US President Donald Trump met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in May at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Photo / Getty Images
The cannons are primed, the band rehearsed, the dinner jackets dusted off.
When Donald Trump welcomes Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, to the White House today, every effort will be made to impress.
Despite making his first visit to Washington since he was implicated in the 2018 murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Crown Prince can rest assured he will not encounter the ambushes sprung on the Ukrainian and South African presidents.
Instead, Trump will try to repay the lavish hospitality he enjoyed in Saudi Arabia, where he was greeted with a fighter-jet escort, a golden sword-wielding guard of honour and a troop of richly caparisoned Arabian greys.
The United States struggles to pull off pageantry with panache, but Trump will hope the spectacle is sufficiently striking to mask the lack of definitive substance.
There is no question the two men share a deep affinity: “I like you too much,” Trump told the Prince in May. Their mutual affection extends beyond a shared enthusiasm for gaudy palaces.
Each wants to deliver the foreign policy breakthrough the other longs for: Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords in Trump’s case; a full defence treaty with watertight US security guarantees in Prince Mohammed’s.
Yet neither is likely to get what he wants, despite Trump’s repeated suggestions to the contrary.
The US President told reporters last week: “I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords very shortly”.
There is no overstating the significance of such a step. For all the conflicts Trump claims to have solved this year, none yet matches the accords in scale or ambition.
Signed in September 2020, they remain his principal foreign policy accomplishment, normalising relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, paving the way for Israel’s integration into the region.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have since flown to Dubai – once off limits – and a Jewish community has taken root there, complete with kosher restaurants and Hebrew schools.
Saudi Arabia, the region’s most influential state, had appeared poised to follow, heralding a new dawn for Israel’s long-troubled relationship with its Muslim neighbours – one that might have been achieved without concessions to the Palestinians.
Israel’s war in Gaza halted such hopes.
Opinion polls show 96% of Saudis oppose normalising ties. Even in an absolute monarchy, such overwhelming public sentiment cannot be ignored.
Late last year, Prince Mohammed dropped his ambiguity, declaring that without a “credible pathway” to Palestinian statehood, there could be no deal with Israel.
Trump appears to think the Saudis are persuadable – a misreading that has exasperated some in Riyadh.
“A Palestinian state is a prerequisite for regional integration,” Manal Radwan, the Saudi Foreign Ministry’s lead negotiator, told the IISS Manama Dialogue, a regional security conference, this month.
“We have said it many times … and I say it here one more time: the realisation of a Palestinian state is the prerequisite for regional integration.”
Yet while the Crown Prince cannot give Trump what he wants, the reverse is also true.
The US President cannot offer Saudi Arabia a Nato-style defence treaty.
Congress would have to approve it, but bipartisan reservations about binding commitments to a country still tarnished by its record on human rights and regional destabilisation rule this out.
On the charge of recklessness, at least, Saudi officials feel aggrieved.
In Trump’s first term, Prince Mohammed was indeed seen as impetuous – prosecuting a bloody war in Yemen, leading a blockade of Qatar, detaining the Lebanese prime minister, imprisoning family members in a Riyadh hotel, and allegedly approving the operation that saw Khashoggi dismembered in Istanbul.
But the Prince is now viewed as a model of sobriety, eschewing foreign adventurism in favour of domestic economic transformation – while Trump has arguably taken his mantle by bombing Yemen and Iran.
These differences, however, should not obscure the genuine closeness between the two leaders and Prince Mohammed is unlikely to leave Washington empty-handed.
He may not get a formal treaty, but Trump is likely to issue an executive order pledging to defend Saudi Arabia if attacked – similar to the commitment he made to Qatar after an Israeli air strike on a Hamas meeting in Doha in September.
He may also secure access to advanced US computer chips, enabling Saudi Arabia to compete with the UAE, which signed a data centre deal with Washington in June.
Likewise, Trump has signalled he may allow Saudi Arabia to purchase a large number of F-35 stealth fighter jets, despite Israeli misgivings, and could offer movement on Riyadh’s long-standing ambition for assistance in developing a civilian nuclear programme.
Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at the international-affairs think-tank Chatham House, said: “I don’t think he is going to come away with anything very tangible or real. It’s going to be all about the show and all about the optics.”
That may not trouble the Prince. For whatever is agreed, he will leave with something of immense symbolic value.
Five years ago, Joe Biden came to office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah”.
This week, its de facto ruler will depart Washington more secure in the US President’s affections than almost any other leader on earth.
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