When President Donald Trump declared from the stage of an opulent ballroom in Saudi Arabia that the US was done nation-building and intervening, that the world’s superpower would no longer be “giving you lectures on how to live,” his audience erupted in applause.
He was effectively denouncing decades of American policy in West Asia, playing to grievances long aired in cafes and sitting rooms from Morocco to Oman. “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” Trump said on Tuesday, during a sweeping address at an investment conference in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. “And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
He urged the people of the region to chart “your own destinies in your own way”.
Reactions to his speech spread swiftly on mobile phone screens in West Asia where the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — and more recently, US support for Israel as it intensifies its war in Gaza, which is on the brink of starvation — are ingrained in public consciousness and criticised by monarchists and dissidents alike.
Sultan Alamer, a Saudi academic, joked that Trump’s remarks sounded like they came from Frantz Fanon, a 20th century Marxist thinker who wrote about the dynamics of colonial oppression. Syrians posted celebratory memes when Trump announced that he would end American sanctions on their war-ravaged country “in order to give them a chance at greatness”.
And in Yemen — another country mired in war — Abdullatif Mohammed implied agreement with Trump’s notion of sovereignty, even as he expressed frustration with US intervention.
“When will countries recognise us and let us live like the rest of the world?” Mohammed, a 31-year-old restaurant manager in the capital, Sana, said when asked about the speech. American airstrikes pounded his city under both former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Trump, targeting the Iran-backed Houthi militia, until Trump abruptly declared a ceasefire this month.
“Who is Trump to grant pardons, lift sanctions on a country, or impose them?” Mohammed said. “But that’s how the world works.”
Trump’s remarks came at the start of a four-day jaunt through three wealthy Gulf Arab states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. He was focused in large part on business deals, including more than $1 trillion in investment in the US pledged by the three Gulf governments.
But his address in Riyadh made clear that he had broader diplomatic ambitions for his trip. He expressed a “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia follow the UAE and Bahrain to recognise the state of Israel. He said he had a keen desire to reach a deal with Iran , adding that he “never believed in having permanent enemies”.