The US president’s deference to his Middle Eastern allies is hollow if they cannot affect what happens in their own back yard
Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East last week was an exercise in disorientation. Both in terms of rebalancing the relationship between the US and the region, and in scrambling perceptions. In Riyadh, he told the Saudi royals there would be no more “lectures on how to live”. He lifted sanctions on Syria so that the country may have a “fresh start”, and he fawned over the camels and lavish architecture (“as a construction guy,” he said at one Qatari palace, “this is perfect marble”). Never has Trump appeared more in his element, surrounded by the wealth of sovereigns, the marshalling power of absolute monarchies, and their calculated self-orientalisation and over-the-top flattery.
The same man who enacted the Muslim ban in his first term was strolling around mosques and shrugging off the radical path to power of the Syrian president: “Handsome guy … Tough past, but are you gonna put a choir boy in that position?” His call for recognising the new role of Gulf states both as political and economic powerhouses, and matter-of-factly taking their lead on what Syria needs right now, whatever the history, is excruciating. Because it reveals how painfully sclerotic and inconsistent previous administrations were. Joe Biden promised to take a hard line with the Saudi government for its role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and in the Yemen war, and then seemed to forget about it, or realised he couldn’t follow through. From Trump, there is no such mixed signalling: you are rich, we need you. You do you.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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