Fire and Fury in the Gulf

Abstract

Amid the fire and fury of Michael Wolff’s explosive account of the Trump presidency so far, readers hoping for greater insight into some of the international controversies of his first year in office were left wanting more than the few pages on the president’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel. Wolff suggests that the ‘Trump Doctrine’ boiled down to a transactional ‘If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want’, and that Saudi Arabia had become a test case to put it into action. Yet beyond a few platitudes about the ties between Jared Kushner and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Wolff did not dwell on the runup to and the aftermath of the Riyadh Summit that Trump attended in May 2017. This is an omission because the outreach by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the then-incoming administration provides a cautionary tale about the conduct of foreign policy in the Age of Trump.