The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has landed on Tuesday in Riad, where he has started a tour of the Middle East, which will also take him to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with an objective that the president has not bothered to try to embellish: to achieve millionaire contracts for his country. (about 900,000 million euros) for American companies, ”said Trump weeks ago. The Saudi responded immediately compromising $ 600,000 million in contracts during the next four years. That amount has opened the ban on a regional competition to see who offers more money to the former real estate magnate. In the case of Arabic Emirates, 1,400 billion dollars in contracts for the United States in 10 years, according to The New York Times.
In the midst of these stratospheric offers, it is expected that the convulsive geopolitical situation that the Middle East is not the priority on the Trump agenda, despite the fact that on May 5 the Government of Benjamín Netanyahu announced its intention to conquer Gaza militarily, which threatens to further inflame the region. Trump has left out of this trip-his first official visit abroad, except for the one he made to Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis-a Israel and this tour is not expected in crisis such as that of the Palestinian Strip.
In Saudi Arabia, oil and the elderly princes abound with more money than can be spent in a life. That is the context in which Mohamed Bin Salmán made his way until he became the heir of the kingdom of the Saud and the strong man of the country. This young prince (39 years old) knows how to entertain mature and rich men like Trump, which this Tuesday came to receive Riad airport. The courtship to the president announced for weeks to the coup of millionaire offers, had already been deployed before the Air Force One will take land. A Saudi F-15 fighter squad escorted the presidential aircraft for the heavens of the kingdom for half an hour. When Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, visited Saudi Arabia in 2022, Bin Salmán did not even go to receive it.
Trump was waiting for Trump later, at the foot of the plane, an honor guard, and the Saudi heir, who accompanied him to the royal pavilion, a building reserved for the most illustrious visitors and where the legion of princes of the Saudi royal family normally presalted. As he made on his first official visit to Saudi Arabia, in 2017, Bin Salmán then accompanied his guest to a sumptuous living room where golden armchairs, who remembered two thrones, waited for the president.
Together with the Republican, a large delegation of entrepreneurs has landed in Riad, who attest to the economic focus of the visit. Among them, the man who is considered a kind of presidential valid, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and advisor to the president. They also accompany Trump the one considered Cryptocurrencies Tsar from the White House, David Sacks, and the executive directors of IBM, Blackrock, Citigroup, Palantir and Qualcomm, a semiconductor company.
Flanked by this delegation, the president will participate on Tuesday in the Saudi-EE UU investment forum, where, according to Reuters, he will offer the Saudis a weapons sale package worth more than 100,000 million dollars. Between 2020 and 2024, the Arab kingdom was the first individual buyer of American weapons (12%), for Peace Research (SIPRI). Trump has also reached the Saudi capital also accompanied by its Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio, and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
On Wednesday, the president will move to Qatar, before traveling to the United Arab Emirates on Thursday. The US president has left open the possibility of making a scale that same day in Turkey, according to Reuters, if the difficult possibility that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodimir Zelenski, look face to face is concretized.
Petrodollar
The choreography of the halago that this Tuesday is following Saudi Arabia with Trump reminds a lot of which he deployed in 2017, when an American president, then still Bisoño, broke with the tradition of his country that the first official trip of a newly elected president was to Canada or the United Kingdom. The hook were then 350,000 million dollars (316,000 million euros) in agreements promised by Riyadh, which later remained much less.
The Trump fascinated by the phases, the adulation-in the high posters with his image presided over the facade of the Riz-Carlton Hotel de Riad and other emblematic buildings-and the golds installed to his greatest glory by Bin Salman, a prince who is considered cunning Blood and oil (Peninsula, 2023) – An agreement to sell weapons to the Saudis for 110,000 million dollars.
Trump obtained the head that probably sought, but time ended up denying that information. At the end of 2018, that arms pact had only translated into the disbursement by the Saudis of a much lower amount: 14.5 billion dollars. The joint summit that, in the midst of those fouls of 2017, brought together dozens of Arab and Muslim leaders ended with an empty statement, he recalled Monday The Economistthat defined that visit as “more show than substance.” This risk also threatens this second Trump visit to the region.
The president has even alluded to the goal of returning to his country with commercial and investment pacts with the three Arab states under the arm worth a billion dollars.
