What Trump Got Right in the Middle East

Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East was remarkably successful, and the president’s political opponents would do well to acknowledge the fact and understand what made it so.

Trump unabashedly uses the American private sector as an instrument of national power. In fact, he does this better than any previous president has in my lifetime. As Calvin Coolidge remarked in 1925, “The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.” The observation still holds true, and Trump is not afraid to embody it.

Read: Trump heads back to where he started

To be sure, the president’s trade war has confused business leaders, angered free marketeers, and led to concerns about capital flight, but for now, at least, investors remain eager to put their money into American technology and infrastructure, and few pools of deployable capital are bigger than those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. So it followed that Trump brought captains of American industry along to his meetings there as partners. In doing so, Trump positioned the U.S. to the Gulf states as something different than it has been in the past—not just an arms merchant or, worse, a scold on human rights, but a commercial and strategic partner for states desperately trying to diversify and grow their economies in preparation for a post-petroleum era. And in exchange, what do Americans get? Well, maybe not the “trillions” of dollars Trump promised, but certainly hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment to help grow American businesses, creating new jobs and enriching Americans.

At the same time, Trump has shown himself willing to navigate Middle East politics in a manner remarkably unconstrained by domestic concerns. This allows him to take actions—some absurd, but some very smart—that other presidents could not get away with. Even Democrats who detest the president might be forgiven for taking some delight in watching Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who bullied and humiliated President Joe Biden, get a taste of his own medicine.

Over the past several weeks, Trump has announced a cease-fire with the Houthis, even as the militants continued to strike Israel; gone around the Israelis to negotiate the return of the last living American hostage in Gaza; cheerfully declared his eagerness to negotiate with Iran, toward something that will almost certainly look a lot like the deal President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015; and not only dropped all sanctions on Syria, but met with the new Syrian president, who can’t be popular with some members of Trump’s Cabinet (I’m looking at you, Tulsi Gabbard).

I happen to think that all of these decisions—with the possible exception of the dubious deal with the Houthis—were the right ones. I also suspect that neither Biden nor his would-be successor, Kamala Harris, would have made any of them. I’ve spoken privately with members of Biden’s team who knew that dropping sanctions on Syria was the right thing to do—but worried that it would be politically difficult.

Trump may well understand that with the Democratic Party likely divided on Israel for the next generation, his Jewish and evangelical-Christian supporters have nowhere else to go. This puts him in a position of power relative to the Israeli prime minister—one that must surely make Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders very uncomfortable. Making them still more uncomfortable will be the fact that everyone who mattered seemed to be in those meetings in the Gulf. Everyone, that is, except them.

In the end, domestic politics might still count for something. Trump might still not be allowed to accept a luxury plane from Qatar, for example. But Trump has shown, once again, that the rules for him are different from those for nearly all of his predecessors.

Read: The darker design behind Trump’s $400 million plane

But Trump has another reason not to worry about domestic politics: Temperamentally, he and his foreign-policy team largely view the region the same way many Americans view it. Speaking directly to Gulf Arabs, Trump promised the Middle East that there would be no more nation-building projects and no more “lectures on how to live.” This message is as popular in the Middle East as it is in Middle America, where many people have grown weary of American military entanglement in foreign conflicts.

To clinch the success of this first Middle East tour, Trump will need to remember three things. The first is that American interests are not limited to business, and he may need to balance his desire to increase investment against other priorities. The second is that optics are not enough—his team needs to follow through on all of the deals and negotiations it has announced. And the third is that courting global investors works only if the United States remains investable.

Historically, America has attracted capital because it can be counted on to follow the rule of law, crack down on public corruption, and support the kinds of independent and quasi-independent regulatory bodies that give investors peace of mind. Trump and his administration have been working hard to weaken all of this. For a president who claims to understand the private sector as well as he does, seeking deals while simultaneously undermining the conditions that make America a great investment will be counterproductive in the end.