Trump caps Gulf tour with America-first policy for peace in Middle East, South Asia

Trump’s vision sits well with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two Gulf nations closest to Washington, but its feasibility remains to be determined, analysts say

US President Donald Trump wrapped up a tour of three Gulf monarchies on Friday after laying out a dollar-driven agenda for peace in the Middle East and South Asia which analysts said contained measures that aimed to curtail Chinese influence in these regions.

The highlight of Trump’s three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates was his decision to lift sanctions against Syria’s new administration at the behest of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite intense opposition from Israel and its many supporters in Congress.

Eschewing the interventionist policies of his Republican and Democrat predecessors alike, the America-first policy for the Middle East Trump presented in Riyadh on Tuesday instead envisioned a region stabilised by coordination between Washington’s major regional partners.

Iran could join in if its leadership agreed to strike a deal that satisfied US concerns about its nuclear programme, Trump said, while India and Pakistan would have to settle their differences under American mediation.

“Trump is distinguishing himself from neoconservatives who constantly seek endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere,” said Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Washington-based risk consultancy Gulf State Analytics.

Trump’s message was “one of a president who wants greater peace, stability, and business as opposed to chaotic conflicts”.

His point about liberal interventionism “being destructive and toxic sits well with Arab leaders who saw many Western military interventions in places like Iraq and Libya, often carried out under the guise of liberal idealism, as horribly destabilising”, Cafiero told This Week In Asia.

According to Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Arab Gulf States Institute think tank in Washington, Trump’s vision was “most consistently that of the two Gulf Arab countries closest to Washington” – Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

“He wants stability, security, financial gain at a national and personal level, and minimum conflict.”

Achieving this, particularly in the nuclear talks with Iran, was “within reach, but will be very difficult … so its applicability to reality remains to be determined”, Ibish said.

There was, however, no vision of hope for Palestinians, despite the Trump administration’s recent move to sidestep Israel to secure the release of Hamas-held American-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander on Monday.

Instead, the mercurial American president blamed their misery on Hamas, and recycled his controversial ideas for redeveloping Gaza as a Riviera-style resort under the control of US contractors.

“It’s unclear if he will be willing to pressure Israel not to engage in huge expansion of the Gaza war, complete with crimes against humanity and possible genocide that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is advertising at the moment,” Ibish told This Week In Asia.

Trump “might, but he also might not”, he said, adding “it’s very likely that he [Trump] has mixed feelings and competing inclinations on this topic”.

Trump spent much of his time in the Gulf talking up the prospects of normalising relations between Israel and more Arab and Muslim states – including Syria, Lebanon and, by implication, Pakistan – under the framework of the 2020 Abraham Accords.

According to Cafiero, the Trump administration “has essentially come to terms with Saudi-Israeli normalisation not being on the table at this point given the current circumstances in which the establishment of a Palestinian state is not imaginable”.

On Israeli normalisation efforts, however, he thought the White House would “seek to cajole and pressure Syria and Lebanon” into joining the Abraham Accords, as they “are weak and thus more vulnerable to Washington and Tel Aviv’s pressure”.

According to HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London, Trump’s message to hawks on Syria within his Make America Great Again (Maga) cabinet and constituency is “it’s over”.

In a social media post, Hellyer said there would be a “lot of anger about this, but Trump just rode over them”.

“Israel, too,” he said, because Netanyahu had actively lobbied for the US to maintain sanctions originally imposed on the ousted Assad regime.

Saying it was “important to look beyond” this, Hellyer noted how Trump had mentioned Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the context of Syria.

“No doubt, Riyadh and Ankara vouched for Damascus, where they will exercise great influence, which means Trump doesn’t oppose a region with a stronger integration of Turkish and Saudi power,” Hellyer said.

This had “definitive consequences for how the US engages in the region” and would “make a lot of Maga, and Israel, very uncomfortable”.

Previous thinking was that normalisation with Israel was the key to better ties with the US, but Hellyer said Trump “hasn’t made normalisation a condition at all when it comes to Riyadh, and it is basically just a suggestion when it comes to Damascus”.

Trump also used his Riyadh speech to showcase his administration’s role in coercing India and Pakistan to end their conflict, using trade and tariffs – to warm applause from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after Saudi Arabia’s unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to prevent the escalation between May 7 and 11.

But India is also part of the Abraham Accords patchwork via its minilateral partnerships with the US, France, Israel and the UAE, as well as a member of the US-led Indo-Pacific Quad alongside Australia and Japan.

Ibish said Trump was trying to expand his Abraham Accords-based project for the Middle East and North Africa into South Asia – “and he has the strong support of Saudi Arabia and especially the UAE in doing that”.

“These are measures largely aimed against curbing Chinese influence and creating economic structures that can mirror and rival need-felt and growth-initiative and similar projects initiated by Beijing,” Ibish said. “That’s a shared interest that’s going to be pursued anyway, [India’s] conflict with Pakistan notwithstanding.”

The Pakistan-India flare-up was not, in any case, “going to change anybody’s inclination towards these projects and their intended goal of limiting Chinese hegemony”, he added.