President Donald Trump talked often during the 2024 presidential campaign about stopping “endless” wars in the Middle East. On Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, he took an astonishing step to do just that — by suggesting he might end America’s 46-year undeclared conflict with Iran.
The Washington Post
Trump the improviser has a head-spinning diplomatic week
In Saudi Arabia this week, at least, the president is pivoting toward the art of the realistic.
May 13, 2025
Trump’s comments in Saudi Arabia cap a remarkable few weeks in which he has bent policies, including his own, to accommodate what he evidently concluded were limits imposed by global reality.
Trump’s revisionism began Sunday with his climbdown from his trade war with China. He pared down the 145 percent tariffs he had imposed to 30 percent, just as he had earlier paused his broader global tariffs after they triggered a financial downturn. As the Wall Street Journal succinctly put it: “The president started a trade war with Adam Smith. He lost.”
My takeaway: Trump remains a disrupter and a dealmaker — with big ambitions for ending global conflicts and boosting America’s economy. He can also be a wrecker, as in many of his domestic policies that have savaged universities, law firms, medical research, government agencies and anyone on Trump’s retribution list. But abroad, he appears to have recognized the constraints imposed by the financial markets, the resistance of China and other big trading partners, the danger of wasting money on inconclusive wars, and the inescapable fact of global economic interdependence.
As Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia on the first extended foreign trip of his second term, he had the manner of a global grand vizier, involving himself in nearly every crisis — and, when necessary, adjusting his plans. For the moment, his approach is that of problem-solver rather than policeman. He has discovered, earlier than most presidents, the limits of U.S. military power and the dangers of headstrong allies. And, as the statement on Iran demonstrates, when he says “America First,” that precept applies to Israel, too.
“I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.” Trump said that in his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” But it’s a good description of his ad hoc foreign policy style today.
Trump’s appetite for deals appears boundless, and not just the $1 trillion in tribute he’s seeking from Saudi Arabia. His administration in recent weeks has frantically tried to mediate conflicts with Russia and Ukraine, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo — as well as Tuesday’s gesture to Iran.
Trump’s Middle East diplomacy has yielded some surprising gains. Special envoy Steve Witkoff negotiated with Hamas to secure Monday’s release of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander. Trump this month declared a surprise truce with the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And after landing Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, he announced an end to U.S. sanctions against Syria and a plan to meet President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who once led an al-Qaeda affiliate.
Trump’s “no permanent enemies” comment has deep roots in American history, back to George Washington’s call in his farewell address to avoid “entangling alliances.” It also echoes the hyperrealist “zero problems” approach to the region developed in recent years by the United Arab Emirates.
As Trump travels abroad this week, it’s worth looking at three recent case studies for hints about how the policies of Trump and Vice President JD Vance are evolving. To me, they intertwine strands of forward-leaning internationalism and wary neo-isolationism — the two themes that have been in conflict since Inauguration Day.
The first test was the trade war with China. Trump has an almost obsessional belief in high tariff walls, and he had unrealistically planned to finance his tax cuts with tariff revenue. A climbdown made pragmatic sense, given the reaction of global financial markets and even Republican members of Congress.
Trump wasn’t wrong to want a “rebalancing” that reduces China’s massive trade surplus, but the “consultation mechanism” announced after the weekend’s U.S.-China bargaining in Geneva seems more show than substance.
If you doubt that China was the winner here, contrast two post-deal statements. President Xi Jinping almost crowed that “bullying and tyranny will only lead to self-isolation.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who negotiated the Geneva deal, came close to eating humble pie with his conciliatory, “We have a shared interest … neither side wanted a decoupling.” (One significant unannounced outcome: Bessent’s triumph over hawkish trade adviser Peter Navarro in the White House influence game.)
A second intriguing reality check was Trump’s climbdown against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who had been attacking shipping in the Red Sea. On March 15, with his usual bombast, Trump posted a warning: “To all Houthi terrorists. YOUR TIME IS UP. YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU.”
But hell only lasted a month. Vance had warned the day before the first attack, “I think we are making a mistake. … There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” according to the Signal chat published by the Atlantic. Trump launched the campaign, but, according to the New York Times, he then demanded an accounting after 30 days: It turned out that U.S. Central Command had spent $1 billion on the campaign, firing superexpensive munitions at Houthis hiding in caves.
Trump declared victory on May 5 and halted the Yemen campaign, even though Israel was still under Houthi fire. The revelatory Times article said he had concluded it “was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.”
A final surprising Trump global engagement was the diplomatic intervention to prevent a potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Here again, Vance began as a skeptic. “We’re not going to get involved in the middle of a war that’s fundamentally none of our business,” he told Fox News on Thursday.
But Vance and Trump reversed course. By the weekend, India and Pakistan were rapidly climbing the escalation ladder, with India striking near a Pakistani nuclear compound and Pakistan convening a nuclear war council. Vance intervened with India, which he had just visited with his wife and children. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked top officials in Pakistan. The result was a U.S.-brokered ceasefire.
Having trouble following the plot? Recall Trump’s comment in September during the campaign: “I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together.”
That sounded like utter nonsense at the time, and I wouldn’t bet the ranch — or Israel’s security — on the outcome. But American foreign policy has been stuck within a set of fixed parameters for several decades. And it’s worth giving them a fresh look.