THE NEW YORK TIMES: Seven years ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman couldn’t visit Washington. When he arrived at the White House on Tuesday, he got F-35s, the world’s fastest chips and the central role in the remaking of the Middle East.
Seven years after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was effectively banished from Washington after the murder of a prominent Saudi dissident, he returned on Tuesday to a welcome meant to signal that he sat at the center of President Trump’s effort to build a new Middle East.
It was, perhaps, the most astounding geopolitical restoration of modern times. The de facto leader of the largest and richest of the Arab states, who President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said should be treated as a “pariah” six years ago, reset relations on his own terms.
The crown prince got a commitment from Mr. Trump for F-35 stealth fighters, over Israel’s objections. At the same time, he managed to push off, most likely for years, any discussion of Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords and recognizing the Jewish state.
“We want to be part of the Abraham Accords, but we also want to be sure that we secure a clear path of a two-state solution,” Prince Mohammed said in the Oval Office, uttering the phrase he knew that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would reject outright, as would much of the rest of Israel’s political establishment.
“We want peace with the Israelis,” he insisted. “We want peace with the Palestinians, we want them to coexist peacefully.”
Then, with the traditional business of the past 75 years of Middle East diplomacy pushed aside, Prince Mohammed uttered the words he knew his host wanted to hear, promising upward of a trillion dollars in purchases and investments in the United States — more than the size of his country’s sovereign wealth fund. (The crown prince carefully avoided saying over what period of time the investments would be made, recognizing that the president sought a big dollar figure, whether it was realistic or not.) » | David E. Sanger | David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents in more than four decades as a Times correspondent. He writes often on the tensions among superpowers, the subject of his latest book. | Tuesday, November 18, 2025
