Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2025

Trump travels to Arabia and proclaims his vision:

My peace I give unto you –
“Let’s make a deal!”

In early May, Donald J. Trump had to deliver the sad news to billions of Christians that he is unfortunately not eligible to be a candidate for the vacant position of Catholic representative of God on Earth, even though, as he insists, he himself would be “my number one choice” on the ballot in the Vatican. Immediately afterward, in mid-May, he travels to the predominantly Muslim Middle East, and for the millions of powerless and poor inhabitants of this region, as well as the select few who are powerful and very, very rich, he has better news, indeed a veritable gospel message: He announces – again with repeated invocations of God – a fundamentally new American policy in and toward the region that will bring peace, joy, and prosperity to all. It is not certain that he will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for this, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because he himself has been publicly proclaiming his conviction since 2016 that he definitely deserves it. This reduces the official award ceremony to a mere formality, and whether this trophy will actually at some point get the chance to have the honor of being presented to Trump is therefore irrelevant.

In contrast, what is decisive for real global events, namely those of commerce and war, and already having a practical effect, is his geopolitical standpoint, which is presented during this trip in his typical manner – everything always directly in relation to himself as a person – and becomes clear enough in this very way: the now official view since his re-election as to what ails this region of the world and what it needs instead, namely what America wants from it and will from now on take. This is the guideline for his revision, tackled with all the power of his powerful office, of the American approach to the more or less significant actors in this region, which he has already had to lament on several occasions for the fact that the entire situation there is as “miserable” as it is widely known to be: characterized by disastrous interstate and intrastate wars, terrorism, and immense suffering from Gaza to Yemen. All of this, he promises, will now fundamentally change, meaning: he will now change it. Because he not only knows where the whole unnecessary mess comes from, but above all knows what the necessary means are and who the appropriate contacts are to clear it up.

With regard to the latter, the first interesting thing about this trip is where it does not take Trump: to Israel and its leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who – endowed with the official rank of “my friend Bibi” – is one of his many buddies in the circle of foreign state leaders.

1. Trump’s position on Israel and its Netanyahu:
a unique ally who the new America no longer allows itself to be bound to

It’s by no means the case that Israel plays a less significant role for the USA under Trump than before. The small but powerful Jewish state has secured itself a prominent place in the Middle East policy agenda of the new US presidency, primarily through its two major violent campaigns: its ongoing war of annihilation against the Gaza Strip and its coming war and quasi-war against Iran.

Trump urges a speedy hand over of Gaza’s Hamas-purged real estate by Israel

Trump wants to see the Gaza war ended, as is well known: quickly and definitively, preferably by highlighting the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants – “The way those people are treated in Gaza, there's not a place in the world where people are treated so badly. It's horrible” – something he has never hesitated to emphasize, unlike some of his values-oriented European colleagues. All the same, Trump doesn’t make any waves with the usual platitudes of previous US presidents, such as that a real guarantee for a lasting peace on this tract of land can only be obtained by doing justice to the Palestinians and granting them the right to their own state. Some see this as a contradiction, others as proof that he isn’t serious about his peace imperative after all. For Trump, the two go together seamlessly and without contradiction. He looks at the showdown between Israel and Hamas strictly in terms of what might make it worthwhile for America. And in this regard he finds – nothing. He is not interested in the irreconcilable nature of the two opposing wills to found a state, or is only interested in it in the form of the consequences of an unending cycle of violence he can’t see any utility in.

It is precisely this view that provides him with the perspective for a solution. He does not see America’s role as that of a broker of a peace process, followed by a compromise between two irreconcilably opposing claims to political sovereignty over the Holy Land or parts of it – these legal claims are, after all, none of his business. He does not want to manage this conflict by forcing it under an order established by America and recognized by all sides involved and everyone else; one in which, on the one hand, all sides, which are obliged to coexist, must come to an arrangement in which, however, on the other hand, all the mutually hostile state founders can see themselves politically justified and morally legitimized to the extent granted to them in each case and in which their claims to existence as sovereigns over land and peoples can be guaranteed by international law and its authorities.

Trump is not into things like international law and its institutions, including in relation to the Middle East. Conversely, he considers the principle of organizing and operating American dominance over the region, and American access to it, through America’s service to the rights of third parties to be the crucial mistake of America’s previous Middle East policy, which has left the region in a state he deems utterly useless. His fundamental revision consists of making the sole guideline of American interests in dominance for the purpose of exploitation the sole guideline for his actions with regard to the endless and unpleasant ongoing conflict – and it is precisely this standard, applied equally to all actors on the ground, that tells him what decisive differences between them he has to take into account as a wise president who always acts in America’s interests.

Under Trump, the USA is very pleased with its traditional ally Israel under its long-time prime minister Netanyahu, and for good reason. The first and most important thing that impresses the president of the world power and commander-in-chief of the largest military force on the globe and in history – “Nobody's even close” – is the sheer successful violence that Israel has always demonstrated, and continues to demonstrate, in dealing with its enemies. And this is by no means a personal quirk of Trump’s, but rather gets to the point of every violent conflict: the real and the good reasons referred to in each case for military attacks are only worth as much as the latter is thought to lead to victory and forcibly lays down the law, which is always that of the victor, for the defeated enemy and all the other powers. Trump liberates this principle for his America from all the practical minutiae of a relationship between America’s unique power and a supposedly even higher international law that it merely serves; he therefore dispenses with the usual moral hypocrisies that accompany this imperialist principle of order – and from the perspective of the unassailably superior power holder, he also concedes that Netanyahu’s Israel has the same view. Israel’s total superiority over its Palestinian adversaries qualifies Israel’s leader to be taken seriously by Trump. And insofar as Trump recognizes Israeli violence as useful for America, the international friendship with this state and the presidential friendship with its leader are in principle sealed.[1] The latter equation holds even more true – and here too Netanyahu has what it takes – the more the personal will of Trump’s statesmanlike counterpart actually and unconditionally represents, because he determines, the policy of the state he leads in whatever formal office. What Trump finds so pleasing about the state of Israel in this respect is that the statesman Netanyahu, even with regard to his rule over his beloved Israeli citizens, whose protector he is, and in the democratic power struggle against his political rivals, knows and puts into practice one crucial thing: that success also depends on internal success, namely on clearly superior leadership or on followers who act without question.

To this end, Netanyahu uses all the methods that democracy also makes available in Israel as the perfect form of a capitalistically functioning, outwardly ambitious imperialist rule. And because he never loses sight of this relationship between the aims of rule and the methods of democracy, he is also flexible enough to declare the obsolescence of institutions and procedures that have been enshrined within Israel’s democratic state organization when they do not suit the aims he represents – the primary aim being, of course, to secure and expand the freedom of his own power. This too is what makes him such a suitable partner for Trump for any deal he might offer, and nothing could be further from the US president’s mind than reproaching his smaller counterpart in Israel – as the Biden administration was known to have done – with accusations regarding the democratic rule of law and the separation of powers in order to make compliance on these issues a measure of his subservience to the USA. Trump simply assumes the latter – this is the third thing he likes about Israel, as he sees it: he views Israel’s total dependence on US support, given the ongoing and constantly escalating violent conflicts, especially with regard to the devastating campaign of violence against the Gaza Strip, as the crucial guarantee that Israel, with its enormous resources, will in principle keep an eye on America’s interests and advance them.

The downside, of course, is that Trump measures Israel and the alliance with it solely by this standard, including in relation to the Gaza war, which Israel, in relation to the rest of the world and, first and foremost, to the USA, portrays as a battle for its very existence, thus obligating its great, indispensable ally to unconditionally side with it. This is precisely what Trump’s America can no longer do. This does not mean that the USA will withdraw or even practically restrict its ongoing, essential weapons aid to Israel, at least not at the moment; on the contrary: as soon as he took office, Trump lifted all the restrictions on arms deliveries to Israel, which weren’t crucial for the war anyway, that had been imposed by the Biden administration. He simply has no use for its ploy of connecting the duty to protect the Israeli ally, which it recognized and treated as such, with such carefully dosed restrictions of necessary supplies in order to thereby wrest respect for America’s overriding claims to order by interfering in the methods of the war of annihilation against Hamas, which it permitted in principle. There is no room for this in Trump’s policy for two reasons: since he doesn’t take Israel’s campaign against Hamas as an exercise of its right to wage war in the course of legitimate self-defense, a right that is recognized by all states, but simply as the means to ultimately eliminate a violent enemy, he does not really care about questions of law while waging war, and he definitely doesn’t measure the respect that Israel owes to the USA by its compliance or non-compliance with the Hague Convention on the Law of War. Conversely, Trump has no need to compare a diagnosed insubordination of the smaller Israeli partner toward the larger American partner, which is tied to questions about the laws of war, with the nevertheless still recognized duty to protect, because he no longer recognizes the latter either. America is helping Israel in this war because, and to the extent that, there is a congruence of interests in combatting Hamas, which Trump has earmarked for elimination from world history, not least in view of its sponsor Iran. Nothing less, nothing more.

And that includes Trump’s desire to finally see an end to the war so that America’s interests can come into play, which he believes Hamas has so thoroughly disrupted that it has qualified for total annihilation. This constitutes the point of disagreement with Israel, whose war is designed to be endless due to the nature of its aims and reasons. The rage of a final battle for survival that must not be ended before its time is not simply a matter of excessive morality on the Israeli side, but rather the mercilessly practiced ethos of a war on the Palestinians, the imperialist dimension of which Israel’s leader himself publicly acknowledges when he speaks of the prospect of a complete reshaping of the region through this war, which has long since ceased to be confined to Gaza.[2]

This is completely at odds with Trump’s ambition to finally open up the region to America in a new way, without the expense of the violent conflicts he considers useless and even harmful. With regard to his ally Israel, he rejects anything that even looks like Israel is dragging America into old and new wars, which it starts on its own initiative and then relies on America to bring to a successful conclusion. In doing so, he fundamentally rejects the basis for Israel’s superior use of force against all opponents: that Israel autonomously initiates and carries out hostilities and, in so doing, practically forces the USA, by invoking its dependence on Israel, to allow it to dictate its own hostilities in the region because the USA is reliant on Israel’s continued existence and success for the sake of its own superior presence in the region. So Trump, for all America’s superiority within this alliance, is simply ignoring the contradiction built into it. He doesn’t care that this doesn’t get rid of the problem for Israel, as long as his agenda makes progress; and in any case, he has no inhibitions about issuing a few clear rejections to this state in the middle of the ongoing war and in view of its recent escalation by Israel: For the first time ever, representatives of an American administration have begun negotiations with Hamas without involving Israel, or even consulting it beforehand, in order to free the last hostage with American citizenship from Hamas. And after he has already omitted Israel from his trip to the Middle East – a fact carefully noted in Israel – his vice president cancels his planned trip to Israel on the grounds that he wants to avoid any impression that Israel can continue to count on American support for the new offensive in the Gaza Strip, which is launched against America’s wishes.

And the Palestinians?

On the one hand, Trump has a lot of sympathy for them; in particular, he pities them for October 7, 2023, the consequences of which they are now paying for and which would never have happened if he ... But he also has a nice perspective to offer: a future without Hamas, but with a huge real estate boom. In this, too, Trump remains true to himself.

He can’t do anything with the Palestinians’ right to their own state – for America. This is primarily because Israel’s superior military power has been working for decades to undermine any practical basis for realizing this right. For Trump, the instrumentalist equation that violence must also pay off for America in the Middle East translates seamlessly into the realism that using American power for a state-founding project that Israel dooms to failure is not worth it; the address ‘Palestine’ has thus been officially removed from the global register of state partners for the assertion of American interests. In this context, Trump accuses his predecessors of wasting American power for decades on artificially prolonging a completely unrealistic legal claim, thereby keeping its Palestinian protagonists trapped in a harebrained scheme and imprisoning the masses of poor Palestinians in what he described in his first term as a “cycle of terrorism, poverty, and violence.” This is also the essence of Trump’s classification of Hamas as a terrorist gang: he avoids the morally high-minded stupidity, so prevalent in Germany, of attributing Hamas’s violence and its victims to entirely gratuitous, evil purposes; he has no qualms about seeing the “atrocities of October 7th” as a means “for political ends” in which he finds and condemns only one significant thing: the utter futility of realizing them. He can express this by pointing to the bright future for the Palestinians that Hamas is denying them, but preferably by asserting that with him as president, the totally outmatched terrorist leaders would never have embarked on the adventure they will not survive.[3]

Trump simply takes this logic a few steps further, and that gives him the wonderful idea that the best way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its usefulness for America, is for America to appropriate the territorially defined bone of contention directly and literally, rather than mediating it through political guidelines for other actors on the ground: “We'll own it.” And that it will get rid of the economically ruined Gazan Palestinians, who are useless for anything foreseeable and therefore, following all capitalist logic, have no foreseeable life prospects even after the advent of a lasting peace, and relocate somewhere else where they will have room and can seek and find the means for “a much better future,” which Trump, in a completely noncommittal way, envisages being provided by a few friendly powers. That his plan is met with enthusiastic approval in Israel because it at least puts up for discussion the decisive date at which any progress toward Israel’s one-state solution for the Holy Land has thus far had to be oriented; that he is enthusiastically celebrated as the best Zionist of all time by those Israelis who now have the upper hand with their view that their divine right to the entire Holy Land has no eastern border at the Jordan River, no northern border in the Galilee, and certainly no gap in its southwest; that visions of a Greater Israel are now circulating that include Damascus, most of Jordan, and a small corner of Saudi Arabia: none of this matters to Trump – after all, he knows what its about for him and he doesn’t intend his Gaza plan to be a homage to Israel’s Zionism – in whatever version – nor will he allow himself to be bound to anything by Israel in this respect either. Accordingly, Trump is free to stand by his plan: he does not withdraw it after it becomes clear that none of the Arab states he has approached are willing to agree to such a solution; but he does not commit himself, i.e. the power of America, to implementing this plan with the prospect of potentially triggering the next major multi-front conflict; what this idea is about is simply too important to him: America’s freedom to pursue its interests in and around this region. Everyone has to get used to this, including “my friend Bibi” and his Israel.

The same applies to the second major issue in the American-Israeli relationship – the war-fraught opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Trump is urging Iran to sign the surrender deal soon

Trump definitely wants to deny Iran ‘access to the bomb’, something he shares with all his predecessors in the office of US President. They have always seen the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons as an unacceptable threat to the USA. Not in the sense that their sacred American land would be vulnerable to Iranian nuclear weapons, but in the sense that it would relativize their discretion to preside over relations of sovereignty and violence in the region, including America’s freedom to deal with this declared opponent of America’s global and regional hegemony, which ultimately also makes itself felt below the nuclear threshold in the form of its regionally-scaled, defensive struggle against American bullying, waged with its own and allied fighters. This American claim guarantees a very high degree of congruence with Israel’s claim that there can be no second nuclear power besides itself in the region, and certainly not the Shiite republic, which Israel is fighting with its claims to territorial and regional power as the epitome and satrap of Western-American oppression of indigenous peoples. For both powers, Iran is the last decisive obstacle to what they want from the region. This is also the crucial difference that Trump makes no secret of.

He wants to force Iran to face the alternative of either agreeing to a deal that meets his need for a guarantee that will prevent Iran from arming itself with nukes for all eternity, or it will have to face the certainty that Trump will destroy anything his military experts identify as part of the existing or future Iranian nuclear program. He leaves no doubt about the relationship between the two options: He repeatedly emphasizes that he is raising such a massive and credible threat of destruction in order to spare America from carrying it out and to drive Iran’s leadership into abandoning its nuclear program – or the parts of it that he has defined as intolerable – with the double weapon of sanctions and the threat of war. To this end, he also refers to and invokes Israel’s willingness to go to war, which, for different reasons than the US, is alarmed by Iran and its nuclear potential.

Israel now sees itself confronted with Trump’s rejection of anything he perceives as an attempt to instrumentalize the USA for Israel’s rise to a regional superpower status, unfettered by its last real rival. His intransigence applies – exclusively – to Iran’s nuclear program, insofar as he perceives it to be an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, and to Iran’s strategy of using its own weapons and allies in the region to wage a militarily asymmetrical, defensive war against its encirclement by the US and against Israeli attacks. Beyond that, Trump no longer sees the US as having a duty to guarantee Israel a strategic victory over its regional rivals or even the strategic distance from them that Israel defines as necessary. This also applies to relations with Iran. Israel must acknowledge that Trump wants to bring America’s hostility to Iran to a victorious end, with emphasis on “victorious” and “end.” In his capacity as a real estate mogul, he is certain that Iran will ultimately have no choice but to back down, given the contrast between the skyscrapers in Riyadh and Dubai and the buildings in Tehran which, according to his information, are in danger of collapsing.[4] And in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the US dollar and military power, he knows that, if necessary, he has all the means at his disposal to inflict a level of damage on the stubborn Tehran leadership that it can’t possibly want with sanctions – “maximum pressure” – and with constant Israeli threats of war in the background, which American military power freely calculates with and is calculable for nobody else.[5]

The mullahs must and will figure out that sticking to their nuclear program against America is not worth it for them – Trump attributes that much Trump-logic to his latest opponents. Regime change is therefore not his thing. He is only interested in the internal balance of power in Iran in the sense that they have to guarantee that his deals with the power holders there are and remain effective. If he has something programmatic to accuse the mullahs of, then it is what he perceives as a violation of the job of any decent, people-loving government: “Iran’s leaders have focused on stealing their people’s wealth to fund terror and bloodshed abroad.” Squandering the people’s and nation’s money purely on ideological grounds to finance kindred spirits who do not bring any benefits that can be counted in money, but only stage death and devilry – what a people-hating crock! This is the insight that Trump demands from the mullahs, and he believes they are capable of: What else could they want than to make Iran into, as Trump puts it, a “wonderful, safe, great country?”! He seriously means it when he offers, from Riyadh, to bury the 45-year-old enmity on his terms – “they cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Just how serious is apparent in regards to and/or on behalf of Israel, in that Trump – as had happened with Hamas – seriously denies Israel the privilege of having a say and being allowed to draw Israeli red lines in his negotiations with Iran.

Israel has to put up with this leveling, whatever practical conclusions its leadership draws from it. In the meantime, it can witness which states and what kinds of leaders Trump is so satisfied with in this part of the world that he is willing to keep Israel on the sidelines in his deals with them for the sake of a shared rosy future.

2. Trump’s position on the Saudi kingdom and its prince regent:
a reliable partner who knows, wants, and has what matters to America

The same couple of maxims that Trump puts into practice in accordance with his redefinition of the connection that is to be guaranteed between the global development of American power and American benefit in relation to Israel, he also follows in relation to the rich oil states in the Gulf. Trump has hinted that the Gulf may soon be given the same name in official US toponymy that it already has among Trump’s new best friends. In his egalitarian view of the whole world, they are currently doing almost everything right, especially the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman: they are the perfect partners for his vision of peace.

Firstly, they possess an abundance of what matters most to Trump as a businessman and as president of every American: wealth in the form of dollars. One can do business with them, and they have deals to make in the trillions of dollars: they bring Boeing the largest civilian business deal of all time, they spend trillions as buyers from the American arms industry, etc. While Trump has to wage a tariff war on the rest of the world in order to turn the criminally negative trade balance into a positive one, or at least to collect an appropriate tribute for the fact that falsely named ‘partners’ and avowed rivals are enriching themselves on the American dollar market, the Arab princes, sheikhs, and kings are participating in the global dollar economy in an exemplary way, just as Trump imagines it should function: most of the money they earn on the fossil fuel market no longer comes from the US,[6] but from other countries. But it is still American dollars that they earn from them, and in doing so they contribute significantly to the dollar being the number one global trading currency and likely remaining so.[7] And last but not least, they spend a lot of that good American money where it belongs, namely in the USA. In this respect, Donald Trump can already note that the petrodollar monarchies are doing a lot more right today than in the days of the so-called “dollar recycling” of late lamented memory, when they still earned most of their dollars from American motorists and had to be taught with rapid deployment forces and other measures that their role as the gas station of American-Western capitalism obliged them to behave in a pro-American manner in every conceivable way.

Secondly, in contrast to the leaders of other oil states who go astray – in some cases with Islamism, in some cases with socialism – these Arab leaders, headed by Prince MbS, know that earned dollar wealth ultimately and sensibly is there for only one thing, namely its “proper use for economic development”: to be invested so that it multiplies. What Trump is actually referring to in his various effusive praises, which violate every Arab-Islamic custom, for the “great guy” MbS and his wonderful country are the results to date of the new program that the prince has decreed to his realm and which, in one respect, is nothing special: As Trump repeatedly affirms, he has grasped that the crucial thing is to use the money earned from oil and gas to turn the entire country into one big money-making machine, a branch of the international dollar economy that dedicates everything the country already has to offer and everything it acquires to one purpose: capitalistic money multiplication. And specifically by inviting international finance capital, which itself consists of dollar credits, to finance this new initiative by making it the source of its own enrichment. Here too, however, what counts for Trump, namely to the system whose dominance he spearheads, counts here too: the best intentions for enrichment – officially laid out in Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” – are only worth as much as their practical success. He definitely sees this success as already having been achieved, even though it is not yet 2030. As an expert on tall buildings, he attributes this success to the construction boom in Saudi Arabia; as the patron saint and savior of the American “rust belt,” he also can’t see any sign that the Saudi investment offensive is designed to steal American jobs. And when he hears how much American capital, and how many dollars, are invested in Saudi projects in the field of beautiful new future technologies, he knows without a doubt: “This is a big one.”[8] He must admire this, and he does so in the way that he also applies to his country and himself ad nauseum: as admiration for the successful type of guy who partly has all the fun, partly has it all under his control, and who must therefore be the reason why things are going so wonderfully.

Thirdly, he also finds his Arab counterparts pleasingly receptive to the complementary side of national enrichment in international dollar capitalism: investing surplus wealth in foreign markets – or rather, in one specific market: the American market. He is keen on this, and they are ready to put huge sums of dollars on the American capital market, not only as buyers but also as investors, thus helping to finance his program of a new beginning for America.[9] All this ties in wonderfully with investment partnerships on Saudi soil. And both are particularly important in areas that are not only economically significant in the narrower sense, but also strategically important, e.g., chips and AI. Trump has no reservations like those put into practiced by the Biden administration in the form of export restrictions on strategically important goods; he is counting on the resounding success of both sides of the partnership to reliably bind the Saudis to America. And, conversely, they are so far in complete agreement with him on this.

Fourthly, the congenial thing about these nice guys with their funny headscarves and large palaces – “national traditions,” “heritage,” and all that stuff – is that he really only has to deal with them when it comes to making deals and then implementing them. Politically, they have their rich countries with their not very numerous populations pleasingly under complete control. For the chairman of common sense in the world, what until now Western politicians – “Western interventionists or people flying in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs” – have morally excoriated, and in some cases fought in practice, shows itself for what it is: effective autocracy that, in its own way, delivers what’s most important in governing. And what makes things perfect for America is that, for these states, the monarchs’ personal power over national wealth allows the dealmaker Trump to completely eliminate any cumbersome differences between government contacts with whom one negotiates the political conditions for lucrative deals and the commercial contacts with whom the actual deals are concluded – a situation he wouldn’t dare dream of for his America, MAGA or DOGE notwithstanding. In this respect, he is probably at least a little bit sincere in his flattery that the only great country in the world that proves to be even greater than great America is the great Saudi empire of the great MbS.

Fifthly, these great guys have figured out that the national advancement programs they pursue on their own behalf, partly in cooperation and partly in fierce competition with each other, require two things in terms of national power: firstly, a national military force that ensures superiority, but also makes the immediate and wider environment available for this purpose and does not stand in the way with a competing power program or a state collapse. A true national ascent must therefore not be limited to the economic sphere, but must ultimately be strategic in nature. Secondly, this military power must then also concentrate on that and not get bogged down in absurd missions that only harm the important things. Trump accuses these leaders of both, certainly with an eye on their ambitious arms buildup programs and their rather interventionist practices from their own peninsula across the Levant and deep into Africa.[10]

Sixthly, he highly values their programmatic realism, namely that they stick with America in everything that their national ambition dictates in terms of visions, projects, and undertakings. He nonchalantly accepts their willingness to explore alternative alliances, sometimes considering and even pursuing strategic cooperation with Russia or China, because he believes that, on crucial issues, they will ultimately remain committed to the principle that their national ambitions only have a chance alongside America, and only on condition that they do not burden or make demands on America, but rather benefit it. For Trump, large-scale arms deals are the ultimate proof of this – not so much because he sympathizes with the princes’ calculations, but because he can see that these leaders are giving America strategic access to their region in a way that not only comes at no cost, but actually brings in money – and both at the highest level.[11]

Despite all this, Trump is the last person to believe that, for all the unity he celebrates, there are no longer any disagreements or that any dispute between him and his Gulf partners has been resolved once and for all. He knows better than anyone else that he has regularly and quite recently been at loggerheads with the Saudis, the most important power in OPEC; and that this will probably continue to happen in the future – he of course assumes this as a dealmaker who, after all, professionally assumes the selfishness of his commercial and political negotiating partners when he imposes his own on them. But that is precisely why he sees no reason for further ill will on his part, which, as is known from the previous administration, would merely be “ideological.” This also applies to the fact that, in his opinion, the Saudis are a bit too late in joining the Abraham Accords which he brokered, and which Trump ultimately wants to use to seal a peace between the Arab states and Israel that is beneficial to America. He makes the latter point clear enough in the form of a request that they hurry up a bit. But because he thinks his power of persuasion in this regard will eventually be irresistible, this issue in no way dampens his joy at the degree of agreement that these partners have presented to him on all other, currently much more important issues.

The mutual trust could not be greater, so Trump lets himself be given a mixture of requests and advice regarding Syria before leaving Riyadh for the next stop on his Arabian trip: MbS and that “tough guy, very smart” on the Bosphorus, whom he has already publicly credited with Assad’s removal from power as his victory – “it was Turkey that orchestrated the downfall last December of Syria’s former longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad” – introduce him to Ahmad al-Sharaa, whose al-Qaida nickname is al-Golani. As the American learns from the Saudi and the Turk, this man is now the interim president of Syria, a country that has been thoroughly destroyed by American weapons, Saudi dollars, and Turkish intervention. And as such, although he may just be an ugly, smaller version of the type of oriental ruler so beautifully and successfully represented by his two mentors, MbS and Erdoğan, he is their creature, and that is why America’s commander in chief, freed from all blinders, should also assess him to see whether he is the right man for him at the right time in the right place. Trump doesn’t need to be told twice.

3. Trump’s stance on Syria and its interim CEO:
A willing helper in making 14 years of regime change carnage worthwhile for America ex post

Trump is using Syria’s new strongman – so it goes – to demonstrate, with merciless principles, how America, under his leadership, correctly defines (and, if necessary, creates) its global points of contact around the world who are suitable for what it currently wants from them.

The Islamists were swept into power in Damascus by circumstances that Trump did not have much to do with and isn’t much interested in: a kind of lingering effect of the waning Western-Arab ambition to oust the former ruler Assad, combined with the entirely new consequences of Israel’s ongoing war against its enemies in the region, primarily Hezbollah and the Iranian forces and militias located inside Syria. What the new leader has partly created and partly simply inherited is a totally devastated country, the hostility of the Israeli state toward any effective Syrian military force that could even potentially be used against Israel as the backbone of Syrian sovereignty, and the regime of continuous American economic and financial sanctions. What he represents: He is the head of the largest militia in the country. Not exactly a good starting point for becoming a partner for deals with Trump.

But: He is, after all, the one who, after a decade and a half of bloody power struggles in Syria, now resides in the presidential palace and governs from there, insofar as his authority extends; Trump respects this, after his friendly tipsters have pointed it out to him: obviously, a “tough guy” and “fighter” whose jihadist career, including his imprisonment in the American torture prison Abu Ghraib in Iraq, can certainly be considered a “strong past” from this point of view. The fact that he is not yet capable of doing very much is a disadvantage, but the “attractive young man” shows – and Trump acknowledges this after encouragement from his buddies in the Gulf – that he knows how little he can do for the time being, i.e., how little he can afford any old or new enmities, which Trump would find only bothersome.

What’s more: he also makes it clear that he does not intend to leave things as they are, but rather, while avoiding all unnecessary and counterproductive hostilities, wants to turn the pile of rubble he now governs on an interim basis into some kind of reconstruction project, and he leaves no doubt about its capitalist orientation.

Furthermore: he also lets on that he knows that, because he wants to make something different of Syria, he must at the same time and first of all make something different of himself: the external calls to at least make himself more or less the sole holder of military power, to integrate or consistently combat the hodgepodge of guerrilla forces ranging from hostile to allied, certainly find him to be all ears, and can accuse him at most of a lack of success so far from both directions; which, of course, becomes all the more urgent.

However: he draws the only sensible conclusion from all this, namely that – precisely because, judged in terms of force, which is what matters in Trump’s world, he is currently a clownish figure, trying to rule over an economically completely broken country while navigating the conflicting demands of second- to fourth-rate foreign powers – he must stand by the first-rank power and curry favor with its prominent legate of imperialist common sense. This is not yet a done deal, but it is the most important prerequisite for one.

With due appraisal of all this, Trump also accepts al-Sharaa for what the Saudis and Turks are touting him as. And in doing so, he transforms the president, who until now has had to fear that Israel will blow him up in his palace, into something else: just a contact person for deals that benefit America. That – and only that – is what Trump has to contribute to the reconstruction of Syria, and the new guy in Damascus distinguishes himself by offering to do his part even before Trump has to pressure him. Above all: he is not begging America, which has been exploited by the whole world, for help. The costs of reintegrating Syria into world trade and equipping the country with the components needed for an infrastructure and a reasonably functioning apparatus of force are currently being borne by others,[12] and lifting the sanctions costs America nothing, but rather creates business opportunities for American companies. In the best case scenario, this might for a change provide positive proof of how effective US dollars might be when used correctly as an equivalent to a means of coercion and for pacifying an undecided violent situation, if they actually give a bit of civil stability to Syria, which, from the American point of view, is currently good for nothing except destabilizing the Middle East.

So far, the likable Salafist ex-cutthroat has proven to be exactly the kind of counterpart that fits Trump’s new type of imperialist recruitment of the entire world for American power and American wealth and the equation of the two: He has proposed a minerals deal to the US president modeled on the US-Ukrainian agreement, as well as the construction of a Trump Tower in Damascus. No secret is made in Syria about the double benefit calculation: all of this is intended to bring dollars into the country and thus make Syria so attractive for America that foreign powers, in their competing claims to power over this country, will find that the American interests involved are a barrier that can’t be ignored.

A head of government who knows that his rule and economic reconstruction program depend on nothing other than the support of his pro-American sponsors and ultimately on America’s own cost-benefit analysis; who recognizes that an American construction site in the heart of Damascus is the only readily available replacement for lost defenses against the air force of the old enemy and America’s ally Israel, which he simply doesn’t want to cross again; whose somewhat desperately optimistic reconstruction program will be either useful or irrelevant to America, and in any case, free of charge: with such a contact person in Damascus, 14 years of proxy war and 600,000 dead Syrians pay off at least in retrospect. For America – and that’s what matters.

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[1] The necessary clarifications regarding the imperialist basis and content of the unique friendship between the US and Israel, which has grown over decades and has now been inherited by Trump, can be found in the article “’Iron Swords’ and ‘the danger of a regional conflagration’: An emergency for the friendship between the regional and global superpowers” in issue 1-24 of this magazine [untranslated].

[2] The article “The reality of the ‘regional conflagration’: Israel is creating a new Middle East for itself and the world” in GegenStandpunkt 4-24, deals with the imperialist progress of a new and unique kind that the Israeli nation is making with its regional war.

[3] “All civilized people must condemn the October 7th atrocities against Israel, which would never have happened, again, if you had probably a different president, but definitely if you had me as president. The people of Gaza deserve a much better future, but that will or cannot occur as long as their leaders choose to kidnap, torture and target innocent men, women and children for political ends.” (Trump in Riyadh on May 13, 2025)

[4] “While you have been constructing the world's tallest skyscrapers in Jeddah and Dubai, Tehran's 1979 landmarks are collapsing into rubble and dust … Those buildings are largely falling apart, falling down, while you're building some of the world’s biggest and most incredible infrastructure projects, buildings, all sorts of things you're building that nobody's ever even seen before. Iran’s decades of neglect and mismanagement have left the country plagued by rolling blackouts lasting for hours a day.” (Speech in Riyadh)

[5] Trump assumes that Iran has essentially lost its asymmetric military defense, which it is waging through its allies. As he announced, he has indeed allowed the Israeli army to open the “gates of hell” against Iran’s Gaza ally and, on a second front, against Iran’s Lebanese ally. And the US military bombed Iran’s Yemeni ally into a deal in a campaign of destruction unprecedented, at least in Yemen. Here, too, Trump demonstrates his brutal instrumentalism of useful violence in every respect: He does not deny the anti-American Houthis in Yemen a certain respect they deserve for their violence: “They're tough, they're fighters.” Why they are angry with America is largely irrelevant to him: “In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins...I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity and peace.” (Speech in Riyadh) The only thing that interests Trump is the fact that they are becoming a nuisance to the US in and around the Red Sea, and his military is addressing this problem – as it has practically demonstrated – with “overwhelming strength and devastating force.”

[6] US oil imports from Saudi Arabia, for example, have fallen by approximately 85% to 277,000 bpd compared to the record level of 1,730,000 bpd in 2003.

[7] As of the end of last year, which many market observers are paying close attention to for economic and strategic reasons, Saudi Arabia's oil export business with China has seen only isolated cases of China's plan to buy Saudi oil for yuan progress beyond the preparatory talks stage. A market report by Standard & Poor's from the second half of 2024 assesses the situation as follows:

“Recent talks of China paying for Saudi oil in renminbi led to expectations that China’s massive purchases from the kingdom will push more of their oil trade to be denominated in the Chinese currency. S&P Global believes yuan-based oil trade between the two countries face significant challenges, and may take decades to grow to a meaningful scale...”

[8] “The engines of Formula One racing now roar through the streets of Jeddah in a historic milestone other industries recently surpassed – oil. Think of it, all of your other industries now have surpassed oil. I don't know if a lot of people will understand what that means, it's so big … Other industries are now bigger even than oil, which is always going to be a big monster.” (Riyadh speech)

[9] He offered Saudi Arabia’s prince to invest a sum in the US location that corresponds to Saudi Arabia’s annual GDP.

[10] Trump has never been able to find a reason convincing to him for the rivalry between Qatar and the rest of the GCC states, which has since escalated to the brink of war, so he congratulates his Arab friends on having calmed down this nonsense in the meantime.

[11] In this regard, too, Trump no longer allows Israel to dictate policy: he has effectively abolished the veto right that the US had previously granted its Israeli ally, in some cases even formally, when it came to America’s strategic cooperation with Israel’s new regional rivals in the Gulf – primarily on arms issues, but also on civilian nuclear power.

[12] The wealthy Arab monarchies, for example, are keen to take over Syria’s liabilities in the IMF.