Ultimate deal? It was worth $110bn, and with Saudis

EVEN FOR a leader whose propensity for dramatic and unexplained policy U-turns is without precedent in modern American politics, President Donald Trump’s brazen reassessment of Saudi Arabia this weekend was breathtaking.

During the election campaign, he had scorned his opponent Hillary Clinton for accepting a donation from the Saudi royals, often reminded the American people that Saudi Arabia produced most of the September 11 hijackers, and accused the royals of funding Daesh and Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

Yet there he was in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, giving a speech that could have been written for Mrs Clinton.

Gone was the talk of human rights abuses and the fanatical Wahhabi ideology that the kingdom’s religious establishment, at the behest of their princely paymasters, promotes at home and throughout the Muslim world.

Instead, Saudi Arabia was transformed into an indispensable US ally — and, bizarrely, hailed as a progressive leader of the Islamic world that will take the lead along with the US in the fight against Islamist terrorism.

This volte-face has been explained in the context of the biggest ever arms deal between the US and Saudi Arabia, secured by Mr Trump before setting off for Riyadh. Worth a staggering $400 billion over 10 years, it will give the US economy a much-needed boost.

More crucial, though, was that Mr Trump had agreed to the deal on the condition that an additional $200 billion of direct Saudi economic investment would be concentrated in key swing states in the rust belt — home to his most ardent supporters and which he must win to be reelected in 2020.

Having thus shrewdly secured the biggest campaign contribution in US history, Mr Trump was also able to deflect attention from his flip-flopping on Saudi Arabia by hardening his consistently critical stance on Iran.

And that was music to the ears of Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is adopting a characteristically pragmatic position as he surveys the Middle Eastern geopolitical landscape.

Having established unprecedented (if unofficial) intelligence ties with the Wahhabi kingdom in the face of their own shared hatred of Iran, last week the Wall Street Journal reported that moves were quietly under way to establish official diplomatic ties between the two countries. Not, of course, that Mr Netanyahu will be taking anything for granted when it comes to the Saudis.

For a start, no one in their right mind could envisage Saudi Arabia as a competent military ally. Last time the House of Saud embarked on a massive spending spree, in the 1980s, much of the aircraft and military hardware delivered by Western powers was left to rust in abandoned bases.

Worse, the last time Washington ushered in such a dramatic military and political reset in the Middle East was in 1974, when the Shah of Iran was elevated as the leader of a Westernaligned Muslim world just as Saudi’s King Salman is being hailed now.

Since what goes around comes around with depressing frequency in the Middle East, only a fool would not have at the forefront of his mind what happened in Iran just five years later.

John R Bradley’s books include ‘Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis’