Trump’s Middle East Pivot? (w/ Greg Priddy)

President Donald Trump’s Gulf trip in May 2025 offered more than just photo ops and billion-dollar deals; it signaled a shift in America’s posture toward the region. From flashy personal business signings to a notable departure from the Bush-era “freedom agenda,” Trump’s visit drew regional praise for its message of humility and realism, even as it stirred controversy back home. His decision to lift sanctions on Syria without preconditions and his hands-off approach to Israeli normalization efforts revealed a broader recalibration of U.S. ambitions in the Middle East. Does this trip mark a strategic pivot or simply a tactical pause in America’s regional engagement?

In this episode, Paul Saunders speaks with Greg Priddy, a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest. Priddy consults for corporate and financial clients on political risk in the region and previously served as Director for Global Oil at Eurasia Group.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

I thought we would focus our three questions today on President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East. He went to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and also to Qatar. There were a variety of headline-grabbing economic agreements that the president reached during those visits. But how important do you think the trip was?

As presidential overseas visits go, I’d put this in the middle. I don’t think this was something that we’re going to look back on as a watershed, but it moved the ball forward in some interesting ways. We had the standard petrodollar recycling, where they announced all of the trillion dollars, $600 billion—a lot of that I take with a grain of salt because they’re mixing investment and trade.

In the case of the Saudi number, they’re running a current account deficit with oil prices where they are right now. So that casts a little bit of doubt on it. But that was bigger than what you usually see on a presidential visit to the region. They also had a U.S.-Saudi arms sales agreement that was well over $100 billion, kind of an eye-popping number, but that’s really just aggregating together several years of normal arms trade with the Saudis. So those were not new, if big.

The new things were the personal business deals. Trump had a lot of signing ceremonies for business venture, like an investment in his cryptocurrency venture, golf course, things like that. He had personal business that his company was doing or his companies in several of the Gulf countries that were also signed on this trip. That’s a bit of a change in norms from previous presidential visits.

But the most significant thing on this trip and what moves the ball forward, is President Trump’s speech on U.S. policy in the region. He has kind of driven the final nail in the coffin of the “freedom agenda” and all the notions that the U.S. has a transformative role over there. I’m sure that there was a lot of criticism he got from liberals and neoconservatives about undermining the U.S. role. But to many people in the region, that speech seemed to display some humility after many years of American arrogance, where we’ve been suggesting that we have all the solutions for domestic governments, for everything from economic policy, etc., where there’s an American solution that we just need to help you achieve.

In Trump’s speech, he’s really acknowledging that change—if it comes—is going to come from you, the people of the region. There’s not a made-in-Washington solution. And a lot of people over there, particularly in the Gulf, saw that as respect. Trump is not treating them as countries that need to be under some form of American tutelage. That actually resonated quite well in the Gulf—the realization that it’s not about us. Most of what goes on in the region is about them. It’s not about us.

Trump had alluded to a big announcement while he was over there. And a lot of people thought that was going to be a business deal. It turned out, though, it was lifting sanctions on Syria. That fits with the theme from the speech, because many people who look at this in Washington had been saying that Syria’s interim government needed to fulfill a series of benchmarks. There were some think tank reports written about that. There was talk about that even from some people in government. Marco Rubio had mentioned it at one point—the series of things Syria needs to do in order to earn sanctions relief, as if sanctions are the default.

As everyone remembers, the sanctions were imposed on the Assad regime, which is no longer there, but they’re still in place. And so that notion that he would just give Syria a chance to reform on their own without holding that in reserve to force them to do a series of things to earn that sanctions relief was a departure, definitely from where the majority of the foreign policy establishment in Washington has been on that issue. But that’s also something that to most people in the region resonated well—the fact that we don’t see Western tutelage as necessary and that we’re willing to give Syria a chance to reform on their own.

One last remark on Syria—part of the question there had been their relationship with Israel and whether they would pose a threat eventually, which I think is probably overplayed, but they’re actually talking. The Syrians are denying it, but Syria and Israel have had a series of meetings about security. And so that has not removed Syria’s incentive to talk to the Israelis about how to live together. That’s a good thing.

Second question: the president obviously visited Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar. There’s some places that he didn’t go. He didn’t go to Israel. He didn’t go to Iran, not that anyone would have expected that, certainly. But the president has been trying to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear weapons program. Could you say a little bit about those two complex relationships and how the trip may have impacted them or been affected by them?

On Iran, obviously, nobody really expected him to visit. There had been a little bit of speculation that there might be some sort of head of state meeting or head of government meeting arranged by the Gulf Arabs. I never really thought that was going to come to anything. Where that’s important on Iran is more on Trump’s discussions with Gulf Arab leaders, where they made the point to him that he needs to be realistic about American demands.

It’s very different from the situation in the 2010s, where Saudi and other Gulf Arab leaders often were pushing the U.S. in a more hawkish direction. After the attack on Abqaiq and Khurais in 2019, when it showed them that they were vulnerable, that situation has shifted, and they really want to quiet things down and see stability. They also don’t think that a military strike would be the answer to the problem. You probably had Gulf Arab leaders trying to nudge Trump in the direction of taking a realistic stance vis-a-vis Iran and coming to a solution on that.

On Israel, you know, he didn’t visit. I think that was largely about the optics of being there while the offensive in Gaza plays out. That would not have looked good for him to be right there during that, given that that’s generating a lot of very ugly video footage. I wouldn’t read too much into that, though, about the U.S.-Israel relationship, which is still quite solid.

There’s been a lot of speculation recently about a chill between Netanyahu and Trump. I think that’s true to some extent. It’s not fundamentally undermining the relationship, but I do think that they differ on Iran. Clearly, Trump would like to have a deal—very much wants a deal. I’m not sure that there will be one, but he wants one. That’s clear. They also differ on Gaza, where Trump, after talking about making Gaza into the French Riviera and all of that, actually has backed off. He also seemed to endorse population transfer, but he has backed off from that. Talking to Arab leaders probably also influenced him on that when they’ve let him know their needs and how their population sees it. But Trump has increasingly been saying, very gently, this needs to come to a close. And so that reflects a little bit of tension. But I don’t see Trump making any threats or saying he’s going to do anything to force Netanyahu’s hand on that.

Third and final question—and you touched on this a little bit already in talking about President Trump’s speech, and I certainly agree that it was a pretty significant speech. What do you think this trip by the president says, if anything, about the future of the American role in the Middle East and how it might evolve in the future?

The speech definitely says that he recognizes there are not made-in-America solutions for everything there and, as they see it, is displaying a little bit more humility than American leaders have in the recent past. This trip isn’t a watershed. It doesn’t really change the trajectory, but it moves us a little bit further down that spectrum.

One thing we did not see him pushing was the idea of Saudi-Israel rapprochement and some sort of security mechanism coming out of that. So, it was very different than the Biden administration in that they don’t see Saudi-Israel normalization to some sort of bulwark-against-Iran, de jure security guarantee. Trump is happy to maintain the more informal security relationships that we’ve had in the Gulf, but he doesn’t seem to be interested like Biden was in trying to do full treaty commitments. I personally very much agree with that. I think we need to maintain our flexibility to decide when to intervene and when not to. Trump not intervening in 2019 with the Abqaiq strike was the right decision. But if we’d had something formal in place, that might have turned out differently. The decision about our intervention is in Washington, even if we’re not making decisions about internal things in the region.

Gulf leaders probably told Trump that their normalization with Iran is coming along pretty well. The U.S. had initially been skeptical about that but I think might become more supportive of that normalization, despite the China angle on it. But this isn’t really a watershed where we’re moving in a different direction in the region. It just moves the ball forward a bit.

Greg, thank you again for joining me today on Three Questions.