President Donald Trump gave the keynote address on March 27 to the Saudi-backed Future Investment Initiative Institute (FII Institute), held March 25-27 in Miami, Florida. The FII Institute is a “non-profit organization run by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s main sovereign wealth fund,” according to Wikipedia.
Trump’s boorish remarks regarding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) are now public globally. It should be noted that at a Tuesday, March 25 press conference, Trump asserted that the Crown Prince had privately urged Trump “not to cut short his war against Iran, and that the US-Israeli campaign represented a ‘historic opportunity’ to remake the Middle East. MBS, Trump said, “Yeah, he’s a warrior. He’s fighting with us,’” reported The Guardian.
On March 27, Trump put more praise of himself in MBS’s mouth: “’He said, you know, it’s amazing ... a year ago, you were a dead country. Now, you’re literally the hottest country anywhere in the world,’ Trump said.” For that and other reasons, Trump boasted, “now he has to be nice to me.” He claimed that MBS was “kissing my ass.”
These remarks were made before an audience of over 1,500 delegates, including sovereign wealth fund managers, defense industry executives, and tech entrepreneurs, and were carried live by numerous press outlets.
The Saudis were swift in their response by noting that Trump is effectively giving the Saudis the “Zelensky treatment,” and effectively placing the Saudis and MBS in a “triple bind.”
“Three days separated ‘warrior’ from ‘kissing my ass.’ The shift was not a mood swing. It was a reclassification. When Trump called MBS a warrior on Tuesday, he was acknowledging Saudi Arabia’s private utility—the kingdom was validating his war. When he humiliated MBS on Friday, he was establishing the public price of that utility. Saudi Arabia could be useful. It could not be equal,” noted the House of Saud.
It went on to explain that, “MBS faces a structural trap with no clean exit. The constraints are military, diplomatic, and personal, and they reinforce each other in ways that eliminate every conventional response.” Militarily, Riyadh is protected from Iranian attacks by U.S. military resources; a diplomatic response could threaten that protection and security, and personally because “MBS’s domestic brand, built over a decade of consolidating power, rests on sovereign strength. He is the prince who detained rivals at the Ritz-Carlton, who launched an air war in Yemen, who told the world Saudi Arabia would no longer ask permission…”
For the time being, Riyadh will follow its standard protocol for such provocations—"no amplification, no confrontation, no official record of the slight.” It also highlighted the fact that the insult by Trump is unprecedented historically: “No sitting American president has publicly used demeaning language about a Gulf Cooperation Council head of state while that leader’s country was under active military attack.”
