What's it all about, really? Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Saudi King Salman, US First Lady Melania Trump and President Donald Trump in Riyadh. Credit:Saudi Press Agency via AP Travelling Trump has been long on rhetoric and short on detail. Yet a subtext is emerging from much of what he had to say in the Middle East. Speaking in Jerusalem of "the ultimate deal", Trump offered something that Netanyahu and the Arab monarchies really, really want – to see Iran corralled – to make them deliver on the Palestinian deal that has eluded a succession of US presidents. "[Trump's offering] a great alliance against Iran – but it needs a Palestinian deal," Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran and adviser to four presidents, told Fairfax Media. Trump's new love of all things Saudi - including the idea of an Arab NATO, his doubts about the European version notwithstanding - is being attributed to Riyadh's assiduous, post-election lobbying in Washington, an effort that seems to have caught Israel flat-footed.

Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Credit:AP Historically, Israel has sought to exclude any foreign involvement - save for Washington - from its negotiation with the Palestinians. But by the time, as he put it, Trump "got back from the Middle East" to Israel, the President wanted it known that he and his new Sunni friends saw an Israeli settlement with the Palestinians as essential to a new regional alignment. In persuading Trump to make Riyadh his first stop on his first overseas trip, Saudi King Salman was able to dust off Riyadh's moribund, 15-year-old proposal to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – recognition of Israel by the 22-member Arab League in return for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 truce lines; the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a Palestinian state – with East Jerusalem as its capital; and a "just" solution on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump review an honour guard in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Credit:AP The President dodged talk of recognising disputed Jerusalem as Israel's capital – "that's an idea", he told Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, a champion of the settlers, as though it was the first time he had heard it.

The Saudis, Riedel says, "played Trump like a fiddle". Still nauseous over the nuclear deal with Tehran, by which then President Barack Obama and other world powers freed Iran from isolation and a raft of crippling economic sanctions, King Salman feted and flattered Trump, rounding up dozens of Arab and Muslim leaders to celebrate his arrival in the birthplace of Islam - the religion Trump repeatedly traduced as a candidate. Donald Trump meets with Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa in Riyadh on May 21. Credit:AP There has been something of a thaw between Israel and the Gulf states, driven by mutual worries about Iran. At the same time, the Palestinian cause has been relegated in regional priorities by the immediacy of war and chaos in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, and the impact of low oil prices. Yet at stops in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Trump made not a single mention of the much-vaunted two-state solution or any other preferred outcome between Israelis and Palestinians; and nothing about Jewish settlements, or of the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. This image provided by an activist who requested anonymity shows people carrying a man injured in a police raid on a sit-in, in Diraz, Bahrain, on Tuesday.

In his Riyadh speech, Trump argued that defeating extremist ideology and terrorism "transcends every other consideration". But just as his predecessor George W. Bush selected Iraq as an enemy of choice when he might have focused solely on al-Qaeda - with disastrous consequences - Trump's decision to focus on Iran raises fears that his eye might be taken off Islamic State. Bahraini security forces during a raid on the sit-in demonstration in Diraz. An activist said one protester was killed. And by abandoning even a pretense of fealty to the human rights of people in the region, Trump defaulted to a military-only response to terrorism, thereby empowering corrupt and calcified autocracies to use their mostly US-supplied and trained security apparatuses to brutally suppress minorities and stamp out political opposition. Any doubt about Trump's acceptance of force as a first response was allayed by the coincidental release in Manila of the transcript of a phone call Trump placed to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, to congratulate him on the government-sanctioned slaughter of thousands of drug suspects: "I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem … what a great job you're doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that."

Shares of three major US defence contractors - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon - hit all-time highs after US President Donald Trump bestowed Saudi Arabia with a $US110 billion arms deal. Credit:AP In Bahrain, where a Shiite majority is locked down by a minority Sunni monarchy propped up by Saudi Arabian troops, the response to Trump's speech was immediate: one of the harshest crackdowns since the "Arab Spring" protests of 2011, leaving five dead and hundreds in detention. Trump invariably gets into trouble for what he says. But like many commentators, Riedel was troubled more by what the President did not say in Riyadh. Ashwaq and Areej al-Harby, Saudi teenagers who tried to flee their family alleging they were abused. Credit:Twitter Riedel writes: "[Trump] did not discuss Saudi Arabia's decades of promoting intolerance and extremism in the Muslim world. Human rights and gender equality were given little attention. The focus was on the Muslim world uniting behind Washington and Riyadh against terrorism and Iran."

The rights of Saudi citizens are circumscribed; the public practice of any religion other than Islam is banned; and the worst crimes are punished by IS-style beheadings, with the amputation of limbs and public lashings for lesser infractions. And lest there be another outbreak of popular sentiment in the region, the regime busies itself propping up thuggish security regimes in Bahrain and Egypt. Supporters of President Hassan Rouhani celebrate his re-election holding a sign that reads "Rouhani 100%". Credit:Getty Images Fifteen of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis; as many as 2500 Saudis signed up as IS fighters; and when IS was searching for school texts to match its cruel and intolerant outlook, where did it go? To Saudi Arabia, home of the puritanical 18th-century strain of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Farah Pandith, who served both the Bush and Obama administrations, reported after travels in 80 countries as an envoy to Muslim communities: "In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence, changing the local sense of identity; displacing historic, culturally vibrant forms of Islamic practice; and pulling along individuals who were either paid to follow [Wahhabi] rules or who, on their own, became custodians of the Wahhabi world view. Illustration: Richard Giliberto

"Funding all this was Saudi money, which paid for things like the textbooks, mosques, TV stations and the training of imams." In examining Trump's call to "drive them [the terrorists and extremists] out", expert advisers to previous Republican administrations were scathing. Former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke said: "Unless governments and Islamic religious leaders can address the underlying causes of the terrorist movements, they will be unable to 'drive them out'. "Oppressive regimes that attempt to solve the terrorist problem simply with force actually strengthen the terrorist's cause, by pushing more young men to the cause. Thus, Trump's blank cheque to do whatever it takes to 'drive them out' will actually make things worse." In explaining why a military approach would fail, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams pointed to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia: "Trump complimented Bahrain in his speech, saying it 'is working to undermine recruitment and radicalism'. This is quite wrong. The Sunni royal family's oppression of the country's [Shiite] majority is in fact creating a breeding ground for radicalism and opening a door for Iranian subversion.

"Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Islam is at least a gateway drug for extremism … [this] version of Islam treats unbelievers with contempt and often hatred, oppresses women, and opposes democracy." Scholars too were strident in their criticism – among them, Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We are picking one side in this geopolitical struggle, and there is very little room for grey," he said. "Sectarianism is a byproduct of this geopolitical rivalry … It is feeding into the Gulf [Arab] narrative, where they project a lot of their insecurities about domestic politics outward and onto the Islamic Republic of Iran, but is Iran the source of all evil in the region? No." In the affairs of a region where transnational interference is de rigueur, Iran is no saint. But the error of Trump's new stand, as analysts see it, is his heaping of blame for all of the region's ills on Shiite Tehran, especially in an era in which the vast bulk of terrorist attacks in the region and the world are by the Sunni adherents of IS and al-Qaeda. While Trump drew his line between good and evil, Iranians were dancing in the streets to celebrate an election in which they had voted by the million to re-elect Hassan Rouhani, a reform-minded president, who in response to the lashing from Trump in Riyadh quipped that Saudis had never seen a ballot box.

Loading For all the shortcomings of Iran's mullah-controlled quasi-democracy, the election outcome was a clear message to the ageing theocrats and the world that Iranians want their place in the community of nations and some of the fresh air that the rest of us enjoy. And for Trump to berate Iran for its lack of human rights, while addressing the assembled dictators of the Sunni Arab world, tells us that in a region awash with firearms, Trump's grand design is no silver bullet.