“The United States should have a normal relationship with Saudi Arabia. We don’t need to treat them as a pariah state as President [Joe] Biden sought to do at first,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting a realist U.S. foreign policy.
But at the same time, he says, President Trump in his first term was “too close to the Saudis, giving them the sense they were a core ally we would henceforth intervene to defend,” he says. “I sense a more cautious approach [to the region] this term. It’s going to be, ‘We do business with them, but we do not pledge to fight for them,’” he adds.
Yet while he supports what he considers to be Mr. Trump’s more realist defense relationship with the region, Mr. Friedman laments the weakening of a longstanding firewall between the nation’s business in international relations and the president’s personal business.
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