Mr. Kerry met on Friday in Paris with his counterparts from the Arab nations that were invited to the summit meeting — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — to discuss what they were expecting from the summit meeting, and to signal what the United States was prepared to offer at Camp David.

But administration officials said that the Arab officials had pressed for a defense treaty with the United States pledging to defend them if they came under external attack. But that was always going to be difficult, as such treaties — similar to what the United States has with Japan — must be ratified by Congress.

Image Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi interior minister.

Instead Mr. Obama is prepared to offer a presidential statement, one administration official said, which is not as binding and which future presidents may not have to honor.

The Arab nations are also angry, officials and experts said, about comments Mr. Obama recently made in an interview with The New York Times, in which he said allies like Saudi Arabia should be worried about internal threats — “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances.”

At a time when American officials were supposed to be reassuring those same countries that the United States would support them, the comments were viewed by officials in the gulf as poorly timed, foreign policy experts said.

The Arab countries would also like to buy more weapons from the United States, but that also faces a big obstacle — maintaining Israel’s military edge. The United States has long put restrictions on the types of weapons that American defense firms can sell to Arab nations, in an effort to ensure that Israel keeps a military advantage against its traditional adversaries in the region.