US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Monday, as the 39-year-old Saudi leader is catapulted to the intersection of a ring of conflicts stretching from Ukraine to Gaza that the Trump administration wants to turn a page on.
In Ukraine, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a convenient mediator for the Trump administration, a reflection of how quickly US foreign policy has pivoted in eastern Europe.
Saudi Arabia welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin on a visit in 2023 when the Biden administration was lobbying partners to shun the Russian leader.
Now, with Trump in office and the US’s Nato allies sidelined, Riyadh is the preferred neutral ground for the Kremlin and Washington to begin discussing an end to the war in Ukraine, historic talks that analysts say could rewrite the security architecture of Europe.
Rubio, national security advisor Mike Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are set to meet a delegation of Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin advisor Yuri Ushakov, in Riyadh on Tuesday.
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However, in other theatres, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is an active participant and officially at odds with the Trump administration.
Rubio arrived in Saudi Arabia as part of a wider Middle East trip whose first stop was Israel. There, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu latched on to Trump’s controversial plan for the US to “take over” Gaza and turn it into a luxury development after forcibly displacing its Palestinian inhabitants.
“After the war in Gaza, there will be neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority. I am committed to US President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
Counter-Gaza plan
In a sign that Israel is moving ahead with efforts to empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on Monday a directorate to facilitate the “voluntary immigration” of Palestinians out of Gaza by land, sea and air.
Saudi Arabia has forcefully resisted those plans. In fact, after Trump floated the idea of a US takeover, Riyadh reiterated its prerequisites for normalising ties with Israel, saying that such a step would only happen after a Palestinian state is created.
Netanyahu’s boost that the Palestinians could establish a country in the Gulf kingdom was met with a furious response from Saudi’s state-controlled media.
In Israel, Rubio defended Trump’s plan as “bold”, but in previous interviews, he said that if Arab states opposed Trump’s proposal, they should make their offer, stating, “Someone has to confront those guys [Hamas]. It’s not going to be American soldiers. And if the countries in the region can’t figure that piece out, then Israel is going to have to do it.”
Even some of Trump’s closest US allies have questioned why an American president who campaigned on disentangling the US from foreign wars would want to “own” Gaza.
During a visit to Israel, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Tuesday that there was “very little appetite” for the US to take over Gaza “in any way, shape or form”.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal said Jordan’s King Abdullah had told him Arab states have a plan to normalise ties with Israel, achieve Palestinian self-determination and expand regional defence agreements with Israel.
Sky News Arabia reported on Monday that Hamas agreed to give up control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority under pressure from Egypt. In response to the report, Netanyahu spokesman Omer Dostri replied on X, “Not going to happen.”
Saudi-Trump tensions?
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman enjoyed close ties to Trump’s inner circle during his first term in office. He forged a friendship with Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and later invested in his private equity group, Affinity Partners. Kushner floated forcibly displacing Palestinians from Gaza before Trump and earmarked it as a real estate investment.
Saudi Arabia is set to host a multilateral Arab summit on Thursday to discuss proposals for post-war Gaza. Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbour and “frenemy”, the UAE, has already broken ranks. The UAE’s ambassador to the US said he saw “no alternative” to Trump’s plan.
Saudi Arabia was inching closer to normalising ties with Israel before the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, a deal the Trump administration is eager to seal, but the Saudi crown prince has pivoted.
Diplomats and analysts are trying to decipher how much of the crown prince’s rhetoric is for domestic consumption or a bargaining position. The crown prince has publicly said that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
In a potential hint at US-Saudi tensions, the press releases from both countries were uncharacteristically short. The State Department did not mention Saudi Arabia’s mediator role with Russia – a nugget the Saudis would like to trumpet – nor did it mention the Palestinian people.
Saudi Arabia issued a short video of the crown prince and Rubio talking.
The Trump administration has been unhappy with Saudi Arabia on several fronts, a US national security official told Middle East Eye.
The kingdom ignored Trump’s call to pump more oil last month. If that call was bluster, Saudi Arabia’s decision to continue preventing the US from launching strikes on Yemen’s Houthis from air bases there is a particular sore point in the relationship.
Trump re-designated the Houthis a foreign terrorist organisation in January over their attacks on commercial vessels. The US said Rubio and the crown prince discussed “Red Sea security and freedom of navigation”. Saudi Arabia has largely abandoned its war on the Houthis and is in peace talks.
Israel is also lobbying the Trump administration to support strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran has been severely weakened by the regional war unleashed by the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack.
In a sign of its diminished influence, Lebanon’s new pro-US government indefinitely banned flights from Iran on Monday. Hezbollah was Iran’s main deterrent against direct Israeli strikes.
Although Saudi Arabia supported the Trump administration’s move to abandon the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018, it has since sought to manage ties with the Islamic Republic through diplomacy, even as it looks to supplant it in Syria and Lebanon.
