Trump and Saudi Arabia: More Transactional Than Ever

During Donald Trump’s first term in office, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia played an important role as both a key partner in achieving the president’s foreign policy aims and as a target of criticism. In seeking to coordinate with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states against Iran, push the Kingdom to normalize ties with Israel, and secure lucrative deals for U.S. weapons manufacturers, Trump’s first administration pushed the limits of a U.S.-Saudi relationship rooted in interests, not values. Yet high-profile human rights violations led Congress to apply unusual scrutiny to these arms deals, and Democratic candidate Joe Biden to label the Kingdom a “pariah” on the 2020 campaign trail.

After the intervening years of the Biden administration, Trump views the U.S.-Saudi relationship as one primarily of economic dealmaking. Trump presents the Kingdom’s domestic economic transformation as a bonanza that can deliver (or at least promise to deliver) extraordinary amounts of investment dollars and purchase orders to U.S. companies while opening up lucrative new opportunities in the Saudi domestic economy. In exchange, Trump has been happy to grant the Kingdom economic and security concessions previously pegged to other big diplomatic “asks,” like potentially normalizing relations with Israel. Despite the initial appeal of a purely transactional relationship to both parties, it has ultimately done little to commit the United States to regional peace or prosperity—a troubling situation given the weekslong U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and its fallout for the region.

Shared Threats Dominate in Trump Term One

The first Trump administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia centered on U.S.-Gulf alignment against shared antagonists. Trump prioritized the Kingdom for his first trip abroad in 2017, where he railed against the threats posed by Sunni Muslim terrorists as well as Iran and Iran-backed proxy groups. Barely a year later, Trump defended Saudi Arabia from U.S. domestic backlash over the murder of media figure Jamal Khashoggi by citing the Kingdom’s role as “a great ally” against Iran and as committed to fighting “Radical Islamic Terrorism.” While other goals periodically gained Trump’s attention – such as oil prices, whether too high or too low – shared threat perceptions formed the strategic core of the relationship.

The administration’s second focus was on the Gulf states’ “common interests with Israel in confronting common threats.” Even during the Obama administration, there was a growing belief that Gulf royals’ fears of Iranian influence could facilitate greater, if tacit, coordination with Israel on security. For Trump, this took the form of promoting a much-touted “Deal of the Century”—region-wide recognition of Israel in exchange for nominal progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. While Trump and his Middle East point person (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner fell short of this goal, they surprised many by securing the Abraham Accords: full normalization between Israel and the UAE (soon joined by Bahrain, Morocco, and—for a brief window—Sudan’s transitional government). While historic, the 2020 deal left out Saudi Arabia; Trump’s subsequent election loss reduced immediate pressure for Riyadh to follow suit.

The Trump administration also pursued side deals rooted in Saudi security fears. “We are bringing back hundreds of billions of dollars into the United States,” President Trump said in March 2018, brandishing posters of U.S. military equipment for sale in an Oval Office meeting with MBS. The President boasted of tens of thousands of U.S. jobs created or sustained by Saudi arms sales (an exaggeration), alongside other pledged Saudi investments. Trump officials overrode periodic objections from Congress over Saudi military activity and other human rights abuses, albeit somewhat pressuring Riyadh to wind down its involvement in neighboring Yemen’s civil war.

Side Deals Take Center Stage in Term Two

In 2025, the bilateral relationship under the second Trump administration at first seemed to reflect a changed regional threat environment. After the Trump administration ultimately declined to strike Iran to deter attacks on Saudi Arabia, and the Biden administration proved unable or unwilling to strike a renewed nuclear agreement, Saudi leaders re-established diplomatic ties with Iran in a 2023 summit pointedly held in Beijing. Israel’s devastating response to the October 7^th attacks in turn exacerbated the political risks of normalization to Saudi leaders, even as Israeli attacks on Iran’s regional proxy network – and eventually Iran itself – undercut Saudi fears of Iranian power projection.

Still, these changes appeared compatible with a second Trump term focused on economic dealmaking as the core of transactional U.S.-Gulf relationships. Key to this was the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 project of socio-economic transformation, which, among other developments, placed large economic bets on diversifying the Saudi economy away from oil and employing more Saudi citizens. The Trump administration worked to ensure that U.S. firms, including the Trump Organization, benefited from these bets, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Within days of Trump’s inauguration, MBS joined other favor-seekers by pledging some $600 billion worth of new Saudi investments in the United States. During Trump’s subsequent visit to Riyadh in May, Trump downplayed the threat posed by ISIS (“wiped them out”) and Iran (“no money left”) in favor of highlighting economic dynamism in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies. The trip touted not only Saudi investments in the United States but U.S.-Saudi business partnerships, especially in the tech sector, and yet another enormous arms deal—all ostensibly part of kicking off a “golden age of the Middle East.” A return visit by MBS in November offered more of the same, increasing Saudi investment pledges to $1 trillion and emphasizing Saudi collaboration with U.S. tech firms like Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Elon Musk’s xAI. Trump in turn went from merely defending Saudi Arabia to denouncing “Western interventionists” who criticized human rights abuses and praising MBS for doing “incredible [things] in terms of human rights and everything else.”

The best argument for this transactional relationship is that it would put America first—securing U.S. economic interests while steering clear of regional conflicts. The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), for example, presents the Middle East as “a place of partnership, friendship, and investment” amid diminished regional conflict. Even if the President blurred the lines between U.S. interests and his own economic interests, or those of his family, perhaps the United States and Saudi Arabia alike could benefit from a clear focus on the bottom line. That might put a positive spin on the Public Investment Fund (PIF) investing $2 billion in an investment fund controlled by Trump’s son-in-law, the PIF-backed LIV Golf Tour holding numerous of events at Trump properties, and (privately owned) Saudi conglomerate Dar Global  paying millions to put the Trump Organization’s brand on regional real-estate deals.

Until Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran, this transactionalism seemed like it might even facilitate regional conflict resolution. Saudi Arabia used the opportunity of Trump’s visit to broker a meeting with Syrian President Ahmed Sharaa, getting critical U.S. backing for ending economic sanctions on a post-Assad Syria. Trump proved willing to strong-arm Israel into accepting a shaky ceasefire in Gaza, while refraining from any punitive action against Saudi Arabia for co-sponsoring efforts at greater international recognition of Palestine. President Trump also seemed content to leave Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords as a “fervent hope, wish and even [a] dream,” rather than contesting Saudi insistence on a pathway to Palestinian statehood. MBS likewise brought up potential U.S. mediation in the Sudanese civil war, albeit perhaps with the ulterior motive of geopolitical maneuvering against the neighboring UAE.

Checking the Work on Trump’s New Dealbooks

Transactionalism is hardly a new feature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Successive U.S. administrations have worked to ensure that U.S. companies benefit from the Kingdom’s oil wealth, while Riyadh has been happy to bankroll ventures broadly aligned with U.S. foreign- and domestic-policy goals. Still, hollowing out U.S. foreign policy to merely a sense that what’s good for the President is good for the country helps explain how the United States found itself mired in a costly war of choice with Iran that has undermined the potential for peace and prosperity in the Middle East.

Even before the Iran war, diplomacy as mere “dealmaking” left the United States unable to prevent destabilizing conflicts or convert temporary deals into sustainable peace. Major U.S. tech deals with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE were insufficient to keep competition between the two countries from hindering regional economic activity and exacerbating conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Subcontracting conflict resolution to local actors occasionally produced good outcomes, such as Saudi efforts to stabilize and invest in a post-Assad Syria. Yet the lack of investment in diplomatic expertise leaves the Trump administration ill-equipped to handle the messy process of drafting and negotiating durable compromises.

Worse, the payoff from these deals did little to dissuade Trump from coordinating with Israel to strike Iran—with immediate and obvious consequences for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. The Iran War shows that what is supposedly good for the President is often the emotional high of dominating perceived enemies and pushing for dramatic “wins” rather than material returns for himself and the U.S. economy. The war has damaged Saudi Arabia’s economy and U.S. prospects for benefiting therein; Saudi investment pledges are less likely to materialize amid new reconstruction and defense bills for the kingdom. For Saudi Arabia, the war should also make it clear that Trump views the kingdom less as an economic partner and more as vassal states paying tribute. During the war—at a Saudi investment conference, no less—Trump renewed pressure on Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and crudely mocked MBS for having little choice but to accept U.S. war-making.

With no upside for Trump’s transactionalism, the U.S. Congress has every reason to exercise robust oversight of any deals struck with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies—both those in the “national” interest and those more narrowly in President Trump’s interest. AI technology deals entail shipping sensitive U.S. technologies to countries known for extensive electronic surveillance, yet few of details of supposed safeguards have been made public. A proposed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia might deliver a “multi-billion-dollar nuclear energy partnership” to U.S. companies, yet recent reporting suggests that it lacks important nonproliferation guardrails. By contrast, Congress should push to include a Saudi role in fraught U.S.-Iranian negotiations to ensure at least one actor in that process has an interest in long-term peace and stability in the Persian Gulf.

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Andrew Leber is an Assistant Professor at Tulane University’s Department of Political Science and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His publications have appeared in Governance, Security Studies, Democratization, and Politics & Society.

Image Credit: The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons