Trump's Middle East "deals" are a sham

His first overseas trip is just a distraction from chaos at home

May 19, 2025

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Donald Trump has just rounded off his first overseas trip, which was to the Middle East. While there he was a busy boy - he set off a remarkable improvement in relations with Syria’s new Islamist ruler, announced progress in talks with Iran, and supposedly secured more than $2tn in investment agreements.

I want to mostly focus on those investment agreements, but first it’s worth saying something about Syria and Iran. There’s sometimes a certain “Nixon goes to China” quality to Trump’s actions, where he is able to do something that another president (particularly a Democrat) would get eviscerated for (as Alex Stein has pointed out). Lifting sanctions on a regime headed by a former member of Al-Qaeda and reopening nuclear talks with Iran (all on a trip during which he didn’t even bother to visit Israel) is definitely an example of this.

You can imagine someone making the argument that Trump is a genuine peacenik who has managed to change the Republican Party’s approach to foreign policy for the better, but I think the lack of criticism that Trump gets is mostly due to the fact he’s transformed his party into a personality cult which is too scared to criticize him. And as always with Trump, people see in his diplomatic mood swings what they want to see.

I’m glad he lifted the sanctions and I’d be glad to see new nuclear talks with Iran. But the problem is always that Trump’s lack of focus and competence makes it much less likely that anything meaningful will ultimately emerge from these gestures.

So onto the “$2tn in deals”. I’ve seen a lot of breathless takes about this in the past week, the main message of which is that Trump has “redefined the overseas trip” and “revolutionized American diplomacy”. Often these takes come from business types who are very impressed that the president put so much energy into (they think) enabling the private sector to make deals. They see it as a new type of mercantilism, where the power of the state is used to boost companies.

I’ve seen takes the likes of which you have never dreamed

There are a lot of places to start criticizing this from. If you want to do it from the level of principle, you can point out that while helping companies exploit commercial opportunities is certainly something the American government should be doing, it is hardly the cornerstone of American foreign policy. Nor should it be. Large corporations are pretty smart and perfectly capable of finding opportunities on their own, and if they need the help of the state then they know how to ask for it. It’s great that embassies have commercial bureaus to help them. But the attention of the president really ought to be on bigger things.

If you dig a little deeper into people celebrating Trump’s approach, what you really find is a fairly disturbing worldview in which it is the job of Trump the Strongman to boost the Economy through Deals. It’s a celebration of the glitz and glamour (and power) of the personality cult around Trump, the cult which says he is reshaping the American and global economy through the force of his genius. It’s a cult which says America needs a strongman to do this.

But the thing is, it really doesn’t. Trump inherited an incredibly strong economy in which large American corporations were not having great trouble making large overseas investments. Trump has then spent much of the time since his inauguration trashing that economy through tariffs. In fact, in a nice piece of symmetry, $2tn is the value of overseas investment into the U.S. that is threatened by Trump’s tariffs.

The administration clearly hopes that tales of Trump’s deal-making prowess in the Middle East will provide a positive economic narrative to offset stories of the impact that his policies are having on the economy at home.

But there’s another problem with these tales: they’re largely fictional because most of that $2tn figure either had already been pledged, is made up, or will never actually materialize, as per The Washington Post:

As Air Force One touched down in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the White House released daily lists of the dozens of deals it said Trump had secured during his visits. But at least half a dozen of the contracts were announced before Trump even took office in January, according to a Washington Post review of the announcements.
The math behind the White House’s claim that Trump secured “trillions” on this trip is fuzzy even including the contracts that predate his presidency. The sum of the deals is under $1 trillion, but the White House is also counting announcements it made months before the trip, including a vague plan that the UAE said would result in $1.4 trillion in investment in the United States over the next decade. The UAE and White House previously announced that deal in March.
Officials in Saudi Arabia and the UAE included deals that predated Trump’s presidency in their announcements to inflate the investment figures, according to an official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private discussions.
One businessman with close ties to Saudi Arabia described the creative math underway in Riyadh ahead of Trump’s visit. The Saudi royal court contacted “all the top businessmen” in the gulf nation “and they were asked: ‘How much have you invested in the United States in the last two years? How much have you put in the United States in any kind of investment — real estate, stocks, bonds?” the businessman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize those close ties. The implication, he added, was that the Saudi government was seeking to assemble a set of numbers that could be included in the total investments announced during Trump’s visit.

Now, none of this is unusual, even in normal administrations. Presidents want bilateral summits to make a big splash and companies want presidents to like them, so it’s very common for a load of investment deals which were going to happen anyway to be announced as part of a large package during a state visit. It’s equally common to make vague promises of future investment for the same reason. Most administrations would put a more believable figure on it than $2tn, but they engage in basically the same practice.

But what’s different with Trump is the number of people who fanatically want us to believe that (a) this lie is true and (b) the supposed success of the trip is down to the unique prowess of Donald Trump. The people selling this story are the same ones who always want you to believe that Trump is “a genius dealmaker” with “a method to his madness”. They want us to believe, I guess, that Trump somehow personally took these multiple complex business deals spanning a dozen industries across the line.

For me - and I suspect most readers of this newsletter - it is axiomatic that this is just not true. But what I find particularly funny about this portrayal of Trump is that it would be difficult to find anyone in professional Republican Party or (non-MAGA) conservative movement politics in Washington, D.C. who is not a paid Trump shill who believes it either. You only have to have watched Trump’s public career to know that it’s not true. So if you’re out there in the world making this argument and Donald Trump is not directly paying you to do it, I can only assume that you really haven’t a clue what is really going on.

There’s also a lesson that the administration should heed, one from history. Many a president has gone searching abroad for the success that they have been unable to find at home. It has worked out for precisely zero of them. Best to focus on getting those tariffs lifted and avoiding a recession rather than on desert mirages.