Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
President treated like prince by Saudi royals
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Donald Trump was greeted with elaborate pomp in Saudi Arabia’s capital Saturday, his first day of a five-country tour that will test his capacity to manage complex international diplomacy while the White House faces a growing political crisis at home.
In choosing the oil-rich kingdom as his first foreign stop since taking office, Trump found a host eager to use all the opulent symbols of state to seek a reboot in relations after the strains of the Obama era.
In a ceremony at the lavish Royal Court, King Salman presented Trump with the nation’s highest honor, the Collar of Abdulaziz Al Saud, for “his quest to enhance security and peace in the region and the world.”
Hours earlier, Salman greeted Trump on a red carpet at the foot of Air Force One before a dramatic flyover of military aircraft honored the visiting president.
When President Barack Obama last visited, in April 2016, the king famously snubbed him, sending the governor of Riyadh to welcome him on the runway while the king greeted other visitors at the airport.
By day’s end, Trump and members of his Cabinet were swaying to the music and chanting of a traditional sword dance as part of an extravagant dinner in his honor at a second royal palace.
Trump was accompanied by his daughter Ivanka and first lady Melania Trump. Like many foreign women, neither wore the headscarf that women in Saudi Arabia are legally required to wear in public.
Beyond the ceremonies, Trump and the king signed agreements locking in a $110 billion package of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and investments in the U.S. economy.
Parts of the arms sale agreement were set into motion under the Obama administration, but Trump took credit for the final product.
“That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States. Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs,” he told reporters later.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the arms deal “lowers the demands on our own military, but it also lowers the cost to the American people of providing security in this region.”
The two leaders also issued what they called a “Joint Strategic Vision Declaration” that each side cast as a major step forward in the seven decades of bilateral relations.
White House officials have alternately been eagerly awaiting the trip and gritting their teeth over its potential pitfalls.
No modern president has attempted such an ambitious debut on the world stage, and Trump’s itinerary — which also includes a two-day visit to Israel, an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican and participation in NATO and G7 summits in Brussels and Sicily — is being carefully choreographed to present Trump as a confident commander in chief.
But Trump’s May 9 firing of FBI Director James Comey set off fast-moving developments that turned questions over Russian meddling in the 2016 election and Moscow’s potential influence with key Trump aides into a fullblown crisis.
It was from aboard Air Force One that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer responded to a report in The New York Times that Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office that his decision to fire Comey — whom he described as “crazy, a real nut job” — had relieved “great pressure” on him over the Russia investigation. . The Comey drama has distracted both the president and some of his top aides as they were meant to be ramping up preparation for the trip.
“As anyone who’s been involved with any of these trips knows, it’s all hands on deck — especially if you have multiple different stops where multiple different agenda topics need to come up,” said Richard Nephew, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the State Department under the Bush and Obama administrations and on Obama’s National Security Council.
“There are lots of pitfalls here, starting with the fact that this administration has been, for obvious reasons, pretty distracted.”
But James Carafano, a foreign policy and national security analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation who advised the president during the campaign and his transition, said a successful trip could be just what the administration needs.
“The great thing about a foreign trip is, to a great extent, you can stage manage it a lot more,” he said. “It does allow the president to detach a little bit from the heated political debate here in the United States.”