President Trump will welcome Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to the White House on Tuesday, rolling out state-visit-level pomp for a leader intent on acquiring stealth fighter jets, security assurances and economic promises from his host.
Prince Mohammed will arrive at the White House with some of his objectives already accomplished: Mr. Trump said on Monday that he intended to sell F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom, flouting concerns raised by the Pentagon about the risks involved with selling the technology to an ally that has a security partnership with China.
“They want to buy,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “They like us very much.”
The visit represents a striking diplomatic turnabout for the crown prince, who has not been on U.S. soil since 2018, the same year a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, was killed and dismembered by Saudi agents in Istanbul. During the Biden administration, U.S. intelligence officials released a report determining that the crown prince had ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, but the White House declined to take direction against the crown prince.
Prince Mohammed has denied his involvement, and Mr. Trump has treated him not like a pariah but as a business partner. Before the visit, a host of other agreements are in process, including one on artificial intelligence, a mutual defense pact and an agreement that would eventually offer Saudi Arabia access to the United States’ nuclear technology.
On his end of the deal, Mr. Trump is prepared to promote the details of an earlier promise by the kingdom to invest some $600 billion in the United States, an agreement the White House announced when he visited Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last spring.
According to a White House official familiar with the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it, Prince Mohammed is not receiving a state visit because he is not the head of state, a distinction that lies with his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Still, the visit comes with all the trappings of one.
Leading up to his visit with Mr. Trump, the crown prince was offered Blair House, a typical lodging place across from the White House for visiting dignitaries, according to a person familiar with the offer. He will be treated to a welcome ceremony and a black-tie dinner at the White House, with business leaders and lawmakers, later on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, he will travel with Mr. Trump to a business investment conference in Washington.
The two men are prepared to sign deals related to bolstering Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence industry by investing in American technology, as well as move forward with an agreement to proceed with plans that would eventually allow the Saudis to develop nuclear power, potentially paving the way for allowing the kingdom to enrich uranium.
The cash and pomp obscured some of the thornier details of the agreements Mr. Trump is prepared to make. His willingness to sell American-made military technology must first overcome production bottlenecks and get congressional approval. (The crown prince is expected to meet with congressional leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, while he is in Washington.) Mr. Trump is likely to encounter criticism from other allies, namely Israel, for his willingness to sell the U.S. military’s top technology to the Saudis. There are also concerns that China could eventually gain access to it.
In the background, the Trump family business has also reaped the benefits of working closely with Saudi Arabia. This week, the Trump Organization and its Saudi-based development partner, Dar Al Arkan, announced a new project allowing cryptocurrency investors to buy into Trump-branded real estate projects using digital tokens that can be bought and sold on a blockchain platform. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who has been helping with the Middle East peace process, runs a private equity firm that has taken $2 billion from a fund led by the crown prince.
And then there is Mr. Trump’s pursuit of world peace, which includes normalizing the Saudi-Israeli relationship. Trump administration officials, riding high on the fragile truce brokered between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in October, have also been clamoring for the kingdom to join the Abraham Accords, a set of diplomatic agreements that normalized relations between Israel and three Arab states during the first Trump administration.
Those proposals are certain to be blocked, for now, by a crown prince who has been unmoved by the tenuous nature of the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Trump has repeatedly mentioned the importance of normalizing Saudi and Israeli relations to Prince Mohammed, but he is not expected to sign on to any related accord during this visit, according to officials familiar with the particulars of the visit. Instead, he is expected to push the president on helping to resolve the conflict in Sudan, according to a person familiar with the plan.
On Monday, the United Nations Security Council approved Mr. Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, a major diplomatic victory for the White House. To fulfill the rest of his 20-point plan and his desire to increase participation in the Abraham Accords, Mr. Trump will need to keep the Saudis engaged on the issue of normalizing relations with Israel and rebuilding Gaza.
“Part of his incentive is to wine and dine the Saudi leadership and lay the groundwork for that eventuality of normalizing with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, a foreign policy think tank. But, he added, “from the Saudi point of view, they’re getting a lot of the package that had been put forward, without normalizing.”
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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