Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Al-Jazeera reports on the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to the White House.
One US goal for the meeting was to induct Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, which Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Kazakhstan have joined, recognizing Israel in return for US economic and security pledges or other quid pro quos, in such a way as to throw the Palestinians under the bus. Some believe the Abraham Accords led to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, the leaders of which feared being permanently sidelined.
Bin Salman politely declined the invitation, saying he could only sign on to the accords if a firm pathway to statehood for the Palestinians were established. Since the Israeli government is dead set against any Palestinian state, insisting the Palestinians remain serfs without rights forever, Bin Salman is excusing himself from the entire affair. He has previously expressed fears of being assassinated if he signed the accords while the Israelis were actively genociding the Palestinians.
Trump nevertheless proclaimed his friendship for Bin Salman and praised him for having pledged $600 billion in Saudi investments in the United States over four years. Bin Salman then promised to nearly double it to $1 trillion.
Or by check:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
Like most things in Trumpworld these investment figures are pure fantasies, and it is disturbing that he is apparently making geopolitical policy on this basis. After the meeting, Trump elevated Saudi Arabia to the status of major non-NATO ally.
Even the Gulf-funded think tank in Washington, DC, The Arab Gulf States Institute or AGSI, found the initial $600 billion investment commitment implausible, much less $1 trillion. Analyst Tim Callen showed that these astronomical sums are vast exaggerations.
Saudi Arabia typically imports about $100 billion of US goods every 4 years, or about $25 billion a year. Saudi investments in US securities and other financial instruments could be as much as $770 billion, but it could also be half that. It is impossible to know for sure because many investments may be made through third parties like the Turks and Caicos islands and other secretive banking sites. How likely is it that these investments will rise by hundreds of billions of dollars in 4 years?
Callen wrote,
- “The scale of the $600 billion commitment needs to be put in context. The $150 billion per year average this implies is equivalent to 14% of Saudi Arabia’s annual gross domestic product, 40% of its annual export revenue, and just over 50% of its annual imports of goods and services. For context, 9% of Saudi Arabia’s goods imports so far in 2024 have come from the United States compared to 23% from China.”
Tens of billions of arms sales are planned, of course, and the manufacture of gpu chips for large language models (“Artificial Intelligence”) could also result in tens of billions of investments, with US firms such as Nvidia profiting. These investments, however, won’t come to a trillion dollars by 2029.
Trump agreed at Tuesday’s meeting to sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to the Kingdom. They cost as much as $109 million per plane. It is a controversial offer, because that plane, for all its faults, is the most advanced in the US arsenal and until now has not been offered to any Middle Eastern countries except Israel. Several NATO countries have bought it, as have Japan, South Korea and Australia.
Never miss an issue of Informed Comment: Click here to subscribe to our email newsletter! Social media will pretend to let you subscribe but then use algorithms to suppress the postings and show you their ads instead. And please, if you see an essay you like, paste it into an email and share with friends.
Israel has a doctrine that it should always outstrip other countries in the region in its access to the highest-tech US weaponry. For Saudi Arabia to level the playing field by also having F-35s violates this doctrine. Trump, however, is unfazed by the strategic calculations of the Israelis. He seemed to put the US relationship with Saudi Arabia on the same level as that with Israel, saying they were both friends. No one in Tel Aviv wanted to hear that.
It reminds me of the time in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan fought the AIPAC-oriented Congress to provide the Saudis with AWACs (Airborne Warning and Control System surveillance planes) at a time when the Saudis were key to opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Israel lobbies don’t always get their way.
File Photo: President Donald Trump speaks with Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, during their meeting Tuesday, March 14, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.) Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons
Some security analysts are afraid that if the Saudis get F-35s, their close relations with China will enable Chinese intelligence to discover its technological secrets, though since so many such analysts in the US are close to the Israel lobbies, it is hard to know whether their discomfort with this sale is genuinely owing to apprehensions about China or if it derives from a desire to sink the deal lest Israel lose its military superiority over Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis became alarmed about Israeli aggressiveness when it bombed Qatar on September 9, 2025, and they signed a mutual security pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan in the aftermath.
Bin Salman’s visit to Washington very much comes under the shadow of that Israeli assault on one of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates), which showed that the US was not a wholly reliable security partner — or Washington would have told Israel that no, it can’t bomb Qatar.
The Saudi response has been twofold. One is to cozy up even more to the United States, attempting to make security for itself also essential to American security. The other is to diversify Riyadh’s alliances, tightening ties with Pakistan and India.
The implausible investments Bin Salman pledged to Trump are part of the first strategy. Even if they don’t invest $1 trillion, they will invest many billions, and Trump likes the sound of that.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved