U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in this handout released on May 14.Saudi Press Agency/Reuters
At the outset of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tour of the Middle East, there were hopes he would force a ceasefire in Gaza and maybe even bring the presidents of Russia and Ukraine together at a negotiating table in Istanbul. Mr. Trump was also hinting that a deal would be done with Iran on curbing its nuclear enrichment program.
In the end, he fell short of those lofty ambitions but delivered an unexpected breakthrough in Syria. The trip also signalled an apparent shift in U.S. policy in the region – away from one long-time ally, Israel, and toward another, Saudi Arabia.
The turn toward Riyadh – a country that until recently was isolated on the global stage after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi – was driven by Mr. Trump’s love of the big deal. His four days in the Middle East saw him back away from leaders who refused to do business on his terms and instead deepen links with the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
When a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas proved out of reach, Mr. Trump left Jerusalem off his itinerary.
Hopes of a breakthrough in the Russia-Ukraine war were similarly dashed when Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear he had no intention of accepting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s invitation to meet face-to-face in Istanbul this week. Mr. Trump had even dangled the possibility that he could fly in to make it a three-way summit.
But the Russian leader – like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – sees little upside in stopping the fighting right now.
Nor was there any announced breakthrough in nuclear talks with Tehran, despite Mr. Trump’s claim that Iran had “sort of” agreed to a deal to curb its uranium enrichment program during the negotiations that concluded Sunday.
That left the U.S. President casting about for things he could describe as a “win” on his first foreign trip since returning to the White House in January (other than a one-day visit to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope Francis).
The deals announced this week in Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi came with impressive dollar figures attached to them – Saudi Arabia repeated a promise to invest US$600-billion in the U.S., including a US$142-billion weapons deal – but all were likely in hand before Mr. Trump boarded the current version of Air Force One, a plane the Qataris have offered to replace, free of charge, with a US$400-million luxury jet (a proposal that went unmentioned in Qatar and is now under ethical review).
None would make the giant headlines Mr. Trump has always craved, nor advance his stated desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
And so he turned, unexpectedly, to beleaguered Syria. In doing so, he took the easiest win in front of him – which also happened to be the most important step he could take, shy of ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
In shaking hands with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Wednesday and announcing the end of sanctions the U.S. had imposed in 1979 on the previous regime, headed by the Assad family, Mr. Trump unlocked the potential of Syria’s economy, clearing the way for international organizations to help rebuild the country after 13 years of civil war.
The announcement of the lifting of U.S. sanctions was greeted by public celebrations in cities around Syria. “The Syrian people deserve to live after these sacrifices and after the injustice they were subjected to for decades,” said Bahia al-Mardini, a dissident journalist during the Assad era who recently helped draft the country’s interim constitution.
In a week packed with speculation about whether Mr. Trump would travel to Israel or Turkey, few predicted he would end up in a room in Riyadh, shaking hands with Mr. al-Sharaa as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman looked on, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – previously Mr. al-Sharaa’s main foreign patron – watching remotely.
Joseph Bayeh, an assistant professor of international affairs and public policy at Lusail University in Qatar, said it was significant that Mr. Trump met with Mr. al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia rather than in Turkey or Qatar, the other main backer of Mr. al-Sharaa and the armed uprising that toppled president Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. al-Sharaa and the new government in Damascus had been “a card in the hands of Qatar and Turkey,” Prof. Bayeh said. “Suddenly, it’s as if Trump took this card out of their hands and gave it to Saudi Arabia. In terms of the regional power dynamic, he was saying, ‘Saudi Arabia is the big player, and the Crown Prince is our man in the region.’”
The meeting with Mr. al-Sharaa also highlighted Mr. Trump’s affinity for grand and seemingly impromptu gestures and his refusal to follow foreign policy conventions.
The same “Why not?” instinct that has led him to propose overly hasty and broadly unworkable ideas for how to make peace in Ukraine – not to mention his suggestion, repeated again this week, that the U.S. could “take” Gaza and turn it into a “freedom zone” – allowed him to meet with Mr. al-Sharaa. So what if the usual diplomacy, such as a meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Syrian counterpart, Asaad al-Shaibani, hadn’t happened yet?
The decision not to travel to Israel underlines Mr. Trump’s increasingly strained relationship with Mr. Netanyahu, who has resisted Mr. Trump’s push for a ceasefire in Gaza while also seeking to scupper the nascent nuclear talks with Iran. Amos Harel, a columnist for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, wrote this week that “in Trump’s first term, the Prime Minister’s followers boasted about the degree of his influence on the U.S. President. Now it appears as though Israel has lost much of that ability and for the present is watching the developments as no more than an observer.”
In the meantime, Israel continued to pound Gaza with air strikes this week, killing at least 143 people on Thursday alone, ahead of what is expected to be a large-scale ground operation. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says more than 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza in a war that began on Oct.7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and saw hundreds more taken hostage.
In Ukraine, too, a war that has killed tens of thousands since Mr. Putin ordered a full-scale invasion in February, 2022, continues to rage. Friday saw the first direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials in more than three years, though Mr. Rubio admitted, “I don’t think we’re going to have a breakthrough here until President Trump and President Putin interact directly on this topic.”
Prof. Bayeh said a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions may prove easier to achieve than ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, since both sides want to avoid a conflict.
The main hurdle will be overcoming Iran’s distrust of Mr. Trump, who in 2018 unilaterally withdrew from a deal negotiated three years earlier by his predecessor, Barack Obama, that had seen Tehran agree to restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
On Friday, Mr. Trump said Iran had received a U.S. proposal for a new treaty, and “they know they have to move quickly, or something bad is going to happen.” Earlier in the week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the U.S. President was “naive for thinking that he can come to our region, threaten us and hope that we back down against his demands.”