Call it diplomacy by bromance. Donald Trump deployed it in the Middle East this week and made more progress in a few days than conventional diplomacy has made in decades.

But then the Gulf States – ‘an amazing part of the world’ he told them on Thursday – are Trump’s kind of places.

They’re run by people awash in dosh. People prepared to sprinkle it generously in America’s direction, even on to Trump’s own lap (thanks, Qatar, for that $400million jumbo jet). People with opulent palaces adorned with lashings of gold and all manner of bling, surroundings in which Trump feels very much at home.

People who know how to suck up to the President by massaging his self-referential image as the master of the deal. People, of course, who rule by dictatorship which, for Trump, is an asset. He has always had a soft spot for ‘strongman’ rulers (keen to be seen as one himself) and he’s never given human rights much thought.

Trump also knows how to suck up to them. ‘I like you too much,’ he tells Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. The ruling emir of Qatar and his family are ‘tall, handsome guys’. The new President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, only recently a jihadist rebel leader with a $10million US bounty on his head, is ‘attractive’ and ‘tough’.

‘You’re a magnificent man,’ he coos to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates), as he cosies up to him in his massive royal palace. And, in its own way, this mutual admiration society delivers.

Trump left Riyadh with $600billion-worth of deals covering artificial intelligence, health care, sport and military hardware. No doubt not all will ever see the light of day – the $142billion arms ‘deal’ is twice the Saudi annual defence budget. But given their scale Trump can afford some slippage, especially since he went on to Qatar and the UAE to mop up several hundred billions more in mega deals.

With Trump in the White House, America and the Gulf States now behave like old friends. The Saudis played country music star Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The USA as he took to the stage in Riyadh and walked off to the Village People’s YMCA – both signature tunes of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The Gulf States – ‘an amazing part of the world’ he told them on Thursday – are Trump’s kind of places, writes Andrew Neil

There was substance amid all the smiles and glad-handing – including a radical shift in policy towards the region

The Crown Prince even drove him to dinner in a golf cart – and laid on a refrigerated mobile McDonald’s should the President still hanker, after a feast in the desert, for his favourite fast food.

But there was substance amid all the smiles and glad-handing – including a radical shift in policy towards the region which was not designed to please democratic ears. Previous visiting presidents talked of the need to foster democracy and human rights. Instead, Trump talked approvingly of ‘safe and orderly’ autocracies. He attacked previous American ‘interventionists’ for ‘wrecking’ the region – a clear critique of the neo-liberals who once dominated US foreign policy and championed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders,’ he opined. ‘The birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves’ – a pointed remark aimed at the failed ‘nation-building’ presidency of George W Bush, which delighted his hosts.

But the most significant development in Trump’s four-day tour was his announcement that he was lifting all sanctions on Syria to give its new government ‘a chance for greatness’. Trump had seen off hawks in his own administration and Washington’s countless foreign policy gurus, who urged caution. It is, of course, pregnant with risk – nobody really knows if Syria’s new president has given up his jihadist ways – but it’s a gamble worth taking.

At a stroke, it removes Syria from Iran’s orbit into which it had descended under the previous dictatorship of the odious Basher al Assad. Saudi’s Crown Prince and Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan had made it clear to Trump that there was no chance of a Syrian economic recovery until the crippling sanctions were lifted.

When Syria’s new president met Trump in Riyadh to thank him, he also invited American companies to start investing in Syria. A huge portrait of Trump already adorns a billboard in downtown Damascus. Funny old world indeed.

This has not gone unnoticed in Tehran. If Trump can so easily and quickly embrace a decades-long foe like Syria – pushing America’s foreign policy establishment aside in the process – then perhaps a deal with Washington can be struck after all. A fourth round of US-Iranian talks was held last weekend in Oman. Progress has been made but not on a major stumbling block: Iran is prepared to commit to ‘never’ developing nuclear weapons yet insists it must be allowed to continue enriching uranium beyond what civil nuclear power stations would need. US intelligence believes Iran has enriched enough uranium close to weapons’ grade levels, to make it only months away from a nuclear bomb.

Trump has sown up all the Gulf States as close, reliable American allies

Iran is in no position to hang tough. Israel has neutralised its two most important proxy terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria is lost. The Iranian economy is a shambles, crippled by rampant inflation and unemployment thanks to sanctions.

Public unrest simmers despite the regime’s brutal repression of any dissent. Even the hardline Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is said to see merit in coming to a deal with the US. He might be further inclined to do so now Trump has sown up all the Gulf States as close, reliable American allies.

The US President started his Gulf trip this week with a couple of notches already on his belt. After the US had hit 1,000 targets in the relentless bombing of Yemen, the Houthis agreed to stop attacking ships entering the Red Sea. America also managed to get Hamas to release its last American hostage.

Ironically, Israel is the loser in all this. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to to visit the White House after Trump’s re-election. He had already opined that Trump was the most pro-Israeli president ever to sit in the Oval Office. Yet now America seems to be doing its own thing in the Middle East.

Trump ended his war on the Houthis despite their continued missile attacks on Israel, which was not informed in advance of the ceasefire. Trump’s people engaged directly with Hamas to release the last US citizen, against Israel’s wishes. He is now engaged in talks with Tehran in which Netanyahu is kept out of the loop. Israeli intelligence keeps Netanyahu informed on the sidelines. But there are no formal updates from the Trump administration. Israel fears American and Iran could come to an agreement without its involvement. Pointedly, Trump did not stop in Israel on this swing through the region this week. Indeed Trump had almost nothing to say about Israel during his trip.

Netanyahu wants America to pressure Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, the greatest foreign policy achievement of Trump’s first term in which four Arab states recognised Israel.

But Trump told the Saudis to join the Accords ‘in your own time’, a recognition that for the Saudis there can be no new relationship with Israel while the war in Gaza drags on.

The Trump administration increasingly sees Israel’s determination to prolong the war in Gaza as inimical to America’s interests in the region. That should give Israel serious pause for thought.

Of course, most of the fundamental problems that hold the region back remain to be resolved, despite Trump’s breakthroughs. Some of his achievements are superficial and probably transient. No over-arching strategy is being rolled out.

But nobody has such a strategy and in its absence there is much to be said for piecemeal progress. Just because the Israeli-Palestinian problem is intractable is no reason not make advances on other fronts.

It’s a simple proposition that foreign policy-makers in Washington, London and Paris have ignored for too long. But not deal-driven Trump, which is why he’s just blindsided them all with a signal success in the Gulf.