Is Trump's Middle East ATM Short on Cash?

Trump returns from the Gulf with a number of TBDs

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

President Trump is set to return today from the Middle East, a region that he sees as an ATM machine, boasting that he scored nearly $4 trillion in deals between the three Gulf nations that he visited—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. On the Boeing deal alone, he claimed that he secured $200 billion, but the White House said it’s more like $96 billion. All of the numbers are fuzzy and even Arab leaders are skeptical that they will materialize, as they’re dealing with their own financial struggles due to diving oil prices.

As we know, Trump loves to announce a quick win, and then backs out while another storm is erupting. Even as he announced a major reset in the relationship with Syria—by recognizing its new leader former Al-Qaeda militant Ahmed al-Sharaa—Arab leaders are holding out to see if he’ll follow through and lift sanctions. His decision surprised senior leaders at the Treasury Department, according to CBS News.

The elephant in the room, the war in Gaza, was barely addressed. “There’s a lot of people starving, a lot of bad things going on,” Trump said.

He notably left the region without stopping in Israel, unlike his trip to the region during his first term. Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff laid the groundwork for a potential Iran nuclear deal after he sent a proposal on Sunday. But still, it’s unclear when it will materialize. After all, it took Barack Obama’s administration two years of exchanging proposals to come to terms with Iran.

Hanging over all of this is the $400 million luxury jumbo jet from Qatar, aka Air Grift One, which even has Trump’s MAGA allies irked. He leaves the region with so many TBDs that it’s hard to know what was actually achieved amidst all of the pomp-and-circumstance.

In addition to The Tara Palmeri Show, which you can listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, and watch on YouTube, I host a weekly global affairs show on YouTube called State of the World, with my friend Sally Lockwood, a former anchor for Sky News who has made a name for herself covering conflict zones like Ukraine and Afghanistan. Sally is the real deal, she’s the type of journalist who runs toward the fire, even if that means putting herself in harm's way. She’s notably one of the few journalists who have interviewed the Taliban. We were connected through mutual friends from my time as a foreign correspondent in Brussels reporting for POLITICO Europe. Now Sally reports from Dubai and in this episode, we unpack the trip with The Economist’s Middle East Correspondent Gregg Carlstrom in Riyadh.

Carlstrom is very plugged into leadership in the Gulf states. He noted that while Arab leaders embraced Trump’s speech and his desire to reset relations in the region, they’re skeptical of the follow through. They’re already disappointed he hasn’t followed through on his campaign promise to end the wars in the Middle East. They hoped that he would be more pragmatic; instead, they see the hawkish wing of the administration ascending with the bombing of the Houthis. They’re also skeptical that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Syria.

“It was received very well in the Middle East,” Carlstrom said. “But let's see what happens going forward, let's see how long this new version of Trump lasts.”

He also pointed out that Trump’s biggest win, a commitment from the Saudis to buy $142 billion in arms, was agreed to in the past, and the Saudis might not