Her crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), is expected to meet with the president on November 17-19. It is his first visit to Washington in seven years as Riyadh seeks to reach a new one with the United States.
The Trump administration recently signed a defense pact with Qatar, pledging to treat any armed attack on its soil as a threat to the US. The agreement came after Israel’s attempt last month to kill Hamas leaders with an airstrike in Doha. The Saudis have said they too would like a similar defense pact with the US.
According to a Financial Times report, citing a US government official, talks are underway to sign an agreement during the Crown Prince’s visit. However, the details are being negotiated. For its part, the State Department told the British newspaper that cooperation with Saudi Arabia is a “strong foundation of American strategy in the region.”
Normalization of relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv
Saudi Arabia has long sought such security guarantees as part of Washington’s efforts to normalize relations between Riyadh and Israel. These efforts, however, were put on hold after October 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza, while Prince Mohammed bin Salman has since declared that his state’s relations with Israel will depend, among other things, on the establishment of a Palestinian State, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still opposes. vigorously.
However, with the first phase of the cease-fire in Gaza now in effect, it seems that Trump will try not only to restart, but also to accelerate the related discussions. Last week, in an interview with Fox News, he said he expected an expansion soon of the “Abraham Accords”, which normalized relations between Israel and Arab countries (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan), brokered by the US during Trump’s first term.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the meeting of the two leaders, next month, in the first phase, may not result in an agreement that corresponds to the defense treaty, which Saudi Arabia has been seeking for a long time. “A more immediate outcome could be a defense cooperation agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, which would boost arms sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning for common threats, including terrorism and Iran,” the US newspaper notes.
Close relationship between Trump and bin Salman
Prince Bin Salman’s last visit to the US was in 2018, a few months before the assassination of dissident Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who had permission to stay in the US, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA assessed that the crown prince had likely ordered the assassination – which he still denies – prompting US sanctions against several Saudi officials.
Although Trump had supported bin Salman at the time, President Joe Biden later criticized the kingdom’s human rights record. When in 2022, Biden visited Saudi Arabia to persuade it to increase oil production and lower prices to limit Russia’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine, his effort did not succeed.
Trump, however, seems to have always had sympathy for the Saudi leader, whom he has called “wiser than his age.” In fact, Saudi Arabia was the first foreign country he visited in 2017 during his first term and the second after he took over as president this year, while the crown prince was the first foreign leader he called in January 2025, at the start of his second term.
