“This is how you win his heart and mind.”
Radwan Ziadeh, adviser to Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa
On the tarmac of Riyadh, beneath the arc of Saudi F-15s, Trump disembarked to the sound of deals being inked and democracies hollowed. The $142 billion arms agreement signed between the United States and Saudi Arabia. What the White House gleefully calls the “largest defence sales agreement in history” is not just a weapons shipment. It is a reordering. A crowning of the transactional presidency, where power, recognition, and diplomacy are repackaged into contracts and towers and kickbacks. Where oil fields become bargaining chips, war crimes become bygones, and the bones of the old order are scrubbed clean for resale.
Let us be clear: this is not peace. It is procurement.
A Transactional Empire
At the centre of the deal is a logic as old as empire: he who arms decides. The Trump administration has abandoned any pretence of regional balance. This arms deal entrenches Saudi military dominance and builds a new architecture of alliance around it. Not one of shared values or collective security, but of shared interests: arms, oil, AI data centres, and real estate portfolios.
And let’s not pretend the weapons are going to a democracy. This is investment without strings. No conditions on reform, no human rights caveats. We are not talking about supporting a country where you can vote out the government or criticise it in the press. In Saudi Arabia, a tweet can get you locked up. A joke can cost you your life. And yet here is the US, pouring billions into the arsenal of a regime that murders journalists, tortures dissidents, and beheads people in public squares. The message is clear: repression is no obstacle to partnership, as long as the cheque clears.
The presence of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and executives from BlackRock and Palantir at Trump’s side is not ornamental. It’s ideological. This is empire as investment opportunity, where the future of warfare and surveillance is outsourced to private capital. If the Pentagon once ran the show, now it’s Silicon Valley and sovereign wealth funds.
The promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the US. However inflated. Makes the whole region a spreadsheet of returns. And in this spreadsheet, the Palestinians don’t exist. Yemen doesn’t exist. The migrant workers who built the towers don’t exist. There is only capital flow, and whoever controls the tap.
The Syria Pivot
Trump’s sudden embrace of Syria’s new president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Until recently a rebel commander. Is not just about sanctions relief. It’s about optics, oil, and architecture. Reports suggest Sharaa offered Trump access to Syrian oil, reconstruction contracts, and even the prospect of a Trump Tower Damascus. This is not diplomacy. It’s a developers’ meeting.
But it signals something deeper: the final burial of international law. Assad’s regime, with backing from Iran and Russia, flattened cities and gassed civilians. Sharaa’s ascendancy is no clean break. It is continuity with better PR. By lifting sanctions in exchange for skyscrapers and demilitarised zones, Trump signals to every strongman and warlord: there is no past that can’t be undone. Only future deals.
And this is no isolated event. With Israeli troops now entrenched inside what used to be a demilitarised zone on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. Overseeing Damascus from Mount Hermon. The message is clear: the land is theirs, and no one’s going to stop them. It’s a strategic and symbolic grab, rubber-stamped not by diplomacy, but by a shrug from Washington. Trump doesn’t even need to visit Israel; the gift has already been delivered. Netanyahu gets boots on Syrian soil and plausible deniability.
Recognition of Israel by Syria, if it comes, will be transactional. A handshake bought with sanctions relief and arms contracts, not forged in negotiation or peace. The Syrian president al-Sharaa, meets Trump in Riyadh. Not Jerusalem. Because the price of reintegration is silence on Palestine. Gaza, meanwhile, burns quietly in the background: tens of thousands dead, ninety percent displaced, and the world too busy securing deals to notice the smoke.
Is Iran the Target?
There are whispers already. Is this all a staging ground for a strike on Iran? The logic is tempting. The bolstering of Saudi defences, the courting of Syria away from Tehran, and the grooming of a pan-Arab investment alliance with the US at its centre. All seem designed to box Iran in.
But Trump’s strategy is not about war. Not yet. It is about leverage. The goal is not to bomb Tehran, but to isolate it until it begs for a seat at a table already cleared of spare chairs. The logic is mafia, not military: you don’t destroy your rival; you squeeze him dry while building condos next door.
This doesn’t mean conflict is off the table. Far from it. A hyper-armed Saudi Arabia, a volatile Syria, an increasingly desperate Iran, and an Israel that has made permanent war its domestic policy. This is a recipe for escalation. But in Trump’s ledger, war is a cost, not a cause.
The End of Pretence
This deal strips away what remained of liberal illusions in US foreign policy. There is no more talk of democracy, rights, or even stability. Trump has made foreign relations a showcase of pure power and profit. The spectacle. Missile deals on one hand, tower mockups in the other—is a betrayal, but also a kind of truth. This is what Trumpism looks like.
And the region will pay. More drones, more surveillance, more repression wrapped in the language of opportunity. A younger generation across the Middle East, radicalised by the hypocrisies of Western double-dealing, will not be fooled. Nor will the families burying their dead under rubble built by one regime and bombed by another.
As for Trump, his foreign policy doctrine is written in concrete and gold leaf: build the tower, take the photo, sign the cheque. History, like the Syrian archives, can be redacted later.
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