When President Trump declared that the US had made state-building and intervention from Saudi Arabia's gorgeous ballroom stage, the world's superpowers would no longer “give lectures on how to live,” and the audience applauded.
He effectively condemned decades of American policy in the Middle East that had been airing for a long time in cafes and living rooms from Morocco to Oman.
“In the end, so-called national builders have destroyed much more countries than they built,” Trump said in a drastic speech at an investment conference in Riyadh's Saudi capital on Tuesday. “And the interventionists were intervening in complex societies, but they didn't understand.”
He urged local people to express “your own destiny to your own destiny.”
His response to his speech has been immersed in public consciousness as it quickly spreads across the screens of pro-Iraq and Afghanistan American invasions, and more recently, on the screens of pro-Israel mobile phones to intensify the war in Gaza, on the brink of hunger vs.
Sultan Alamar, a The Saudi Arabian Academic joked that Trump's comments sounded like they came from Franz Fanon, a 20th-century Marxist thinker who wrote about the dynamics of colonial oppression. The Syrians posted a congratulatory meme when Trump announced he would end American sanctions on their war-torn countries “to give them great opportunities.”
And in Yemen, in another country plagued by war and subject to American sanctions, Abdullatif Mohammed, even though he expressed his dissatisfaction with our intervention, implied an agreement with Trump's sovereignty concept.
“Will the country recognize us and let us live like the rest of the world?” Sana's Mohamed, the capital's 31-year-old restaurant manager, said when asked about his speech. The US airstrikes have slammed his city under both former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Trump, targeting Iran-backed Hooty militias.
“Who is Trump giving pardons, raising or imposing national sanctions?” Mohammed said. “But that's how the world works.”
Trump's remarks came at the start of a four-day wonder through three wealthy Gulf Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. He focused primarily on business transactions, including more than $1 trillion in the US pledged by the three Gulf governments.
However, his speech in Riyadh revealed that he has broader diplomatic ambitions for his trip. He expressed his “fervent wish” for Saudi Arabia to pursue two neighbors in the Emirates and Bahrain, in order for Saudi Arabia to acknowledge Israel's condition. (Saudi officials said it would only happen after the establishment of the Palestinian state.) He said there was a eager desire to sign a contract with Iran in the nuclear program, adding that he “never believed in having a lasting enemy.”
And on Wednesday he met Syrian new leader, Ahmed al-Shara. Ahmed Alshara is a former jihadist who led the rebel alliance that expelled the brutal strongman Bashar al-Assad. Trump took a photo with Alshara and the Saudi Crown Prince, taking the image of the jaw dropping from the area and beyond.
“Hey, I really can't believe what happened,” said Mohammed, a restaurant manager in Yemen.
Trump's speeches were occasionally rumble speeches, lasting more than 40 minutes.
In Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, he neglected to say that “Islam hates us” and that the Quran teaches a “very negative atmosphere.” Instead, he praised the kingdom's heritage.
His familiarity in front of Saudi crowds stood in contrast to Biden's Chillier's approach to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi ruler who oversaw a long-standing bombing campaign in Yemen and oversees a widespread crackdown on dissent. When Biden visited Saudi Arabia, he told the Crown Prince he believed he was responsible for the murder and mutilation of Jamal Khashog, a Washington Post columnist who is critical of royal rule.
Instead, Trump has piled praise for the Arabian Peninsula and Prince Mohammed, calling him an “incredible man.”
“In recent years, too many American presidents have suffered from the notion that it is our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use American policies to distribute justice for their sins,” Trump said.
His remarks made some Arab listeners worried about what the potential evaporation of American pressure on human rights abuses would mean for their country.
Ibrahim Almadi is the son of a 75-year-old American and Saudi dual citizen who was arrested in the kingdom for important social media posts. His father was released but was not permitted to leave Saudi Arabia. In an interview, Almadi said he wanted Trump to tell Saudi officials about his father's incident during his visit. He sees it as a type of human rights abuse that the previous US administration would have been pushing Saudi officials.
“They're normalizing my father's case, but that's not normal,” he said of the Trump administration.
The White House did not immediately comment on the response to the president's speech or whether the president or his aides raised human rights issues, including the case of Almadi with Saudi officials.
Abdullah Alaud, a member of the Saudi opposition party in exile and a son of a prominent cleric imprisoned in the kingdom, called his speech a public relations stunt in the interests of Prince Mohammed.
He added that he found it ironic that Trump praised the Middle East, which was built “by local people.”
Trump received a standing ovation in the ballroom in Riyadh.
“The president's speech was actually very important,” Saudi Arabia's Prince Faisal bin Fahan said at a press conference on Wednesday that he described it as a “partnership, a mutual respect approach.”
Alamour, a senior resident fellow at the New Line Institute, a Washington research group, said in an interview that the president's words reflect themes “usually associated with leftists and anti-imperialist intellectuals.”
“This is surprising in the sense that we as Arabs were the subject of American lectures and interventionism, but it is not surprising to think that, borrowing some of this rhetoric in both the Gulf and the US, the new right-wing populist movement borrowed some of this rhetoric and then resumed it, in order to advance a conservative worldview.
Negad El Borae, a well-known Egyptian human rights lawyer, said he was reluctant to read much in Trump's speech, considering he was in Saudi Arabia primarily to talk about investment.
But for Elboley, Trump was just honest about what the US president really cared about: America's interests, regardless of how much the US president covered their agenda with comments on human rights and democracy.
“The United States puts its own interests first,” he said. “Trump has been openly expressing his opinion, and that's clear in every speech he has.”
Shuaib Almosawa Contributed with a report from Sana, Yemen. Rania Khaled From Cairo; Ismaeel naar From Dubai; sad and Jacob Lebay From Beirut; and Muhammad Haji Kadur From Damascus.
