Donald Trump re-entered the White House on January 20 as the first president to serve a non-consecutive second term since Grover Cleveland in 1893. Any expectations that Trump II might have more message discipline and policy clarity than Trump I have been diminished by a chaotic opening period in office, with the not inconsiderable powerful role of the world’s richest person Elon Musk adding a new layer of unpredictability. And yet, early signs suggest that, with respect to American policy in the Middle East and specifically relations with the Gulf states, there is less likely to be sudden or disruptive change, in part because there was an underlying level of continuity from Trump I to Biden on certain issues, even as the regional context has evolved.
The Biden Return to Business as Usual
When Joe Biden became president in January 2021, there was a greater expectation of a shift in US-Gulf relations than there is today. During his campaign to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination, Biden had vowed to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ and ‘pay the price’ for the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Candidate Biden also indicated that his administration would rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) if Iran returned to compliance with the agreement from which then-President Trump had walked away in 2018. In addition, there was a view that the Biden presidency would place little priority on relations with the Gulf states, or even on the region more broadly, as officials focused on domestic measures to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and sought to pursue a vaguely defined ‘foreign policy for the middle class.’
As it turned out, the Biden administration failed to revive the JCPOA, both in 2021 and the on-and-off talks in Vienna that proceeded haphazardly and without breakthrough until the end of 2022. Biden also eventually gave way to political reality after initially refusing to engage with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On other issues, such as the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, there was little evidence of distance between the Biden White House and its predecessor, as winding down the ‘forever wars’ had been a rare example of a policy that enjoyed bipartisan consensus from both the US right and left, even if Biden’s chaotic implementation of the Trump-era deal with the Taliban hurt his presidency politically. In the case of the Abraham Accords reached in the final months of Trump I, although the Biden administration did not manage to expand them to include new signatories, it put significant effort into brokering a Saudi-Israeli deal.
What to Expect from Trump II?
What, then, can US-Gulf relations expect from the second Trump presidency? Key administration positions, especially those within the Department of State that include a focus on the Middle East, are still being filled, but several observations can be made at this stage. At the level of principals, the hawkishness of Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State, seems to be somewhat at odds with the appointment of advocates of US foreign policy restraint to senior posts in the Department of Defense, including critics of a hawkish US policy toward Iran. A degree of whiplash may ensue, as evident in Trump’s ‘firing’ by social media post of Brian Hook, the Trump I State official seen as the architect of the 2018 policy of ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, only to issue an executive order two weeks later that re-imposed aspects of ‘maximum pressure’ on Tehran. The volatility of Trump’s announcement of, and apparent retreat from, tariffs on Canada and Mexico is likely being parsed carefully in capitals across the region (and the world) for any lessons that may be drawn for his approach to their own countries.
Predictions before Trump re-entered the Oval Office that he might be more ‘unleashed’ in his second term have hit the mark in some respects.
Any underlying continuity in broad tenets of policy may therefore be undercut by uncertainties in the process of decision-making, just as they were during Trump’s first term. This time, however, there appear to be fewer guardrails in place in the form of experienced senior officials such as Trump I’s secretary of defense James Mattis, Observers of Gulf politics and US-Gulf relations need little reminding of the stabilizing role that Mattis and others played in the opening days of the blockade of Qatar in June 2017, after Trump initially let it be known, on Twitter, that he was taking sides in a dispute in which all the participants were longstanding US partners. Predictions before Trump re-entered the Oval Office that he might be more ‘unleashed’ in his second term have hit the mark in some respects. For example, the president has quickly shown a willingness to make extreme statements that seemingly lack any filter and may or may not be meant by him to be taken seriously, regardless of the anger and outrage his comments produce, such as with his February 4 call for the United States to ‘take over’ Gaza.
Transactional Politics Again
It is against this backdrop that the next phase of US-Gulf relations will unfold. The transactional nature that was a feature of the first Trump presidency’s dealings with the Gulf States looks set to be another point of continuity in the second Trump administration. This became clear in Trump’s first few days back in office as he mused about making his first foreign trip as the 47th president to Saudi Arabia, just as he had done in his first term in May 2017. Trump recollected that he had gone to Riyadh then “because they agreed to buy $450 billion worth of our products,” which was a figure significantly higher than the $110 billion in US arms sales to the kingdom reported at the time. This discrepancy notwithstanding, after Trump floated the idea of returning to Riyadh if the Saudis invested $500 billion and Saudi media responded that the kingdom planned to invest $600 billion in the United States over the next four years, Trump reacted by telling an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “I’ll be asking the Crown Prince, who’s a fantastic guy, to round it out to around 1 trillion, I think they’ll do that, because we’ve been very good to them.” Such a figure would exceed the entire valuation of assets held by the Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s main investment vehicle charged with the development of the various ‘giga-projects’ across Saudi Arabia.
Transactional interests can, of course, go in both directions. Both during his four years out of office and in the aftermath of the 2024 election, there were several investments from Gulf-based funds to entities linked to close associates of Donald Trump. Examples include sizeable injections of capital from Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari sovereign wealth funds into a private equity firm established in 2021 by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor, and more recent investments by the Oman Investment Authority, the Qatar Investment Authority, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holdings into xAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) company founded by Trump’s self-declared ‘first buddy,’ major donor, and current advisor Elon Musk. Two days into Trump’s presidency, MGX, an AI-focused fund backed by Mubadala and G42 in Abu Dhabi, became one of four anchor partners in the Stargate project announced by Trump (and promptly undermined by Musk) with the aim of investing $500 billion in developing AI infrastructure in the United States.
Commercial ties and business relationships may insulate the Gulf States from Trump’s darker instincts.
Commercial ties and business relationships may insulate the Gulf States from the darker instincts on display in several of Trump’s attempts to coerce foreign leaders to bend to his will, as seen in his skirmishes with Denmark’s prime minister on Greenland and with Panamanian leaders over the Panama Canal. There is at least a familiarity between key political and economic figures in Trump’s orbit and the Gulf. Such links can also be leveraged in the pursuit of diplomatic objectives, as Steve Witkoff, the real estate developer tapped as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, worked closely with officials from the outgoing Biden White House as well as from Qatar and Israel to produce the multi-phased Gaza ceasefire and hostage release agreement that came into effect on January 19. Witkoff attracted criticism, much of it from opponents of a deal with Hamas, for alleged links to Qatar; in fact, Witkoff had concluded previous business deals with Qatari partners, along with those from other Gulf States including the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The Gulf Is Slightly Different This Time Around
Gulf states’ geoeconomic influence, while far from uniform across the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), is thus likely to play a leading role in relations with the United States in Trump II. That this brings pitfalls as well as opportunities was evidenced in Trump’s assertion that “neighboring countries of great wealth” could be asked to fund his vision of a US takeover of Gaza and Palestinian displacement. Trump’s apparently off-the-cuff remarks about Gaza, which echoed Kushner’s March 2024 comments that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and that “from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” were so extreme that they elicited a middle-of-the-night rebuttal from the Saudi Foreign Ministry. The Arab League, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE also quickly issued a joint statement firmly rejecting any forced relocation or transfer of Palestinians, and other countries around the world also expressed condemnation.
The immediate and strong Saudi reaction to Trump’s shocking Gaza remarks reflected an expectation that the Trump administration would pick up from where the Biden White House had left off to push to conclude a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement. While Mohammed bin Salman had stated, in a Fox News interview days before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, that “every day, we get closer” to a deal, the two sides continue to disagree on the Palestinian component of any deal. The subsequent ferocity of Israeli operations and scale of destruction in Gaza, which the Crown Prince himself labeled a “collective genocide,” has raised the cost to the kingdom of normalization, a card the Crown Prince realistically can only play once, especially in explaining the terms of a deal domestically. Over time, the Saudi stance on normalizing has hardened from focusing on economic concessions and a defense agreement with the United States, in 2023, to requiring Palestinian statehood in return for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, in 2024 and now. As a result, when bin Salman claimed, in September 2023, that any breakthrough would be “the biggest historical deal since the end of the Cold War,” the history-making aspect in 2025 is likely to focus more on the delivery of an independent state of Palestine than on the formalization of ties with Israel.
While issues relating to normalization and to what role, if any, the Gulf states might play in Gaza, particularly if the ceasefire moves toward phase three, may be the initial areas of emphasis. US officials, especially political appointees, would do well to acknowledge that the regional context to some of the policy continuities has changed and that they cannot pick up in 2025 where they left off in 2021. There is little appetite in the Gulf for the hawkish approaches that dominated in 2017, either in relation to intra-GCC feuds or to a geopolitical confrontation with Iran. This stance stems largely from the long overhang of policies pursued by Trump in his first term, including his decision to initially take sides in the 2017 GCC rift and to not respond to Iranian-linked attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE two years later.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Emiri Diwan, Kuwait
