Premature Celebration? Saudi and UAE Leaders Too Optimistic About Trump

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By Kevin Barrett, for Crescent International

When news broke that Donald Trump had been selected President—not by the voters, but by America’s billionaire oligarchs and their black box voting machines—Saudi and Emirati leaders emitted congratulatory yelps and yaps. According to Middle East Eye, “Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and his son, de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, sent cables to Trump hailing the ‘close relations between the two friendly countries and peoples, which everyone seeks to strengthen and develop in all fields.’”

Not to be outdone, UAE President Mohamed Bin Zayed tweeted to “extend my sincere congratulations to @realDonaldTrump on his election as 47th President of the United States and @JDVance on his election as Vice President. In building upon over five decades of strategic bilateral cooperation, the UAE and US are united by our enduring partnership based on shared ambitions for progress…”

Most observers think the blathering Saudi and Emirati leaders were sincere—if the word sincere can apply to such people—in their preference for Trump over Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Trump is their kind of guy: a corrupt, nepotistic, shrewd but not-especially-bright wheeler-dealer bereft of morality and ethics. What’s more, he’s their guy. Trump has engaged in dubious business dealings with both royal houses, and they undoubted have something on him, though perhaps less than Jeffrey Epstein had.

What’s more, Trump’s Kosher Nostra princeling son-in-law, the ultra-zionist Jared Kushner, supposedly has some sort of personal friendship with MBS that greases the wheels of their multi-billion-dollar deals. Indeed, Democrats have accused Kushner of being an unregistered agent of Saudi Arabia. (That he is an unregistered agent of Israel goes without saying.)

So Bin Salman and Bin Zayed appear to be joyously welcoming Trump’s impending return to the White House, believing that it will give them an edge in regional power games, and possibly even magically solve West Asia’s many problems, the biggest of which is the zionist genocide of Palestine. Such optimism, however, is misguided.

The Gulf autocrats’ views of Trump are colored by their corrupt business relationships with him. MBS and MBZ may be congenitally incapable of forming clear-eyed evaluations of what Trump and his regime, fronting for the zionist-occupied American deep state, have planned for the region.

Kushner, Trump’s closest advisor on West Asian affairs, is an unsophisticated and unreflective zionist. Kushner’s ultra-zionism, formed by his upbringing in an American Jewish organized crime family, makes him defer to Netanyahu—who in turn defers to the likes of Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Both openly call for the complete genocide of Palestinians, the demolition of Majid al-Aqsa, and the eventual establishment of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Even if those goals were acceptable to MBS and MBZ, their people would never allow them to be complicit in crimes against humanity on such a grand scale. So there is a fundamental clash of interests between the Trump camp, which is owned by Netanyahu and his extremist backers, and the Saudi and Emirati states.

During Trump’s first term, MBS and MBZ made the fatal mistake of misreading Trump and embracing what they took to be his agenda: “killing the zionist extremists with kindness.” According to that model, if Arab nations proffered a path to peace and normal relations with the zionist entity, the zionists would scale back their genocidal and expansionist designs, and finally accept the sine qua non of a fully independent Palestinian state based on zionist withdrawal from all lands stolen in 1967.

If Trump were really in charge of his regime, and advised by well-informed realists, such a peace plan might actually have a chance. Trump is a narcissist who would love to go down in history as the president who brought peace to West Asia. But what MBS and MBZ don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, is that Trump is owned by ultra-zionists, starting with his own son-in-law. The chances that Trump will do what would be necessary to forge a durable peace—order the Israelis to relinquish their ill-gotten 1967 gains, including Jerusalem al-Quds—are not slim-to-none, they are just plain none.

So the whole “normalization” scenario, like its Camp David accords predecessor, is a sucker’s game. The genocidal Israeli swindlers are playing the Americans (and naïve Arabs including Palestinians) for gullible fools.

Indeed, it was MBZ and MBS’s foolishness in believing Kushner’s vague bromides about peace that caused the current war. Had Trump and Kushner not forced abnormalization down the throats of regional leaders—or had those leaders been wise enough to refuse the poisoned “medicine”—the regional Resistance would not have been driven to launch the October 7 2023 raid which the Israelis have used as an excuse for genocide.

Will the Saudi and Emirati leaders make the same mistake again? Will they fall for deceptive American promises uttered by Trump’s ultra-zionists?

Perhaps not. It may be that MBS and MBZ have finally learned their lesson. Indeed, there is some reason for optimism. Back in 2016, the Gulf Sheikhdoms were still falling hook-line-and-sinker for the zio-Americans’ divide-and-conquer strategy. But today they are stepping outside the western imperial orbit to mend fences with the Axis of Resistance. The BBC reported after Trump’s victory:

Brokered by China, Saudi Arabia and Iran have agreed to put aside their differences ending seven years of hostility characterised most visibly by the war in Yemen, where the Saudi air force bombed Iran-backed Houthi rebels. On Sunday (November 10) Saudi Arabia’s military chief flew to Tehran to meet his Iranian counterpart, with both countries now talking about deepening their co-operation on defence and security.

Obviously the BBC, representing the British establishment, is not especially enthusiastic about the emerging regional anti-zionist consensus. One observer whois optimistic is Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher and advocate of global multipolarity. In his November 21 al-Majalla article “Riyadh Summit could yet shape the dynamics of a multipolar world” Dugin writes:

What transpired at the unexpected Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh on 11 November 2024 could mark a historical turning point. If developments continue along this path, it may later be understood as the beginning of a pole formation in a multipolar world. At the summit, which placed the Palestinian cause front and centre, the presence of two long-standing foes—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—was telling. Not long ago it would have been unthinkable for these two men to appear in the same forum. Also there was Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref who met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after.

In the wake of the ongoing zionist genocide of Gaza and war crimes against the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, it has become obvious to everyone in West Asia that the zionists are not rational actors. Rather, they are millenarian-messianic maniacs—criminally insane gangsters who must be dissuaded, and finally disbanded, at gunpoint.

What this means is that the Axis of Resistance has won its argument with the appeasers. Today, everyone recognizes that the Resistance was right all along: The zionists and their American backers are non-agreement-capable, as the fruits of Camp David and abnormalization have conclusively demonstrated. Palestine will be liberated, and fever dreams of “Greater Israel” put to bed, not by negotiation, but by force majeure.

And it may not even take all that much force. Zionist settler colonialists, like their Euro-Algerian counterparts circa 1960 only more so, will flee like proverbial rats from a sinking ship as soon as their insecurity level becomes intolerable. Being spoiled cowards at heart, whose only military talent is for mass-murdering tens of thousands of women and children and raping helpless prisoners to death, the zionists are incapable of enduring even a fraction of the suffering they have heaped on their Palestinian and Lebanese victims. The minute the real prospect of such suffering looms, they will flee to greener pastures.

There is now a consensus in the region, and indeed in the whole Global South, that the zionists need to be defeated and sent home. New military technologies are making it ever-easier for even non-state actors to raise the level of insecurity in Occupied Palestine to levels that zionists—especially educated, economically productive ones—cannot tolerate.

So the bad news is that whatever approach MBS and MBZ take to the incoming Trump regime’s nonsensical deceptions, the outcome will be continued war. The good news is that the war will eventually be won, the zionists will go home, and (insha’Allah) a united Muslim Ummah will form a central pole of an emerging multipolar civilization.