Only a few years ago, Washington was calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its headline-making human rights violations. Western business leaders canceled investments in the kingdom. Celebrities and sports stars took flack for doing events there.
With its oil and its regional clout, however, Saudi Arabia proved too useful for the Biden administration to push the kingdom away for too long. And just a few weeks into the second term of President Trump, who nurtured a cozy relationship with the kingdom when he was last in office, Saudi Arabia’s stock is once again on the rise — even if Mr. Trump’s approach to the region is not always to the Saudis’ liking.
This week, all of the diplomacy is in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital. On Friday, Arab leaders are expected to gather to hammer out a counterproposal meant to persuade Mr. Trump not to deport all of the some two million people in Gaza to Arab countries, mainly Egypt and Jordan, and transform the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
On Tuesday, senior American and Russian officials met in Riyadh for opening talks over ending the war in Ukraine and re-establishing normal relations, another major foreign policy priority of Mr. Trump’s. The Russian delegation was based at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, once locked up hundreds of powerful businessmen and royal family members in an early quest to consolidate power. (Saudi Arabia said it was a crackdown on corruption.)
This time, Saudi Arabia was presenting a very different image, facilitating the talks on Tuesday with a lunch menu of Arab and Western specialties that included a “symphony of scallop, shrimps and salmon” and knafeh cheesecake, according to Russian state television.
“Country of peace,” read the hashtag accompanying some social media posts about the Tuesday talks from government and state media accounts. Others had a hashtag calling the kingdom “capital of world decisions.”
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