Opportunistic Embrace
Trump’s lavish welcome for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman lays bare a US–Saudi partnership driven by deals in billions of dollars and a blind eye to murder.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s return to Washington this week - his first since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in 2018 - was choreographed with all the extravagance of a state visit. President Donald Trump welcomed him to the White House with military trimmings, smiles and a flourish of flags. It was, in every sense, a political theatre of indulgence as Saudi Arabia and the United States renewed an alliance rooted less in shared values than in a frank, transactional opportunism.
The Crown Prince arrived armed with eye-catching promises. Saudi investment in the United States, he announced, would jump from $600bn to nearly $1trn - an extraordinary pledge at a moment when America is hungry for foreign capital. The two sides are also preparing agreements spanning defence, nuclear energy and a high-profile purchase of US-made F-35 fighter jets. The White House under Trump’s second term is eager to present this as proof of revitalised American leadership and economic clout. Riyadh sees it as a way to expand influence in Washington while diversifying its own strategic dependencies.
But awkward moments ensued when reporters pressed the Crown Prince on the most sensitive scars in the relationship: the 9/11 attacks and the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS insisted, as he has done for years, that Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi national, intended the September 11th attacks to rupture US-Saudi relations, and that anyone questioning Riyadh’s commitment to counterterrorism was helping to fulfil bin Laden’s goal. The families of victims, furious at his presence in the Oval Office, were unmoved. America’s intelligence agencies, too, have been clear that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and the kingdom’s export of extremist ideology in earlier decades created fertile ground for bin Laden’s rise.
On Khashoggi, the Crown Prince offered little beyond familiar denials. More extraordinary was Trump’s intervention. Sitting beside MBS, the president dismissed the CIA’s 2018 conclusion that the Crown Prince personally ordered the journalist’s murder. Khashoggi, Trump airily declared, had been “extremely controversial.” “Things happen,” he added, absolving his guest with a shrug that would have been unthinkable for any previous American president.
But the logic underpinning this performance was entirely consistent. For Trump, the opportunist salesman, the moral cost of overlooking a murder is outweighed by the prospect of lucrative business. Saudi Arabia already holds significant investments in the Trump family’s orbit, including the $2bn handed by Riyadh’s sovereign wealth fund to Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. A Trump Tower and a Trump Plaza are planned for Jeddah; two more projects are scheduled for Riyadh.
For MBS, the United States remains the indispensable security provider in the Gulf, the backbone of the Saudi military and the political guarantor Riyadh turns to in moments of regional crisis. By dangling vast investments and weapons deals before an American president keen to claim economic victories, MBS can demand concessions while signalling that Saudi Arabia has alternatives from Chinese investment to Russian coordination on oil markets.
The geopolitical context makes the embrace even more revealing. In the past, the United States has tolerated Saudi excesses from the oil embargo of 1973 to decades of Wahhabi proselytisation. The Middle East is again in flux: wars in Gaza and Yemen, shifting alignments in the Gulf and a global scramble for energy security. Washington needs stable partners as it focuses more of its attention on Asia. Riyadh wants strategic autonomy while still benefiting from America’s military umbrella. The result is a relationship in which both sides privately distrust each other, yet publicly cling to the fiction of strategic harmony.
The opportunism that sustains the US-Saudi alliance may be unseemly, but it offers flexibility in an unstable world. What neither side can admit openly is that this flexibility is precisely what makes the partnership both resilient and perpetually fragile - a bargain held together by a mutual willingness to look away when inconvenient truths intrude.
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