Blake Hounshell is the editor in chief of POLITICO Magazine.

Those who expected Donald Trump to fly into Riyadh and insult his Saudi hosts with the kinds of broadsides he delivered on the campaign trail against Islam and Muslims needn’t have worried.

The president who once accused Saudi Arabia of complicity in the 9/11 attacks praised its “magnificent” and “sacred land.” He looked comfortable trading pleasantries and sipping coffee with King Salman, the aging scion of the country’s founding ruler, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. He soaked up the gaudy chandeliers, the gilded wall trimmings. Trump even bobbed up and down during the ardah, the traditional sword dance that desert tribes once performed before they went into battle.


The images on TV and on Twitter looked like a Michael Moore fever dream — and Democrats couldn’t stop harping on the “curtsy” Trump made as he accepted an award from the Saudi king, just as Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did before him.

The pageantry was not subtle, but the real import of Trump’s visit, and especially his carefully crafted speech, was to announce a new alliance between America and the Sunni autocrats of the Arab world, aimed at Shiite Iran.

No more Bush-like paeans to “freedom” or even Obama-esque warnings about being on the “right side of history” — Trump dispensed with the usual presidential to-be-sures about the democratic shortcomings of America’s regional allies and said flatly that defeating terrorism “transcends every other consideration.”

“This is a battle between good and evil,” Trump declared in one of the speech’s more striking passages, which bore the unmistakable echo of Bush’s famous September 2001 declaration, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Elsewhere, he demanded that his audience “drive out the terrorists and extremists,” repeating the words “drive them out” several times for emphasis. He spoke of combating “wicked ideology” and “foot soldiers of evil,” phrases that would be right at home on an old David Frum notepad.

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Indeed, the speech had the flavor of an early Bush address, before his administration needed a rationale for spending billions to rebuild a shattered Iraq and the “Freedom Agenda” became the ostensible organizing principle of his second-term foreign policy.

Trump only hinted at the complicity of Gulf Arab regimes in promoting a radical, sectarian version of Islam, praising their apparent newfound willingness to crack down on extremism and terrorist financing. But he was explicit in condemning Iran, Saudi Arabia’s sworn enemy, for stoking “the fires of sectarian conflict and terror” in the region.

“Until the Iranian regime is willing to be a partner for peace,” he said, “all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism, and pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve.”

There was little effort to reach out to the 40 million Iranians who had just voted to reelect Hassan Rouhani, the pragmatic president who won by pledging greater openness to the world, albeit within the severe constraints of Iran’s theocratic system.

As for the Sunni monarchies and military dictatorships like that run by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, Trump promised to stop pestering them about human rights and political freedoms. “Our partnerships will advance security through stability, not through radical disruption,” he said. “And, wherever possible, we will seek gradual reforms — not sudden intervention.”

All that is exactly the kind of rhetoric the Sunni strongmen of the region yearned for during the Obama years, when the United States dialed back its usual criticism of Iran as it pursued the much-maligned nuclear deal, while pressuring Arab leaders to respond to the demands of their people.

Still, parts of the speech could have been given by either of Trump’s predecessors — respectful language about religion, the observation that Muslims have suffered the most from terrorism, the patronizing evocation of past civilizational glories, like the pyramids. What was missing, though, was any sense of why Trump thinks terrorism is on the rise, and how he plans to combat it.

It was as if, as former Bush administration official Elliott Abrams put it, the terrorists were aliens from outer space, rather than the twisted product of broken societies that have yet to divine how to stop churning them out. “He offered no explanation of what was producing this phenomenon,” Abrams noted in an email to my colleague Annie Karni. “Trump had no theory, and therefore could not suggest what might be done to prevent more extremists from rising.”

Bush, and advisers like Abrams, had a theory — that a lack of freedom and human development had created a malignancy in the Arab world, which in turn was spawning religious radicalism and terrorists. Obama seemed to buy into the idea, too — just ask Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak — though he sanded off the sharper edges of Bush’s rhetoric and lacked his messianic fervor. But where the Bush team spoke expansively about defeating Islamist ideology, Obama’s more risk-averse advisers aimed for narrower victories, like the “degradation” of specific terrorist groups. And they also made much of the need to curb the abuses of the Bush years, though an internal revolt against practices like waterboarding had already taken hold in his second term.

Very little of any of it, as Trump suggested on Sunday, has seemed to work, and he promised to “apply new approaches informed by experience and judgment.” But he also warned several times that the United States wouldn’t be bearing any burden or paying any price to vanquish the terrorists that he had once boasted would be quickly and easily defeated. “The nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them,” Trump said. “The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.”

Trump is offering, in short, a war on terror without the pretense of idealism. There has always been a strong odor of hypocrisy hanging over the U.S. relationship with regimes like Saudi Arabia, and perhaps there’s something refreshing in Trump’s “we are not here to lecture” candor.

The United States has, after all, very little real leverage or will to remake Arab societies in America’s image — particularly ones that buy $110 billion of our weapons. All too often, U.S. criticism of the democratic failings of its allies seems meant more for our domestic consumption than for foreign audiences, who have learned to tune it out. And presidents of both parties have almost always prioritized core U.S. interests — like the Iran nuclear deal over suffering Syrians — when forced to make a choice.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former speechwriter and foreign policy alter ego, got an earful on Twitter when he complained that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was foolish to slam Iran’s record on human rights while standing next to the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, whose record is arguably worse. “Really undercuts US credibility when it looks like we only raise human rights issues for geopolitical purposes,” he wrote.

“300,000 Syrians were unavailable for comment,” one Rhodes critic shot back.