Forget Democracy in the Middle East. Trump Wants Deals.

The Free Press, Batya Ungar-Sargon, 05.14.25

The president sees fortunes to be made in a new Middle East defined not by Sunni vs. Shiite, but by OpenAI and Grok.

President Trump’s Middle East tour, the first foreign visit of his second presidency, got started with a bang. Breaking protocol, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greeted President Trump on the tarmac, and for the next 12 hours, the two joked and laughed as they greeted cabinet members and dignitaries. At one point Trump was toted around in a golf cart driven by the Crown Prince himself, who wore a beatific smile. Perhaps one reason for the joy: The two nations signed a $142 billion arms deal.

But more significant than the MBS-Trump bromance was the speech Trump delivered, which denounced the failed forever wars of Republican administrations past as well as the failed appeasement of the Democrats, laying out the president’s signature strategy: peace through strength and peace through commerce as the path of the future.

In his June 2009 address in Egypt, President Obama defined his foreign policy as “based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition,” as the president put it. “Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

If Obama’s speech marked one epoch, President Trump’s address marks another. One not built on the fiction of shared principles but respect for our differences and with alliances built on the unflinching, hard reality of economic partnership—even between erstwhile foes.

And his message to our allies was clear: Get on board or get left behind. “As I said in my inaugural address, my greatest hope is to be a peacemaker and to be a unifier. I don’t like war,” Trump said.

Throughout the peninsula, the president said, “a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.”

The current American president has no interest in adjudicating longstanding beef between mullahs. Instead of sectarianism, Trump sees massive financial opportunity—the billions and billions of dollars to be made in a new Middle East defined not by Sunni vs. Shiite, but by OpenAI and Grok. (In a sign of imminent world peace, sworn enemies Elon Musk and Sam Altman both accompanied Trump on the trip.)

This new Middle East was not being built thanks to overbearing Western intervention but rather in spite of it, the president said. “It’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs,” said Trump.

“The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits,” he went on. “Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way,” Trump said. “ Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly. And it’s something only you could do. You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way.”

Compare this to the last Republican president prior to Trump, George W. Bush, who declared in his last State of the Union address: “We seek the end of tyranny in our world. Some dismiss that goal as misguided idealism. In reality, the future security of America depends on it.” He said, “Dictatorships shelter terrorists and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer—so we will act boldly in freedom's cause.”

Trump’s speech was a rejection of the idea, shared by Obama and Bush, that Western-style liberal democracy is essential to human flourishing in the Middle East. In Trump’s view, it can be achieved through success, security, stability, respect for a nation’s sovereignty and culture even where it differs from ours, and above all, a disgust for the regime-change wars that promised freedom and delivered death and destruction.

“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” the president said. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interest of stability, prosperity, and peace. That’s what I really want to do.”

These words resonated deeply with the MAGA base. One of Trump’s signature campaign promises, building off his success in his first term, was no new wars. (As early as 2005, Trump was calling TV executives and demanding to know what we were doing in Iraq, horrified at what he saw as senseless bloodshed.)

That position and promise mean a lot to his working-class supporters, who have borne the brunt of the failed wars in the Middle East at the cost of their sons and daughters. As one of my followers on Twitter put it, speaking no doubt for millions, “As a retired soldier and father of two draft-eligible sons, I appreciate President Trump. Nice to have a president who doesn’t think of his ordinary citizens as expendable abstractions to be used in service of achieving vague elite goals.”

The message—both domestically and globally—is clear: The only nation we’re building is our own. For the rest of the world, we are looking for sovereign partners who carry their own weight and increase America’s safety, strength, and prosperity across the globe.

This isn’t isolationism; quite the opposite: It’s rallying Middle Eastern nations through mutual respect and cooperation to achieve goals we cannot achieve on our own. It’s a huge opportunity for our allies. The price of entry for Trump is simple: Commit to peace and where you can, invest in the U.S. Choose the path of war and there will be hell to pay.

That’s why on the subject of Iran, Trump minced no words, castigating the Ayatollah’s regime as an agent of “chaos and terror.” But he also encouraged Iran to come to the table, offering Tehran a choice: Make a deal and agree to never have a nuclear weapon or face the “maximum pressure” of oil exports driven down to zero. “We really want them to be a successful country. We want them to be a wonderful, safe, great country, but they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, for Saudi Arabia, a country that has liberalized dramatically in recent years and had committed $1 trillion in investment into the United States by the time Trump decamped for Qatar, the president had one major request in his speech: Join the Abraham Accords with Israel. “It will be a special day in the Middle East with the whole world watching when Saudi Arabia joins us,” President Trump said in his speech. “And you’ll be greatly honoring me, and you’ll be greatly honoring all of those people that have fought so hard for the Middle East, and I really think it’s going to be something special. But you’ll do it in your own time, and that’s what I want, and that’s what you want, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Outside this mention of the Abraham Accords and a strong condemnation of October 7, Israel was noticeably absent from the trip. There has been a reported cooling of relations between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump. Last month, Netanyahu traveled to Washington to ask President Trump to give Israel cover to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Trump said no. Of course he did. “My preference will always be for peace and partnership, whenever those outcomes can be achieved, always. It’s always going to be that way. Only a fool would think otherwise,” he explained in his speech in Riyadh.

Will Israel heed the president’s call? So far Netanyahu has badly misread the room, and not just on Iran. Frustrated with the pace of negotiations over a ceasefire deal, the administration seems to have cut the Israelis out of the process whereby the Trump administration secured the release of American-Israeli Hamas captive Edan Alexander. And it’s not just Netanyahu; others in his coalition have told me they think this is the moment to be pushing a declaration of sovereignty over the West Bank. This would be exactly the kind of mistake the president was warning about in his speech.

Trump’s commitment to the Jewish state is genuinely held and runs deep, but the Israeli right ought not seek to force a choice between his America First, peace through strength agenda and their own aims. It would be foolish to alienate the president at this moment.

Just one year ago, this new Middle East would have been unimaginable. Assad is now gone, Hamas’s leadership is dead, and deals can be made between people who until recently were enemies, not over anything as ephemeral as shared values but over cool hard cash and that most precious, most irreplaceable commodity: a better future for their children.

As Trump put it, “If the responsible nations of this region seize this moment, put aside your differences, and focus on the interests that unite you, then all of humanity will soon be amazed at what they will see right here in this geographic center of the world.”