SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Foreign policy is going to change under the next Trump administration. That is especially true when it comes to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, countries that President-elect Donald Trump courted during his first time in office. Two weeks before Americans voted to send Trump back to the White House, he gave an interview to Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned news channel. And here he is talking about Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
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DONALD TRUMP: I think he's a great guy, and he's doing - he's respected all over the world.
DETROW: Trump said the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia under him was great. Now, he says it's just OK.
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TRUMP: Biden goes over there, and he fist bumps. You don't fist bump. You go over there, and you do it right. You shake a hand or something. You hug. You do. But it could never be great with a guy like Biden.
DETROW: We're joined now by NPR international correspondent Aya Batraway, who is based in the Gulf to talk about what those ties might look like when Trump returns to office. Hey there.
AYA BATRAWAY, BYLINE: Hi.
DETROW: Let's start with that comment. What did you make of that and what it says about how Trump will be dealing with Gulf leaders?
BATRAWAY: So the dig that he's taking at Biden is one that the region here remembers very well. When Biden came to Saudi Arabia two years ago, he only fist bumped the crown prince instead of owning that relationship, and that was perceived as weakness and disrespect. So when Trump talks about handshakes and hugs, is showing a real understanding of how things work here in this region. Countries here are very tribal, and personal relationships are everything. Dania Thafer is the director of the Gulf International Forum, and she was explaining to me that Trump has a direct-line relationship to Gulf rulers. And she describes him as transactional.
DANIA THAFER: Trump is very much not about, like, preaching about values. Trump is a businessman, and he's very much concerned with, you know, financial considerations and investments.
DETROW: On the topic of transactions, though, remind us just how many investments and business ties Trump has in that region.
BATRAWAY: OK. So Scott, Trump has branded towers, hotels, residential neighborhoods, and even golf courses that are being developed or have already been built in places like Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Oman. But there's also been really big money invested in his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was known to have this, like, relationship over WhatsApp and a personal relationship with the Saudi crown prince when he was an adviser to Trump at the White House. Now, just months after he ended that role at the White House, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that he received $2 billion, with a B, from Saudi Arabia's wealth fund that is overseen by the crown prince to help kickstart his new private equity fund. He also received hundreds of millions of dollars from the UAE and a Qatari entity.
DETROW: Let's talk about what this means for policy, then. Where do you see a Trump administration and Gulf states aligning on regional policies, and where do you think the big differences are?
BATRAWAY: So in the run-up to the election, Gulf analysts and top policymakers here in the region that I was speaking to were saying Trump comes with pros and cons. You know, as president, he tore up this Obama administration deal with Iran that was supposed to, you know, lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for caps on its nuclear program. And he exerted this maximum pressure campaign on Iran, something he might try to do again, claiming that Hamas, which gets support from Iran, would have never attacked Israel under his watch, and this entire war that we're seeing in Gaza would have never happened.
DETROW: Of course, some of these Gulf states have good ties with Iran as well, like Qatar. And Qatar actually just announced a really big policy change. Tell us about it.
BATRAWAY: Yeah. So Qatar and Egypt, they've both been the key mediators over the past year of this war trying to get the two sides, Israel and Hamas, to agree to some kind of cease-fire. And they briefly succeeded about a year ago when over 100 Israeli hostages were released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian detainees. There was a weeklong cease-fire. But that never materialized again. And Qatar says they've been at the end of a lot of mudslinging over those ties with Hamas. They've been hosting Hamas' political office for years, something that the U.S. wanted them to do so that they could indirectly have a line of communication with Hamas. Now Qatar is saying they no longer want to be mediators, and they are - no longer see a purpose for hosting Hamas' political leadership. And, of course, the timing of this to kind of wash their hands clean of all this Biden administration era policy is just as Trump is coming into office.
DETROW: Yeah. Let's go back to Iran, though, and that maximum pressure approach, as you put it, that the Trump administration really leaned in on during Trump's first time in office. Any sense whether Gulf states would support that approach again?
BATRAWAY: Look. They definitely want to see Iran's regime weakened and its proxies like Hezbollah and other groups in the region. But at the same time, a lot has changed. You know, these countries now, their foreign policy priority is largely de-escalation because they're very focused on their economies, bringing in tourism, bringing in foreign investment, revamping their economies from being reliant on oil to other industries. And so chaos and war and escalations with Iran and direct missile attacks by Iran and Israel flying over the Gulf, that is not good for business. So I don't think that they are going to be eager to see that same kind of maximum pressure campaign and that risk-taking again. And also, now the one big change that's happened is Saudi Arabia has diplomatic ties with Iran. That was a deal that was brokered by China.
DETROW: Let's talk about the Abraham Accords for a moment. This is one of those few areas of Trump's first term in office that got widespread support. The Biden administration praised the accords. Again, this was UAE in Bahrain establishing full ties with Israel. It was a historic breakthrough. Any sense whether Trump and Jared Kushner could pick up on that and then craft a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia?
BATRAWAY: I think it's going to be really tough. First, those accords did not bring peace to the region. They were billed as peace treaties. This past year has demonstrated that the Palestinian struggle for statehood and independence cannot be sidelined and cannot be kicked down the road. So the question is, will Trump attempt to end this Gaza war? Will he be able to? And just look at the death toll Gaza. You have tens of thousands of people killed, most of them women and children, the entire population displaced and hungry. Abdulaziz Alghashian, he is a Saudi expert who focuses on Saudi-Israeli relations. He says Trump and this Israeli leadership are going to keep trying to create this impression that talks are moving ahead, normalization is on the horizon, the deal is close at hand. But he says...
ABDULAZIZ ALGHASHIAN: Some of the stuff that I've heard when I - in some Saudi interlocutors, they're incredibly furious, you know, that this war is happening. They're incredibly furious that this idea that normalization is going to happen in the midst of all of this.
BATRAWAY: And he also says that the mood in Saudi Arabia has grown anti-Israeli. Like, they - people are seeing Israel as problematic. And he says these views are even being aired on TV networks.
DETROW: A big thing that Saudi Arabia wants in all of this is a security pact with the United States, a formal agreement. That's something the country pressed for with both Trump and Biden. What are your sense of how big of a bargaining chip that would be for a Trump administration?
BATRAWAY: They kind of see Trump still as unpredictable. And also, the Saudis, when they were attacked by Iranian missiles and drones on their biggest oil refinery, Trump did not rush to their defense. So Saudi officials, yeah, they would like this security pact. But they're saying that right now they're not in a rush for one. The policy now is that they will not establish ties with Israel without seeing first a pathway toward a Palestinian state. But Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he doesn't support a two-state solution. In fact, he says that he is working to prevent a Palestinian state from being established. So Trump not only is going to have to end the Gaza war before anything can happen. He's going to have to try to bridge that divide if he wants to clinch a deal.
DETROW: That is NPR's correspondent in the Gulf, Aya Batraway. Thank you so much.
BATRAWAY: Thanks, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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