Trump announced that Iran and the U.S. were ‘very close’ to a deal after scolding Tehran for supporting terrorism in remarks to the Saudis.
President Trump is performing a geopolitical balancing act this week, as he simultaneously shores up U.S. relationships with Gulf kingdoms while cheering on his administration’s talks with Iran over the country’s nuclear program.
“Iran has sort of agreed to the terms: They’re not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust. We’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran,” Trump said at a roundtable event in Qatar, according to CNN, which cited an Iranian state media agency.
Trump insisted that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon” but said that the two sides are “getting very close to maybe doing a deal.”
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff took part in talks with the Iranians last week in Oman.
Earlier Thursday, the president posted to Truth Social an interview in which a senior Iranian official said that Tehran would agree to give up on highly enriched uranium as part of a potential deal.
While Trump emphasized America’s historical ties to Saudi Arabia in a speech to the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh earlier this week, some of his remarks sounded as though they were tailored to assure the Saudis that his ongoing Iran negotiations would not damage their interests.
“The whole purpose of this trip is engagement and assurance,” Ilan Berman, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told National Review. Berman cited the Trump administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran regarding a potential nuclear deal as a factor shaping the president’s outreach to Saudi, a major regional rival of the Islamic Republic.
Trump condemned Tehran for causing “unthinking suffering in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.”
Berman said that even though Trump’s remarks repudiating nation building were likely written into the speech far in advance, tough lines regarding Iran’s malign actions in the region could have been a later addition that responded to comments from Saudi officials during meetings in Riyadh on Monday.
The Iran talks contain “a lot of moving parts, and not fully baked,” Berman said, pointing out that Trump likely wanted to offer the Saudis reassurance — and tough talk about Iran’s support of terrorist groups across the Middle East.
The tough talk on Iran was coupled with flowery praise for a regime — with its “gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi” — that he has been actively courting since his first term in office.
Trump took pains to contrast his pragmatic approach with that of his predecessors, who he cast as patronizing moralists.
“It’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs,” Trump said, in a portion of his speech that has attracted widespread attention.
Trump’s affinity for the Saudis was reciprocated in a series of gestures specifically tailored to flatter the president: He was given a hero’s welcome in Riyadh earlier this week, with a lavender carpet that unfurled from Air Force One and, per a video that went viral online, a mobile McDonald’s trailer.
The forum featured participation by dozens of U.S. CEOs including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Trump departed the country touting a $600 billion in Saudi pledges to invest in U.S. data center, health-care facilities, and aerospace firms. The administration also described a $142 billion sale of U.S. arms to the kingdom, though questions remain about the substance of that arrangement.
After the grisly murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, President Biden had pledged to make the kingdom a pariah.
During his 2022 trip to Saudi Arabia, he fist-bumped Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, in an awkward attempt to bridge the distance between his human-rights-focused rhetoric and the U.S. strategic interest in maintaining ties with the kingdom amid spiking energy prices.
Later in his term, Biden would warm up to MBS. But in Trump’s estimation, that was too little too late.
“They were starving for love because our country didn’t give them love,” he said this morning in a speech at Al Udeid air base in Qatar, following his stop in Saudi Arabia.
“We gave them a fist bump. Remember the fist bump in Saudi Arabia? He travels all the way to Saudi Arabia and give them a fist bump. That’s not what they want. They want to shake his hand.”
Biden eventually shook Bin Salman’s hand at the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
Back home, the president and his inner circle have faced some criticism for allegedly mixing his personal business interests with his foreign policy outreach in the region. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and an architect of the Abraham Accords, conducted deals in Saudi Arabia after Trump’s first term.
Trump has faced pushback this week over plans for Qatar to donate, temporarily, a luxurious Boeing 747 jet to the Defense Department for the president to use as Air Force One.
By traveling to the region, Trump is also likely trying to convey that the U.S. intends to remain the dominant geopolitical player in the region, despite Beijing’s attempts to muscle its way into regional politics, including through brokering a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran last year.
In an analysis piece, Hudson Institute research fellow Zineb Riboua called Trump’s choice of Riyadh as his first stop a “deliberate signal.”
“It indicates that the United States no longer views the Middle East as a peripheral concern, but as a vital theater of strategic competition with China. The scale of the announcements confirms that message,” she wrote.