This week, U.S. President Donald Trump is set to visit three key American partners in the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is not yet clear what he hopes to achieve. He may be seeking to secure arms deals and investments in the United States. He might hope to personally enrich himself through Gulf investments in Trump properties, investment funds, and cryptocurrencies. But many hope—and others worry—that he has larger ambitions. In particular, it seems possible that his trip is mostly about Iran, a country with which his administration has been conducting negotiations relating to its nuclear program. Because of the erratic nature of Trump’s administration and internal disagreement among his key advisers, however, his trip could just as easily set the stage for war with Iran as it could for signing a nuclear agreement.
Leaders in the Arab states of the Gulf had hoped for Trump’s reelection. They had done well during Trump’s first term and had little love for U.S. President Joe Biden. (Neither did most ordinary people in their countries, who blamed Biden for enabling Israel’s destruction of Gaza.) Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, would never forgive Biden for calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS maintained close relationships with Trump and his associates during the Biden years, and he strung Biden along with the prospect that Saudi Arabia might normalize relations with Israel, which, prior to October 7, 2023, was the single overriding goal of an administration that was otherwise disengaged from the Middle East.
But 100 days into the second Trump administration, those leaders are perplexed and concerned. Trump’s Middle East policies look similar to Biden’s, which is surprising considering how radically the new administration has moved to transform the federal government and alter core U.S. alliances. Trump’s policies toward war-torn Gaza and Yemen, for example, are essentially more brutal and less restrained versions of those Biden had pursued.
But perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising. After replacing Trump in 2021, Biden had continued virtually all of Trump’s Middle East policies, focusing on extending Trump’s Abraham Accords (a set of normalization agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states) while not returning to the Iran nuclear agreement from which Trump had withdrawn, declining to pursue Israeli-Palestinian peace, and neglecting to prioritize human rights.
Where the two presidents do differ is in style and predictability. Biden and his team were reliable and familiar, whereas the region’s leaders know that Trump can change his mind without warning. They worry that Trump’s tariffs could trigger a global recession that would hurt oil sales and shipping that transits the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. They fear that Trump’s termination of foreign assistance could destabilize its recipients, such as Jordan. His outlandish statements about Gaza have unsettled them. And above all they don’t know whether he is paving the way to real diplomacy with Iran or just checking boxes on the path to war.
ON THE AGENDA
The decision to visit all three leading Arab Gulf powers and not just Saudi Arabia seems designed to prevent a schism. In 2017, Trump visited Saudi Arabia, and after he returned, posted a message on Twitter in support of isolating Qatar—giving a green light for Saudi Arabia, along with Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE, to start blockading Qatar as punishment for its support of Islamist groups. That blockade divided the Gulf Cooperation Council and fueled proxy warfare and political competition across the region. It also interfered with the Trump administration’s efforts to exert maximum pressure on Iran through draconian sanctions because it forced Qatar to become more dependent on Iran for trade and access to the world. The Qatar blockade ended as soon as Biden took office, as the region’s leaders sought to align with the new president’s priorities, this time to the benefit of the entire region.
The run-up to Trump’s visit, the first foreign trip of his second term, has largely focused on economics. Trump hopes to sign a $100 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and encourage Gulf investments in the U.S. economy. The Saudis, at least, are eager to be seen as economic partners; after Trump was elected, MBS floated a $600 billion Saudi investment in the United States. In reality, any Saudi commitment would be mostly for show, as the kingdom is struggling with lower oil prices and domestic economic demands, and rarely delivers on such promises. Trump may also have his personal interests in mind. According to The New York Times, Trump’s family businesses have made millions from deals with firms tied to the Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati governments.
Trump might also use the trip to try to persuade the Gulf states to keep oil prices down. During the Biden years, Saudi Arabia proved uninterested in using its oil policies to help out the United States. Indeed, Riyadh, along with the rest of OPEC+, infuriated the White House by slashing production, which kept gasoline prices high, to Biden’s political detriment, and increased Russia’s oil revenue while the United States was sanctioning Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine. But low oil prices are dangerous for Riyadh, which needs them above a certain level to sustain its budget and ambitious development plans.
The Gulf states are emerging as an antiwar caucus.
Trump’s visit will cover regional politics, too, though his aims on that front are much less clear. Arab governments are unsure whether the United States will ask them to prepare for war or peace with Iran. Such uncertainty is unusual. Part of the problem is that the administration, which is understaffed and dysfunctional, has been speaking with multiple voices. The fact that Trump removed Michael Waltz from his position as national security adviser on the eve of the visit is emblematic. Waltz had been coordinating closely with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on plans for military action against Iran and pushing an aggressive military approach to the Houthis in Yemen. Gulf leaders have been left to wonder whether Waltz’s demotion represents a change in U.S. policy or is merely a symptom of the administration’s chaos.
The most critical issue, of course, is Iran. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in 2017, Saudi and Emirati leaders were keen to discard Obama-era diplomacy and embrace a more confrontational approach to the Islamic Republic. But their attitudes have since changed. In 2019, Iranian proxies attacked a Saudi oil refinery, temporarily reducing the world’s oil supply by six percent. By choosing not to respond with U.S. military force, the Trump administration shocked Gulf leaders, whose security strategy had long rested on American guarantees. The United States also disappointed Gulf leaders with a limited response to an attack by the Houthis, a militia backed by Iran, on Abu Dhabi in 2022. The incidents reminded Gulf states that they would be Iran’s first target in a regional war and that they would be largely on their own. Whereas Israel appears eager for the United States to attack Iran, the Gulf states are emerging as an antiwar caucus.
For the last few years, Riyadh has engaged in a quiet Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran, resuming diplomacy and trying to prevent regional escalation. Gulf leaders are delighted by Iran’s setbacks at the hands of Israel—especially the destruction of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant-group-turned-political-party in Lebanon—and would shed no tears were its regime to collapse. But they are less inclined than Israel to think that their interests would be served by taking the war to Tehran. If Trump gets into a war with Iran, the Gulf states will want compensation for going along, likely demanding serious strategic assurances—such as a formal defense treaty, as was floated to the Saudis by the Biden administration—arms sales, and other side payments in exchange for publicly supporting the new American approach.
Trump, for all his bellicose rhetoric and military escalations, has always been deeply skeptical of getting into another major Middle Eastern war. He has discarded most of the Iran hawks from his first administration and empowered an envoy with a mandate to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Tehran. Because such agreements take painstaking work and a lot of patience, the Trump administration is unlikely to pull one off. Some Trump administration officials have advocated for a total end to Iranian uranium enrichment, a position that would virtually guarantee that the talks collapse. If negotiations fail, it could pave the way toward a conflict that Trump claims to not want. But Trump has thus far stuck with diplomacy, even over Israeli objections. A new Iran deal would go a long way toward stabilizing the region and reducing the risk of war.
TOUGH SELL
Trump considers the Abraham Accords one of the greatest diplomatic accomplishments of his first term. No doubt he would love announcing Saudi Arabia’s accession to that process during his visit—especially to claim that he achieved what Biden could not. Were it not for the war in Gaza, MBS would probably have agreed to normalize with Israel as a honeymoon present for Trump.
But the grim daily toll of Israel’s assault on Gaza makes normalization a tough sell. Although Arab leaders don’t care about Palestinians, their people do. Arab governments, obsessed with the possibility of a new round of uprisings, closely monitor the political mood of their people. The carnage in Gaza has had a devastating effect on Arab perceptions of Israel and the United States and has undoubtedly raised MBS’s asking price for a deal. He would probably require a formal U.S. security guarantee, arms sales, and progress toward a Palestinian state to sign a normalization agreement with Israel—if he even still wants one. But U.S. assurances might not be enough, given that Trump has cast doubt on the United States’ commitment to its allies and partners.
Arab leaders worry about Israel’s (and Trump’s) endgame for Gaza and the West Bank. In February, Trump suggested “temporarily” expelling the more than two million Palestinians who live in Gaza and resettling them elsewhere (probably Egypt and Jordan) so that he could turn the territory into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” His plan horrified and frightened most Arab leaders, not just on humanitarian grounds but because a large influx of Gazans would destabilize any Arab countries that took them in. Qatar worries it could become the scapegoat for failed negotiations between Israel and Hamas, as Netanyahu shifts the blame for his policy failures. The UAE worries that Washington will task it with funding the reconstruction of Gaza. And all Arab governments worry that the unending war will radicalize their own populations.
Netanyahu has threatened to obliterate Gaza and its inhabitants if a cease-fire deal hasn’t been reached by May 15—coinciding with Trump’s Gulf visit. By meeting with Trump on the eve of an Israeli campaign, Arab governments risk looking like collaborators in the destruction of Gaza. But they also hope to influence a president who often seems swayed by the last person he talks to.
Arab leaders are also worried about Israel’s expanding incursions into Syria. Israel has captured a large buffer zone in southwestern Syria and has bombed hundreds of sites in the country since December, when Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was ousted by a consortium of rebel groups. Most Arab states, even those deeply suspicious of Islamists, have leaned toward supporting the new government in hopes of stabilizing a country shattered by 13 years of civil war. Many Arab governments have delivered financial support to the new regime, and Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, will attend the upcoming Arab summit meeting. Arab leaders want to know whether Washington prefers a Syria that is stable and unified under a regime led by former jihadists, or is violent and divided.
LONGER AND STRONGER?
There’s a good chance that Trump will accomplish little on his visit, aside from inking a few arms deals. But he should aim to do something grand. He should seize the chance to lay out his clear intention to secure a nuclear and political agreement with Iran. Such a deal would take advantage of Tehran’s temporary setbacks and embed Iran within a new vision of regional order. A deal would align well with the regional mood by lowering the risk of an Israeli war with Iran; normalizing Iranian relations with the Gulf; and restraining Iranian allies across the region, including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and nascent Assadist insurgents in Syria. If Trump lands an agreement that covers more than just Iran’s nuclear program, he can claim that he achieved a better deal than did U.S. President Barack Obama.
But Trump’s restraint toward Iran has been paired with full support for Israel’s military campaigns. His administration seems to accept Israel’s ambition to remake the regional order by military force. And if Israel’s price for assenting to a nuclear deal with Iran (as opposed to unilaterally attacking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities) is U.S. permission to complete the destruction of Gaza and, perhaps, to annex the West Bank, then the stabilizing effects of any agreement with Iran would prove short-lived. A new agreement with Iran should instead be anchored in a reconfigured regional order, which would have to include at a minimum a durable cease-fire in Gaza, a significant influx of humanitarian assistance to the territory, and a plausible path toward a Palestinian state.
That is difficult to envision, given the personnel, policy processes, and preferences of this administration. Trump seems to want a regional order based on force and transactionalism rather than legitimacy or partnership. He has radically undermined American soft power and the nonmilitary U.S. presence in the region by eroding the federal government’s ability to carry out policy, closing American borders, slashing foreign assistance, and shuttering institutions of public diplomacy. Support for Israel’s depopulation and annexation of Gaza will only inflame public opinion in the Middle East in ways that an Iran nuclear deal will not assuage. If Trump truly wants to break the endless cycle of U.S. policy failure in the Middle East, then this Gulf visit would be the right time to start.
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