Is Trump Pivoting in his Middle East Policy? New $142 Billion Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia Announced – “Largest in History”
President Donald Trump and his entourage arrived in Saudi Arabia today for an economic summit that included many American CEOs, such as Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Citicorp’s Jane Fraser, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and BlackRock’s Larry Fink. As a precondition to letting Trump and these American CEOs attend this conference, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made it clear that any discussion about normalizing relationships between Saudi Arabia and Israel, was OFF LIMITS. It looks like the Abraham Accords proposal is now dead in the water. Trump seemingly obliged to these conditions, and did not even include Israel on this trip. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was scheduled to visit Israel just before this trip, but ended up canceling it at the last minute. There are a lot of issues and news stories resulting from this trip, but to me, the biggest news story is that Trump has reportedly agreed to sell Saudi Arabia an arms package worth $142 billion, "the largest defense cooperation agreement in history." By comparison, Trump approved military sales to Israel last month amounting to $12 billion. Wow! That takes military spending to a whole new level! And I thought Trump's tariffs were going to fund tax cuts for Americans?! So does this mean the U.S. is abandoning Israel now? I hardly think so.