam that supplies 40% of its water. Israeli far-right cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich then pledged that Israel’s multi-front war of expansion there would only end when Syria was—you couldn’t put it more bluntly than this—“dismantled.”
Now, Israeli analysts not only fear a resurgent Syria but also worry that since Erdogan has Trump’s ear on Syrian policy, he will be emboldened. Turkey, after all, backed the rebel group that has now taken power and is their main international sponsor. Turkish fighter jets are already operating in northern Syrian air space, and Israel’s attempt to establish hegemony over its southern regions is endangered by Turkish claims that, going back to Ottoman times, Syria has always been in its sphere of influence.
Iran: No Nuclear Dust
Trump also sidelined Netanyahu during his trip by continuing to press for a new nuclear deal with Iran. His Gulf Arab hosts showed a collective enthusiasm for the ongoing talks, and Trump revealed that Qatar’s ruler, Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, had indeed lobbied him to begin direct discussions with Iran. The Gulf Arab monarchies fear being caught in the crossfire of any future American-Israeli war with Iran. The leaders of Qatar and the other Gulf states are anxious that the (all too literal) fallout from any aerial strikes on enriched nuclear materials in Iran could drift onto their populations, affecting their water supplies. Trump tried to reassure his hosts that “we’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran,” adding that he wanted to try negotiations first in hopes of forestalling any such outcome.
During both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, Washington’s pitch to the Gulf Arab states was that they should recognize Israel, do business with it, and form a military alliance with it against Iran. Jared Kushner succeeded in making this argument to the postage-stamp Gulf countries of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which signed the Abraham Accords with Israel on September 15, 2020.
Trump appears to have developed the same fascination that possessed Barack Obama when it comes to “opening” Iran the way Richard Nixon once opened China.
However, Kushner and then-President Biden failed to bring Saudi Arabia aboard. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman resisted going on a war footing with Iran, especially after the devastating 2019 attack by that country or one of its proxies on the Kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery, which underlined Riyadh’s vulnerability. Not surprisingly, then, in March 2023, the Saudi foreign minister joined his Iranian counterpart in Beijing, where the two countries restored diplomatic relations and began deconfliction talks.
Once Israel launched its total war on the Gazan population in October 2023, bin Salman could hardly sign on to the Abraham Accords. In the region, it would have looked as if he were helping to destroy the Palestinian Arabs while putting a target on Iran, one of the Palestinians’ few remaining state champions. Unlike Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia has a substantial citizen population—some 19 million people—whose opinions the government has to be at least a little bit anxious about, especially since the blood of the average Saudi is indeed boiling at the daily atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza. Last year, bin Salman’s office leaked to Politico that he feared he would be assassinated if he recognized Israel under such grim circumstances and he insisted on the need for an independent Palestinian state (which seemed to get Washington off his back on the issue).
In addition, Trump appears to have developed the same fascination that possessed Barack Obama when it comes to “opening” Iran the way Richard Nixon once opened China. Nothing, of course, could be more unwelcome in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities (though Western intelligence agencies do not believe that country actually has a nuclear weapons program). In an April meeting, Trump informed Netanyahu that he wanted to try negotiations before anybody attacked Iran and pointedly gave the prime minister a copy of his book The Art of the Deal.
Qatar: A Fundamental Role
If Qatar did convince Trump to try negotiating with Iran, then Sheikh Tamim won a major round in the contest for influence with the American president. It was a victory in keeping with Doha’s longstanding regional role as a mediator and seeker of peaceful solutions to conflict. And the rise of Qatari influence is another blow to Netanyahu, who has attempted to sideline the Gulf gas giant even though he was happy to make use of its services.
Since Hamas’ bloodthirsty October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, elements of the Israeli government and its supporters have attempted to blame Qatar for supposedly supporting and bankrolling Hamas. The allegations are breathtakingly false and serve as a smokescreen for Hamas’ actual patron (in a manner of speaking), Netanyahu himself. They were aimed, however, precisely at turning Qatar into a distrusted regional pariah, a ploy that has so far failed spectacularly.
That the fundamentalist Hamas movement came to power at the ballot box in Gaza in 2006 and could not be dislodged struck Netanyahu as a potential blessing. The bad blood between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on the West Bank left Palestinians politically divided. Netanyahu made that very rivalry a pretext for preventing the establishment of a state for the 5 million stateless Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He put severe import-export restrictions on Gaza but otherwise allowed Hamas to run it as its own fiefdom. Hamas rocket fire from time to time (which seldom did any real damage) was a price Netanyahu was then willing to pay. He had a close associate act as a go-between regarding transfers of money from Qatar and Egypt into Gaza for civilian aid and administration. From 2021 on, Egypt and Qatar deposited aid money for Gaza civilian reconstruction in an Israeli bank account, and then Israel transferred it to the Gazans.
That’s right: Bibi Netanyahu was once functionally Gaza’s comptroller. Moreover, in 2011-2012, the Obama administration asked Qatar to host members of the Hamas civilian politbureau so that they could take part in indirect negotiations with both the U.S. and Israel. The favor Qatar did for Washington and Tel Aviv, however, would prove burdensome to its diplomacy. In 2018, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim, grew so frustrated with Hamas that he decided to kick its officials out and cease sending aid to Gaza. Terrified that his divide-and-rule approach to the Palestinians might be jeopardized, Netanyahu frantically dispatched the head of the Israeli intelligence outfit Mossad to Qatar to plead with the emir to continue the arrangement.
In 2020, The Times of Israel revealed that Mossad head Yossi Cohen had written a letter to Tamim about the Gaza money transfers, saying: “This aid has undoubtedly played a fundamental role in achieving the continued improvement of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and ensuring stability and security in the region.” As late as 2023, other Israeli government officials were still sending similar messages, according to that paper. The subsequent attempt of the Netanyahu government to shift blame for its disgraceful Gaza policy onto Qatar has struck few seasoned observers as plausible.
Regarding Trump’s recent visit, the Israeli genocide in Gaza was the one outstanding issue on which Gulf leaders appear to have made little headway. After a roundtable with Qatari business leaders, the president said of Gaza, “Let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone.” These remarks, wholly detached from reality, did not clarify whether he still agreed with Netanyahu on a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, which no one in the Arab Gulf could accept. In any case, insiders say Trump is frustrated that Netanyahu doesn’t “wrap up” the war, but that the president has not exerted the pressure necessary to stop it.
A Stark Pivot
Trump’s foreign policy trip marked a stark pivot away from what had long been a neoconservative version of Middle Eastern policymaking in Washington. In the era of President George W. Bush, some officials typically argued that Israel was Washington’s only reliable democratic partner in the Middle East and that all policy in the region should be organized around that reality. In the process, of course, they downplayed the plight of the Palestinians, claiming in 2002 that peace would only come in the region when the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown. They gradually developed a rhetoric for stuffing Washington’s version of democracy down the gullets of Middle Eastern regimes—at the point of a gun, if necessary. They either marginalized Arab regimes or sought to scare them into an alliance with Israel. Their ultimate goal then was a war on Iran that would overthrow the government there. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” they used to proclaim in a creepy combination of male chauvinism and juvenile jingoism.
Trump’s own regime is, of course, not free of either toxic masculinity or a jejune hyper-nationalism. However, unlike Bush and the neocons, the 47th president seems uninterested in kicking off long, debilitating foreign wars, which his base has come to hate. Still, think of him, at least in part, as Trump of Arabia. Of course, he’s mainly interested in making money for himself and his wealthy backers there. If Israel gets in the way of deal-making with the Gulf plutocrats, it could become an annoyance that Trump might feel he can’t afford. So far, however, the president seems unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to end the genocide and position the Middle East and the U.S. for prosperity, leaving us all in limbo with only a new Trump Tower in Dubai to show for it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
In Bonanza for Arms Industry, Trump Announces Record $142 Billion Weapons Sale to Saudis
"I like him a lot," Trump said of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a prolific human rights violator. "I like him too much."
May 13, 2025
In what the White House described as "the largest defense sales agreement in history," U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a deal for prolific human rights violator Saudi Arabia to purchase $142 billion worth of arms from a dozen different American companies.
The White House unveiled the sale as Trump visited Saudi leaders including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the kingdom's capital city of Riyadh on the first leg of a Mideast tour, with stops also scheduled in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
A fact sheet published by the executive office said the arms sale involves "air force advancement and space capabilities, air and missile defense, maritime and coastal security, border security and land forces modernization, and information and communication systems upgrades."
"Oh, what I do for the crown prince."
Reutersreported that military-industrial complex titans including Lockheed Martin, RTX—formerly Raytheon—Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics are involved in the deal. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia reportedly discussed the potential sale of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom, but it remains unclear if the Trump administration will allow the transfer of the highly advanced warplanes.
The agreement is part of a broader Saudi commitment to invest $600 billion in the United States, which the White House said will "strengthen our energy security, defense industry, technology leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals."
Trump and his relatives, including son-in-law Jared Kushner, enjoy close personal and financial relations with the Saudi royal family, which has poured billions of dollars into their business ventures.
During a signing ceremony, Trump—who apparently fell asleep during the proceedings—joked that the Saudis should invest $1 trillion.
Business leaders including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—who is also the de facto Department of Government Efficiency chief—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, CitiGroup CEO Jane Fraser, and the heads of investment firms including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Blackstone Group also traveled to Saudi Arabia.
Critics including congressional progressives and anti-war groups have long opposed U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which stands accused of a litany of human rights violations including bombing and starving civilians in Yemen, massacring African migrants, and the 2018 murder of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
In 2019, during Trump's first term, Congress passed three bipartisan bills aimed at blocking an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partner in the U.S.-backed war on Yemen, the United Arab Emirates. Trump vetoed the legislation. His successor, former President Joe Biden, paused U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and the UAE but subsequently lifted the freeze despite pleas from human rights defenders.
The record arms sale comes amid Trump's effort to broker a diplomatic normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The president is no longer demanding that the Saudis normalize relations with Israel as a precondition for a civilian nuclear cooperation deal, a move that reportedly alarmed Israel's far-right government.
Trump lavished praise on the Saudi monarchy in a rambling speech in Riyadh on Tuesday, hailing bin Salman as an "incredible man."
Trump gushes over MBS: "We have great partners in the world, but we have none stronger and nobody like the gentleman right before me. He's your greatest representative. And if I didn't like him, I'd get out of here so fast. He knows me well. I do. I like him a lot. I like him too much."
[image or embed]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 13, 2025 at 9:01 AM
"We have great partners in the world, but we have none stronger, and nobody like the gentleman that's right before me, he's your greatest representative, your greatest representative," Trump said. "And if I didn't like him, I would get out of here so fast. You know that don't you? He knows me well."
"I do, I like him a lot. I like him too much, that's why we give so much, you know?" the president continued. "Too much. I like you too much!"
"Oh, what I do for the crown prince," he added.
Trump also announced that the U.S. would lift sanctions on Syria and restore relations with the country's new government, a move the peace group CodePink called "good news."
"The bad news is he's making new arms deals with Saudi Arabia, jeopardizing diplomacy with Iran, and continuing to ignore the U.S. and Israel's genocide in Gaza as they drop bombs on hospitals," the group added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What’s Behind Trump’s Decision to Cease Bombing Yemen?
The U.S. president appears to be heeding Saudi wishes ahead of a visit to Riyadh, with a potential eye on negotiations with Iran as well.
May 07, 2025
Middle East Eye reports that Saudi Arabia pressured the Trump administration to cease bombing Yemen in advance of his planned trip to the Kingdom next week because such raids would be an embarrassment for him and his host. U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was convinced that the Houthis were sincere in their new pledge to cease targeting shipping in the Red Sea.
The subtext here is that people in the region believe the U.S. is bombing an Arab country on behalf of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea and to protect Israel from repercussions for its Gaza genocide. Attacking the Houthis, who are not otherwise popular, on these grounds while Trump is in Riyadh would make it look like Saudi Arabia is also running interference for the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Houthi strategy of hitting out at Israeli interests has helped rally the people around them and lends them some regional popularity.
Both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have bombed Yemen in reaction to the Houthi targeting of Red Sea shipping and attacks on Israel in sympathy with the people of Gaza, against whom Israel has conducted serial atrocities.
MEE says that the Saudis have requested that Trump not bring up normalization with Israel on this trip, since Riyadh is determined not to recognize Israel until there is a firm prospect of a Palestinian state. Unlike the UAE and Bahrain, which did recognize Israel, Saudi Arabia has a fairly large population of citizens, most of whom would be extremely upset to see their king reward the Israelis for their Gaza atrocities by establishing diplomatic relations.
The Houthis do not appear to have made any pledge to cease targeting Israel with missiles, and the Israeli government was reportedly blindsided by the Trump move. Trump kept them out of the loop, much to their dismay. On Tuesday, Israel itself bombed Sanaa in retaliation for the Houthi missile attack Sunday on Ben Gurion Airport.
Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, confirmed the White House announcement of the cessation of hostilities. Oman has been a go-to mediator for conflicts in the region, and is helping negotiate a Trump deal with Iran.
A senior Houthi official, Politburo member Muhammad Ali al-Houthi, expressed cautious optimism, saying that the American pledge to halt bombing the small country on the southwest edge of the Arabian Peninsula would be “field tested.”
Both the Biden administration and the Trump administration have bombed Yemen in reaction to the Houthi targeting of Red Sea shipping and attacks on Israel in sympathy with the people of Gaza, against whom Israel has conducted serial atrocities. Trump alone has ordered 800 bombing raids on the desperately poor country. Yemen is the only Arab country to have reacted against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Its methods, however, have involved war crimes, since it has attacked civilian container ships, most of them not actually connected to Israel, and has attacked civilian targets in Israel—or has been unable to control its missiles, endangering civilian life—which is a war crime.
Former National Security adviser to the Iranian parliament, Heshmetollah Felahat, said Tuesday that the cessation of U.S. bombing of Yemen was connected to U.S.-Iran negotiations and was a way for Trump to block attempts of Netanyahu to draw the U.S. into war with Iran. He said that the chances of successful U.S.-Iran negotiations just went up.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular