Overview
Next week, President Trump will embark on his first international trip, making state visits to Arab Gulf monarchies as he did in his first term. The three-day agenda includes visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, with a summit of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders in Riyadh. Despite several regional flashpoints—including Israel’s expanded war on Hamas, ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Syria on the brink, and Yemen’s Houthis (maybe) backing off Red Sea attacks—the visit is expected to be light on geostrategic deliverables. Instead, the focus of the tour will be on economic priorities, including defense contracts, tech, tariff easing, minerals, and oil prices. The conflicts at Gulf capitals’ front doors will take a backseat as President Trump avoids regional entanglement.
Some deliverables have already emerged: President Trump has announced that the US will officially call the body of water most widely known as the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf (which Arab monarchies prefer), a mostly symbolic step that will still rankle Tehran amid slow-going nuclear talks. In recent days, Trump has also teased “one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject" prior to his departure next week.
Commercial Concerns Top the Agenda
A primary focus of the upcoming tour will be trade—unsurprising given the Trump administration’s focus on the economy. In March, when the president announced his upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia, he was clear about why the Kingdom would be his first international visit: “I said I'll go if you pay $1 trillion to American companies […] and they've agreed to do that.” While the feasibility of this $1 trillion pledge can be questioned (no Saudi official has confirmed the number, which eclipses the Kingdom’s entire sovereign wealth fund), the focus of the trip is clear.
One area where the Trump administration will seek new deals is defense contracts. The president has long favored lucrative arms deals with Gulf partners, which have historically been controversial, as a way to boost the US defense industry as well as strengthen bilateral relations (including by increasing Gulf dependence on American technology amid growing relationships with China). In late April, the media reported that the Trump administration was poised to offer Saudi Arabia an arms package worth well over $100 billion, a development that may be clarified and confirmed during next week’s trip. Last week, the White House granted initial approval for a $3.5 billion package of air-to-air missiles for the Kingdom. One issue that remains up in the air is the long-stalled sale of advanced F-35 aircraft to the UAE, which was initially proposed by President Trump in 2021 and shortly after suspended by President Biden over concerns about Chinese access to defense technologies. While the UAE announced in September that it did not plan to reopen the F-35 issue, President Trump is reportedly interested in raising it—not least due to mounting competition with French defense firms, which in January made the largest-ever overseas delivery of Rafale fighter jets to Abu Dhabi.
Gulf monarchs will also likely be hoping for tariff concessions. While the countries on Trump’s agenda have not borne the brunt of tariff pressure—most are facing just the 10% baseline tariff on non-aluminum and steel exports, and the US is not a major export destination for Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are still hoping to strike a deal. Headwinds in the global economic environment will challenge the ambitious and expensive economic transformations underway to different degrees in all three countries, which their leaders consider existential efforts to create diversified, post-oil economies. Global fiscal pressures will significantly increase borrowing costs and the liquidity of sovereign wealth funds, the base from which Gulf monarchies are funding their 2030 plans. Decreasing tariff burdens, de-escalating the trade war, and stimulating their domestic economies with new bilateral economic ventures will be top of mind for all three leaders set to meet the president next week.
Tech will be a focus in all three capitals, buoyed by the Trump administration’s recent announcement that it would roll back the Biden-era Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, which curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips according to a three-tiered ranking of trading partners. Gulf Arab countries were unhappy to have been classified in Tier 2, which imposed significant limits on the types and amounts of high-performance semiconductor chips that could be purchased. The Biden administration had imposed restrictions on Gulf states, despite their significant investments to establish themselves as AI hubs, due to concerns over Chinese access to sensitive technologies. The Trump administration is likely to be more amenable to Gulf arguments that technological enmeshment with China is only an economic concern, and to proposals of new joint ventures in the AI space that could move Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar up the list of preferred AI partnerships.
Mining and mineral processing will also be on the agenda in Saudi Arabia. The media is reporting that the Saudi cabinet has approved a plan to broach a Memorandum of Understanding with the US on full-stream mineral exploitation. The potential agreement comes alongside a significant push in Riyadh to make the Kingdom a global leader in critical minerals extraction and processing, with state mining company Ma’aden aiming to become the world’s most valuable mining company in the world by market capitalization by 2050. This effort has led to significant state investments in the industry (with some $120 billion pledged by the government to date), the near doubling of the valuation of the Kingdom’s unexploited mineral resources to $2.5 trillion in 2024, and the granting of exploration licenses to multinationals beginning in 2022. With its robust stores of lithium and the capital to fund a substantial push into the refining industry as well as extraction, Saudi Arabia is an attractive partner for the US, for whom reducing dependence on Chinese critical minerals has become an increasingly more pressing strategic imperative over the last several years.
Abraham Accords
On the White House’s wish list for the trip—if not the agreed-upon agenda—is Saudi Arabia’s normalization with Israel under the Abraham Accords. Trump’s flagship Arab-Israeli normalization accord saw the UAE and Bahrain normalize ties with Israel in 2020, followed shortly after by Morocco and Sudan (although this latter agreement has been stymied by the country’s civil war). The president and his aides have long presented the Abraham Accords as an ongoing policy initiative, with various reports of new countries floated over the years, such as Kuwait or Indonesia. Saudi Arabia, however, has long been the crown jewel: as the home of two of Islam’s three holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, and the second-largest Muslim country by population, Saudi Arabia is the moral leader of the Muslim world. Saudi normalization with Israel would be a powerful signal that generations of Arab-Israeli conflict and tension were in the past. Indeed, there is some speculation that the “as big as it gets” announcement Trump has floated in recent days could be Riyadh’s induction into the accords—it certainly would fit the bill as “one of the most important announcements that have been made in many years about a certain subject.”
However, Saudi normalization with Israel under current regional conditions is deeply unlikely. Prior to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent ongoing conflict, normalization had seemed on the horizon—following a history of deep commitment to the Palestinian cause, the importance of the cause seemed to decline in the Kingdom and Saudi Arabia’s next generation de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, hinted several times that the country was open to moving towards recognition of Israel under several conditions. Last summer, Riyadh was openly considering a proposed deal by the Biden administration that would formalize American security commitments to the country in exchange for normalization with Israel. The outbreak of war in October 2023 scuttled that plan; Riyadh has indicated that normalization would be impossible without at least a durable ceasefire, and likely concrete steps toward Palestinian statehood (both unlikely in the near term given Israel’s recently expanded war plans). On the American side, President Trump is also unlikely to endorse Biden’s proposal of a blank-check security deal with Riyadh, whose isolationist bent has long made him wary of protracted security entanglements abroad. While Saudi-Israeli normalization is by no means dead, it is certainly in the deep freeze.
Other Geopolitical Concerns Take a Backseat
While the region is increasingly in turmoil, geopolitical issues such as the Israel-Hamas war, Syria’s post-Assad reconstruction (or dissolution), and the conflict with the Houthis remain in the background. These topics will be touched upon in official communication, but no substantive negotiations or deliverables are likely to emerge. On Israel-Hamas, the US and its Gulf partners remain deeply at odds, despite the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s broader strategic alignment with Israel on the risks posed by Iranian proxies. All three countries on the agenda vehemently oppose Israel’s expanded war in Gaza and have denounced US plans to occupy postwar Gaza, leaving little room for engagement with the US on the issue outside of humanitarian concerns.
The US is similarly at odds with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar over Syria. Whereas the US harbors deep wariness over getting involved in the post-Assad scramble, Syria’s Gulf partners have pledged significant support to the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led government with the primary goal of preventing a failed state at their doorsteps. Qatar, among other efforts, has agreed to continue paying Syrian public sector salaries (now with US go-ahead), Saudi Arabia has pledged assistance “with no limit,” and the UAE has similarly embraced the new government in Damascus, most recently mediating backchannel security talks between Israel and Syria. Trump’s Arab counterparts will likely push for sanctions easing, which he will continue to refuse without significant progress.
Regional positions on nuclear talks with Tehran have shifted since 2015 when Gulf capitals felt that President Obama’s decision to blindside them with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the nail in the coffin of their historic bilateral relationships. Today, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have initiated their own diplomatic détentes with Iran and are cautiously supportive of the talks, having seen firsthand how the breakdown of the JCPOA accelerated Iran’s nuclear development and its proxy activity. Qatar, which has long enjoyed a closer relationship with Iran and has served as an interlocutor for the US and other Gulf countries, is more unreservedly supportive. Despite this, there is little room at this stage for Gulf input or support.
