Trump's Pledge to the Middle East: No More 'Lectures on How to Live'

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- When President Donald Trump declared from the stage of an opulent ballroom in Saudi Arabia that the United States was done nation-building and intervening, that the world's superpower would no longer be "giving you lectures on how to live," his audience erupted in applause.

He was effectively denouncing decades of American policy in the Middle East, playing to grievances long aired in cafes and sitting rooms from Morocco to Oman.

"In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built," Trump said Tuesday, during an address at an investment conference in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. "And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand."

He urged the people of the region to chart "your own destinies in your own way."

Reactions to his speech spread swiftly on mobile phone screens in a Middle East where the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan -- and more recently, U.S. support for Israel as it intensifies its war in the Gaza Strip, which is on the brink of starvation -- are ingrained in public consciousness and criticized by monarchists and dissidents alike.

Sultan Alamer, a Saudi academic, joked that Trump's remarks sounded like they came from Frantz Fanon, a 20th-century Marxist thinker who wrote about the dynamics of colonial oppression. Syrians posted celebratory memes when Trump announced that he would end American sanctions on their war-ravaged country "in order to give them a chance at greatness."

And in Yemen -- another country mired in war and subject to American sanctions -- Abdullatif Mohammed implied agreement with Trump's notion of sovereignty, even as he expressed frustration with U.S. intervention.

"When will countries recognize us and let us live like the rest of the world?" Mohammed, a 31-year-old restaurant manager in the capital, Sanaa, said when asked about the speech. U.S. airstrikes pounded his city under both former President Joe Biden and Trump, targeting the Iran-backed Houthi militia, until Trump abruptly declared a ceasefire this month.

"Who is Trump to grant pardons, lift sanctions on a country, or impose them?" Mohammed said. "But that's how the world works."

Trump's remarks came at the start of a four-day jaunt through three wealthy Gulf Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He was focused in large part on business deals, including more than $1 trillion in investment in the United States pledged by the three Gulf governments.

But his address in Riyadh made clear that he had broader diplomatic ambitions for his trip. He expressed a "fervent wish" that Saudi Arabia follow two neighbors, the Emirates and Bahrain, to recognize the state of Israel. (Saudi officials have said that will happen only after the establishment of a Palestinian state.) He said he had a keen desire to reach a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, adding that he "never believed in having permanent enemies."

And on Wednesday, he met the new leader of Syria, Ahmad al-Sharaa -- a former jihadi who led a rebel alliance that ousted the brutal strongman Bashar Assad. Trump posed for a photograph with al-Sharaa and the Saudi crown prince in an image that dropped jaws in the region and beyond.

"Dude, what happened is truly unbelievable," said Mohammed, the Yemeni restaurant manager.

Trump's address was a sometimes-rambling speech that lasted more than 40 minutes.

In Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, he neglected to mention that he has said before that "Islam hates us" and that the Quran teaches "some very negative vibe." Instead, he praised the kingdom's heritage.

His friendliness in front of the Saudi crowd stood in contrast to Biden's chillier approach to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto Saudi ruler who directed a yearslong bombing campaign in Yemen and has overseen a widespread crackdown on dissent. When Biden visited Saudi Arabia, he said that he told the crown prince he believed he was responsible for the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist critical of the royal family's rule.

Trump instead heaped plaudits on the Arabian Peninsula and Crown Prince Mohammed, calling him an "incredible man."

"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 U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins," Trump said.

His remarks left some Arab listeners worried about what the potential evaporation of American pressure over human rights violations could mean for their countries.

Ibrahim Almadi is the son of a 75-year-old American-Saudi dual national who was arrested in the kingdom over critical social media posts; his father was released but is not allowed to leave Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Almadi said he had hoped Trump would speak to Saudi officials about his father's case during his visit -- and that he had tried without success to reach out to officials across his administration. He sees it as the type of human rights violation that previous U.S. administrations would have pressed Saudi officials on.

"They are normalizing my dad's case, which is not normal," he said of the Trump administration.

A White House spokesperson did not answer questions about whether the president or his aides had raised human rights issues with Saudi officials. Asked about the reaction to his address, the spokesperson, Anna Kelly, said, "The president has received widespread praise for his speech."

Abdullah Alaoudh, a member of a Saudi opposition party in exile and the son of a prominent cleric imprisoned in the kingdom, called the speech a public relations stunt for the benefit of Crown Prince Mohammed.

He added that he found it ironic that Trump was praising a Middle East built "by the people of the region" when he was speaking to an audience dotted with foreign billionaires and "in front of an authoritarian leader who has brutally silenced all dissent."

In the ballroom in Riyadh, Trump received a standing ovation.

"The president's speech was actually quite consequential," the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said at a news conference Wednesday, describing it as an "approach of partnership, of mutual respect."

Alamer, a senior resident fellow at the New Lines Institute, a Washington research group, said in an interview that the president's words reflected themes "that are normally associated with leftist and anti-imperialist intellectuals."

"While this is surprising in the sense that we, as Arabs, used to be the subject of American lecturing and interventionism, it is also not surprising when we consider that new right-wing populist movements -- both in the Gulf and the U.S. -- have borrowed some of this rhetoric from leftists and socialists and repurposed it to advance a conservative worldview," Alamer said.

Negad el-Boraie, a prominent Egyptian human rights lawyer, said he was reluctant to read much into Trump's speech, given that he was in Saudi Arabia primarily to talk about investments.

But for el-Boraie, Trump was merely being honest about what U.S. presidents had always really cared about -- American interests -- regardless of how much previous presidents draped their agendas in comments about human rights and democracy.

"The U.S. prioritizes its own interests," he said. "Trump expresses his opinions frankly, and that's clear in all his speeches."

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.