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saudi arabia
Foreign Policy Experts Warn US-Saudi Security Pact Would Be 'Risky' to Middle East Stability and Human Rights
The assumption of US backing allowed the Saudis to wage a brutal war in Yemen that cost close to 400,000 lives without fear of consequences. "Now imagine if Saudi Arabia had an ironclad US security guarantee," wrote one scholar.
Nov 11, 2025
As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman prepares to meet with US President Donald Trump next week, experts are warning that it could cause even greater instability in the Middle East if the president agrees to the Gulf regime's requests for a defense pact.
On November 18, the crown prince, commonly known as MBS, will be welcomed in Washington for the first time since 2018. That meeting with Trump came just months before the prince signed off on the infamous murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi as part of a brutal crackdown on dissenters in the country.
Trump defended MBS from international outrage and isolation at the time and has continued to sing his praises since returning to office. In May, after inking a record $142 billion weapons sale to the Saudis during a tour of the Middle East, Trump gave a speech, practically salivating over the crown prince.
“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.
Now, according to a report Tuesday from the Financial Times, the Saudis are coming to Washington seeking a similar security guarantee to the one Trump recently granted Qatar, which one State Department diplomat referred to as "on par with the mutual defense commitments the United States provides its closest allies.”
Trump signed an executive order stating that the US would respond to any attack on Qatar by taking all “lawful and appropriate measures—including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military."
That agreement came weeks after Israel launched an unprecedented assault on Hamas leadership as they met for negotiations in Qatar's capital city of Doha to end the two-year genocide in Gaza. Without the security agreement, the Qataris had threatened to walk away from their role in mediating the talks that ultimately led to October's "ceasefire" agreement.
The deal expected to be reached between Trump and the Saudis has been described as "Qatar-plus," not just pledging defense of the state were it to come under attack, but regarding it as a threat to American “peace and security."
Such an agreement was already underway during the tenure of former President Joe Biden, following the normalization of relations with Israel, but was upended by Hamas's October 7 attacks and two years of indiscriminate slaughter Israel launched in response, which bin Salman referred to as a "genocide."
While MBS has publicly stated that he would not agree to continue normalization with Israel without a Palestinian state, he has not shied away from a separate security deal with the US, which reportedly includes "enhanced military and intelligence cooperation."
According to Christopher Preble and Will Smith, a pair of foreign policy researchers at the Stimson Center's Reimagining US Grand Strategy program, the Trump team hopes that by pursuing a heightened security and financial relationship with the Saudis, they can coax them back towards detente with Israel and bring them back into the US orbit in response to what Trump views as an overly flirtatious posture toward China.
"These developments suggest a troubling belief that handing out security guarantees is a quick, cost-free way to reassure anxious partners and ensure their alignment with US priorities. That belief is mistaken," the researchers wrote in Responsible Statecraft Tuesday. "A US-Saudi defense pact would be unnecessary, risky, and unlikely to achieve its unclear aims. Rather than revive the misguided Biden administration initiative, the Trump administration should shelve the idea once and for all."
They said there are few upsides to the normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and that if it were to occur, it would be little more than a formal recognition of the cooperation between the two nations that already exists in combating Iran's influence.
While a deal would lead to few benefits, they argued it would "come with significant downsides," potentially forcing the US to ride along with "reckless driving" by the Saudis, especially with its neighbors in Yemen.
"Extensive US support emboldened Saudi Arabia to wage a disastrous, failed intervention there that dragged on for seven years, fueling a war that claimed close to 400,000 lives, including nearly 20,000 civilians killed by airstrikes," the researchers said.
International relations scholar Adam Gallagher pointed out that the Saudis did all of this merely "because of what it assumed would be continual US backing."
"Now imagine if Saudi Arabia had an ironclad US security guarantee," he said.
The result, he warned, would be something akin to Israel's sense of total impunity to wage destruction in Gaza.
"When a great power provides a security pledge to a less powerful ally, the weaker state is more willing to take on risk, and the patron often ends up paying the price," he wrote. "There is simply no strategic reason for the United States to imperil its interests or incur costs if Saudi Arabia engaged in renewed adventurism."
Human rights groups have noted that a deal also has massive implications for the Saudi regime's actions at home, where its leaders have faced little accountability for their repression of dissent.
“Saudi Arabia’s crown prince is trying to rebrand himself as a global statesman, but the reality at home is mass repression, record numbers of executions, and zero tolerance for dissent," said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. "US officials should be pressing for change, not posing for photos.”
Matt Wells, the deputy director of Reprieve US, emphasized that outside pressure on the regime has mattered in the past: "In the fallout from Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination, Mohammed bin Salman’s regime felt international pressure to improve its human rights record, and that pressure made a difference. Some child defendants on death row were resentenced and released, and from July 2021 to July 2025, there were no executions for childhood crimes.”
“Beneath Saudi Arabia’s glittering facade, the repression of Saudi citizens and residents continues unabated," said Abdullah Aljuraywi, monitoring and campaigns officer at ALQST for Human Rights. "To avoid emboldening this, the US should use its leverage to secure concrete commitments, including the release of detained activists, lifting of arbitrary travel bans, and an end to politically motivated executions.”
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Trump Is Vindicating Every Warning About the Potential Misuse of War-on-Terror Powers
What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.
Oct 15, 2025
There is good news and bad news for critics of the United States’ bloated 21st century war machine. The good news: The “war on terror” is dead.
The bad news? It seems to have become a part of the walking dead—a kind of zombie war on terror that is continuing and radically expanding, even as the fears and threats that originally motivated all its excesses are seemingly vanishing from the American psyche.
Consider the following facts: Despite the public release only a few years ago of evidence showing the Saudi government’s direct complicity in the crime of September 11, 2001—the central, instigating act of terrorism that drove and justified every aspect of the “war on terror” that followed—associating with or even taking money from that same government appears to carry no stigma. The Biden administration’s efforts to pledge American lives and treasure to defend that same government elicited relatively little controversy. And this year, dozens of top US comedians, from the left-leaning Bill Burr to the right-leaning Andrew Schulz, happily took its money to help whitewash its image. The Saudi government’s expanding encroachment into US sports and entertainment in general continues only to receive an eager welcome.
Meanwhile, after spending more than a decade fighting the shadowy threat of al-Qaeda, the US government has now seemingly come to terms with the terror group’s ongoing influence in the region. It has enthusiastically gone along with the installation of an al-Qaeda-linked militant, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as the leader of Syria, whose former president Washington spent years trying to remove from power expressly because of his alleged support for terrorism—including the very al-Qaeda its new president hails from.
Trump may be the first president to use this zombie “war” for ends that it was never meant for, but history suggests he will not be the last, unless we make the collective political choice to put a lid on and roll back the radical growth of executive war-making power that has accumulated year after year since 9/11.
Sharaa swiftly had the $10 million US bounty on his head removed, the terrorist designation of the al-Qaeda offshoot he led has been revoked, and just a few weeks ago, he was given a warm welcome during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where on one stage, former CIA Director David Petraeus acknowledged the two had been on opposite sides of the civil war in Iraq 20 years ago, in between lavishing him with praise and declaring himself a “fan.”
It’s not just al-Qaeda. The Biden administration had explored teaming up with the Taliban to fight ISIS’ branch in Afghanistan, while the Trump administration is now inching toward normalizing relations with the group, which George W. Bush once said was “threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists.”
The Taliban’s link to al-Qaeda was once upon a time the rationale for regime change and 20 years of US war in Afghanistan—which, of course, ended with the Taliban coming back into power, which Washington appears to be coming to peace with now.
Together, these stories suggest that both the American public and the Washington national security establishment have moved on from the core motivations that drove the “war on terror” for the better part of two decades. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the government forces behind September 11—none of it matters anymore, apparently.
And yet the “war on terror” is not just still with us, it’s expanding in radical new ways. The Trump administration has now explicitly repurposed the tactics and powers used against terrorism against a new, unrelated target: drug traffickers—launching airstrikes on private Venezuelan boats in international waters on the basis that drug smugglers are terrorists, and that their transportation of drugs constitutes “an armed attack against the United States.” This is despite widespread doubts about the legality of such strikes and concerns about the risks of this terrorist designation.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has also continued and escalated the trend started under the Biden administration of turning the “war on terror” inward. The president is now threatening to deploy the military against what he calls the “enemy from within,” as his administration pushes to treat a variety of domestic critics, dissidents, and opposition groups as terrorist threats over their First Amendment-protected activity, and draws up secret watchlists of supposed domestic terrorists.
This is all a vindication of the many civil libertarians who warned over the past 24 years that the expansive powers claimed by President Bush and then Barack Obama would somewhere down the line be used in new, alarming ways they were never originally intended for, including to intimidate and punish political dissent. What’s absurd is that this is happening at the exact time that the threats that originally justified all of this are simply being forgotten.
What we are witnessing is the war on terror in zombie form: devoid of its original life force and human drive, but more dangerous than ever, as it shuffles mindlessly forward in a search for human flesh to no end.
Trump may be the first president to use this zombie “war” for ends that it was never meant for, but history suggests he will not be the last, unless we make the collective political choice to put a lid on and roll back the radical growth of executive war-making power that has accumulated year after year since 9/11. Until then, this zombie will stagger on.
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Trump to Sidestep Cold War Arms Control Treaty to Sell More Drones: Report
The policy shift—which began during the first Trump administration—came after lobbying from US drone makers and amid stiff competition from Chinese, Israeli, and Turkish manufacturers.
Sep 05, 2025
After years of lobbying from US weapons makers, President Donald Trump is reportedly set to implement his first-term reinterpretation of a Cold War-era arms control treaty in order to sell heavy attack drones to countries including Saudi Arabia, according to a report published Friday.
In July 2020, Trump announced that his administration would reclassify unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with flight speeds under 500 miles per hour—including General Atomics' MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper and Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk—as exempt from certain restrictions under the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).
Signed by the United States in 1987 during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the 35-nation MTCR "seeks to limit the risks of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by controlling exports of goods and technologies that could make a contribution to delivery systems" for such weapons, as the US State Department website explains.
The end of Trump's first term limited his first administration's implementation of the MTCR policy shift, which was not continued under former President Joe Biden, who adopted a somewhat stricter stance on arms exports to some gross human violators including Saudi Arabia, but not others—most notably Israel.
Now, a US official and four people familiar with the president's plan tell Reuters that Trump is preparing to complete the MTCR revision, a move that "would unlock the sale of more than 100 MQ-9 drones to Saudi Arabia, which the kingdom requested in the spring of this year and could be part of a $142 billion arms deal announced in May."
As Reuters reported:
Under the current interpretation of the MTCR, the sale of many military drones is subject to a "strong presumption of denial" unless a compelling security reason is given and the buyer agrees to use the weapons in strict accordance with international law.
The new policy will allow General Atomics, Kratos, and Anduril, which manufacture large drones, to have their products treated as "Foreign Military Sales" by the State Department, allowing them to be easily sold internationally, according to a US official speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity.
This effort is the first part of a planned "major" review of the US Foreign Military Sales program, the official said.
The US State Department did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on the policy shift.
Trump's move comes as US arms makers face stiff competition from Chinese, Israeli, and Turkish drone manufacturers. Neither China nor Israel are signatory to the MTCR, and Turkey, which did sign the agreement, features lighter and shorter-range UAVs not subject to the same restrictions as the heavier Reaper.
The US official who spoke to Reuters said the new guidelines will allow the US "to become the premier drone provider instead of ceding that space to Turkey and China."
Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association—a longtime critic of MTCR revision—warned that Trump's planned reinterpretation "would be a mistake."
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