On Jan. 23, his second full day in office after being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump picked up the phone and dialed his first foreign leader. The honor didn’t go to the leader of a formal U.S. treaty ally like Canada or the United Kingdom, but rather to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). This wasn’t a surprise given the relationship the two men conjured up. In his first term, Trump jetted to Saudi Arabia for his first overseas trip. The visit was a precursor to what would turn out to be a blossoming U.S.-Saudi relationship over the next four years. Trump showered the Saudis with billions of dollars in military equipment; continued to assist the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen; joined Riyadh’s economic embargo against Qatar; and defended MBS when the U.S. intelligence community assessed that he was responsible for the October 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump and MBS are prepared to pick up where they left off. The two view each other as force multipliers for their respective agendas. Trump looks at the Saudi crown prince and sees a high net-worth individual who could throw a gargantuan amount of petrodollars into the American economy. In Trump, MBS spots a transactional businessman who couldn’t care less about high-browed concepts like the rules-based international order.
Both men are also nationalists to the core. MBS can relate to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra because he is following the same playbook in the kingdom. MBS wants to make his country stronger and wealthier than ever before, best exemplified by his Vision 2030 economic campaign to diversify Saudi Arabia from an oil-pumping machine into a center of banking, finance, and sports.
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