Donald Trump this week will embark on the first foreign trip of his second administration with a tour of the Middle East, as he looks to secure investment, trade and technology deals from friendly leaders with deep pockets amid turbulent negotiations around numerous regional conflicts, including Israel’s war in Gaza.
The tour through the Middle East is largelya repeat of his first international trip in 2017, when he was feted in the region as a transactional leader eager to secure quick wins and capable of providing support for the regional monarchies’ economic and geopolitical interests.
His negotiations inSaudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will focus on a number of topics, including oil and trade, investment deals, the regional conflicts in Israel-Gaza and Yemen, and negotiations over the Iran nuclear programme among other issues.
But Trump’s key goal is to come out of the region saying that he put America first, say observers.
“I think what he’s clearly looking to get out of this is deals, the announcement of multiple multi-billion dollar deals,” said Steven A Cook, the senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The president’s approach to foreign policy is heavily influenced by … his version of economic statecraft, which is to look towards the wealthy states in the Gulf and their very large sovereign wealth funds as sources of investment in the United States,” he said.
Trump has already announced Saudi Arabia’s commitment to invest $1tn into the US economy and is hoping to secure big-ticket investments on Monday’s visit. That would be consistent with his America First policy of prioritising domestic interests, Cook said.
Those countries may also seek access to advanced US semiconductor exports, and Saudi Arabia will want to ink a deal on civilian nuclear infrastructure, which had previously been tied to the country’s normalisation of relations with Israel. In a departure from previous policy, theTrump administrationhas indicated the two issues are no longer linked.
The Middle East trip is notable for the US president’s lack of plans to visit Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet havefloated plans to launch a larger invasion of Gazaand expel the Palestinian population there in what critics have called a broad plan of ethnic cleansing.
The Israel-Gaza war will loom large over the negotiations, as Saudi Arabia has said it will not normalise relations with Israel unless there is a clear path to a two-state solution, and many countries in the Middle East have spoken out againsta proposal that beganwith Trump to expel Palestinian from Gaza to other Arab countries.
“He could have gone to Israel like he did last time,” said Elliot Abrams, former deputy national security advisor under President George W Bush and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, had cancelled a planned trip to Israel. “I think there’s some tension here … [Israel] knows that Trump is going to be spending a week in the Gulf hearing about Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza every day. So it’s not the best moment in US-Israel or Trump-Israel relations.”
There is a growing understanding in Washington and Israel thatTrump has taken a step backfrom attempting to mediate the war in Gaza. His administration said that they would negotiate a new aid deal without the direct involvement of the Israeli government to renew deliveries of aid into Gaza, which is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis of the war since a ceasefire collapsed in March.
“He’s the only one who speaks the same language as Netanyahu, and he’s the only one who can speak to Netanyahu in a language that Netanyahu will understand,” said Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Israel Security Agency, also known as the Shin Bet.
“Trump again, when it comes to to the hostages, when it comes to our relations in the Palestinians, has become the center of everything in the Middle East,” he said.
That turns Trump’s attention to the things he can get done.
He has said that he plans to decide on his trip to Saudi Arabia on an announcement thatthe US could refer to the Arabian Gulfor the Gulf of Arabia rather than the Persian Gulf.
That has angered Iran at a moment when the Gulf states appear largely in support of US efforts in talks on the future of the Iranian nuclear programme. As opposed to 2017, the Gulf states have largely spoken in support of renewed negotiations between the United States and Iran over the nuclear programme, but those governments were said to be unclear on the details of any deal as of yet.
“US partners have confided to me that there are US statements on all of these issues, but they don’t yet see US policies,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at CSIS, a thinktank. “The US government doesn’t speak with one voice and its actions remain uncoordinated.”
In Saudi Arabia, Trump has enlisted his son-in-law Jared Kushner to act as a point man for the discussions ahead of the trip, CNN has reported. Kushner, who was Trump’s envoy to the region during his first administration, is said to be tasked with making progress in discussions of Saudi Arabia joiningthe Abraham accords. But his role is also tainted by a perceived conflict-of-interest given his family’s business interests in the region.
Yet with such a complicated tableau of economic and geopolitical interests in the region, there are questions about whether the Trump administration has the focus and the team to pursue a comprehensive policy in the region. Many in Trump’s orbit say that US policy should place lower priority on the Middle East, and focus instead on China and the Indo-Pacific region.
“I think the sense that there’s these pieces that the President is negotiating don’t respond together, and that his priority really is essentially domestic focus, securing, you know, agreements to invest in the estates,” said Cook. “Regionally, the president would like these issues to go away, and that’s why he has these compressed timelines he doesn’t want to focus on.”