The US-Saudi relationship is too big to fail…for now

The most shocking thing about President Donald Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman on Tuesday was that anyone was shocked by it.

The main headline coming out of the two leaders’ combative session with reporters was Trump’s blasé dismissal of a question about the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which was arguably the biggest challenge to US-Saudi relations since the 9/11 attacks, and which US intelligence reports have concluded the crown prince personally ordered.

“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that,” Trump said.

But Trump had made similar remarks to these just weeks after Khashoggi’s death in 2018, issuing an official statement that referenced Saudi accusations that Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and concluding: “It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

It’s hard to imagine any other president talking about a foreign state’s murder of a journalist and US resident this way, not to mention dismissing the conclusions of his own country’s intelligence agencies this way. Nor has any other president had the kind of personal business ties to the Kingdom while in office that Trump and his family enjoy. But Trump is hardly the first president in the 80-year history of relations between the world’s most powerful democracy and its most powerful absolute monarchy to conclude that the relationship is too important to let human rights get in the way.

To take the most recent example, in 2020, Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail to make the crown prince widely known as MBS a “pariah” on the world stage for Khashoggi’s murder and accused the Saudi government of “murdering children” in Yemen. But the spike in global oil prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to Biden’s infamous fist bump with MBS in Riyadh in 2022. Prior to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the Biden administration was pushing a three-way deal involving a mutual defense treaty between the US and Saudi Arabia, Saudi-Israel diplomatic normalization, and progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution.

That deal never came to pass, but the general thinking behind it has continued into the second Trump administration, now coupled with a far chummier relationship between the two leaders. On Tuesday, Trump mocked the Biden fist bump, saying, “I grab that hand. … I don’t give a hell where that hand’s been!”

The relationship between the two leaders may be almost cartoonishly close at this point, but there are still limits to just how much the two countries can get from one another.

In fairness, Saudi Arabia is not the same country it was in 2018. By all accounts, the liberalization of society has been rapid and profound: with the religious police sidelined, restrictive gender laws (including the infamous ban on women driving) lifted, and foreign cultural products (including last month’s controversial Riyadh Comedy festival) allowed in for the first time. MBS is also no longer doing the kind of highly destabilizing things like kidnapping the prime minister of Lebanon or blockading Qatar. The long and destructive war in Yemen has wound down.

But Saudi Arabia is still an absolute dictatorship where political opposition is not tolerated, and executions of dissidents are disturbingly common.

Still, it is abundantly clear that to whatever degree MBS was a “pariah” in Washington following the Khashoggi murder, that era is over. Back in 2018, prominent Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio broke with the administration to demand accountability for the killing. But Graham has since patched things up with the crown prince. Rubio, who previously described MBS as a “gangster,” was in the room for Tuesday’s meeting as Trump’s secretary of state. MBS got a warm, though decidedly partisan, welcome on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

The meeting brought some tangible results: In recent days, the two governments have announced a slew of major deals. MBS pledged $1 trillion in investments in the US economy, up from an earlier pledge of $600 billion. (Eye-watering investment promises like these tend to turn out to be less than initially pledged.) Saudi Arabia is promising to buy 300 US battle tanks. Trump also said he would approve the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite the misgivings of US generals and supporters of Israel. (The former are worried about advanced military technology being shared with China; the latter say the sale would violate a law that requires the US to ensure Israel retains a “qualitative military edge” over its neighbors.)

Trump also said he would elevate Saudi Arabia to the status of “major non-NATO ally,” which will make it easier for the Saudis to buy US weaponry. (Notably, it’s the same status currently enjoyed by Israel.)

The relationship is also about more than just defense and oil these days. The Saudis are looking to become major players in AI and data centers, and the crown prince’s visit includes an investment forum on Wednesday attended by Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The US is eyeing Saudi Arabia as a potential new source of rare earth minerals as well.

For many in Washington, though, and not just those with major real estate deals in Riyadh to consider, the US-Saudi relationship is simply too big to fail.

However, the relationship only goes so far. Trump would desperately like Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, the series of diplomatic normalization deals between Israel and majority Muslim countries that began in his first term. This would be a crowning diplomatic achievement for both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (The recent announcement that Kazakhstan, a country that has never had any conflict with Israel, was joining the Accords suggested a bit of desperation on the administration’s part.)

But MBS was noncommittal this week, saying, “We want to be part of the Abraham Accords, but we want also to be sure that we secure a clear path to a two-state solution.” Palestinian rights may not be a major priority for this Saudi government, but a country that wants to position itself as a leader in the Islamic world and is ever concerned about internal stability can’t afford to ignore the widespread anger provoked by the war in Gaza. (The Palestinian issue is also thought to be a bigger priority for MBS’s father, King Salman, who is still nominally the head of state even if his son is the kingdom’s de facto ruler.) The current Israeli government would love to have normalization with Saudi Arabia, but probably not as much as it wants to prevent a Palestinian state, so this issue is probably stalled for the time being.

And for all the high-tech military hardware now heading from the US to Saudi Arabia, the US is also unlikely now to provide the kind of credible defense guarantees the Saudis are hoping for, which unlike “major non-NATO” status, would require an act of Congress. The biggest roadblock in the relationship during Trump’s first term was not Khashoggi, but Saudi frustration over Trump’s lack of response to a massive Iranian missile attack on its oil facilities in 2019.

In a dangerous and unstable region, Saudi Arabia still needs defense partners, and the US will continue to be the most important one for the foreseeable future. But the Kingdom’s increasingly close economic relationship with China and a recent defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan highlight the degree to which the Saudis are also interested in hedging against uncertainty in the US relationship.

For now, the US and Saudi Arabia still feel they need each other. But going forward, the bigger question may not be how much the US can stomach a relationship with Saudi Arabia — but whether Saudi Arabia still needs a relationship with a country as unpredictable as the US.