Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, former Saudi ambassador to the United States, has written an open letter to President-elect Donald Trump asking him to “finish what you started the last time you occupied the White House” with respect to Middle Eastern affairs.
Prince Turki, who was the ambassador to the United States from 2005-2007 and also served as director of Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence service, buttered Trump up in the opening paragraph of his letter:
After your remarkable and outstanding victory in an election campaign marked by lawfare waged against you and a fear-inspiring verbal assault aimed at the American people warning them not to vote for you, you prevailed against those challenges and the American people gave you their trust and confidence to lead them to what you promised to give them, a better America. You also overturned the Senate majority from the other party to yours and brought your party within striking distance of a House majority.
I am gratified that the American election system worked so smoothly and decisively to determine the winners from the losers, unlike the contentious one before.
These facts give your friends and allies around the world the confidence that your leadership will be as decisive as the election results and put to rest the arguments of those who contend America is on the wane.
Having laid the groundwork by ticking off every box on the “How to Get Invited to Mar-a-Lago” checklist – his comment about the “contentious” 2020 election was an especially nice touch – Prince Turki asked Trump to direct his attention to the “hot spots” that surround Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. He noted those spots were a good deal cooler before President Joe Biden took office.
“When you left in January 2021, there was no war in Gaza, Iran and Israel were not firing missiles at each other, the Houthis were not interdicting shipping in Bab Al Mandab, there was no civil war in Sudan,” Turki pointed out.
The Saudi prince’s tone became a little rougher when discussing Israel’s campaign against the terrorists of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – a war the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, denounced as “genocide” on Tuesday.
“Although Israel has decapitated the leadership of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter are still capable of killing Israeli soldiers and firing projectiles and other ordinance at Israel,” Turki said, handling the matter a bit more delicately than his crown prince, although he slipped in a jab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by calling him a warmonger.
Turki added the Gaza and Lebanon wars to the “bloodbath” in Ukraine to make the case that the world is “in more turmoil” than when Trump last held office.
“I believe God spared your life not only to deal with the situation inside the United States, which faces enormous challenges for you to overcome, but, because America is what it is, to work with your friends in Saudi Arabia and other friends you have in the area, to pursue what you started before: to bring PEACE, with capital letters, to the Middle East,” he told Trump.
Turki was a little vague about how Trump might smooth the turmoil of the Biden-Harris world, but he strongly implied Trump should renew his Abraham Accords peace initiative, which seemed on the verge of bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia together until Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. Indeed, many analysts believe one of the reasons Hamas perpetrated those atrocities was to prevent other Middle Eastern states from joining the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords.
“Before your first stay at the White House and until your return to it, America and other countries talked the talk about ending the bloodshed in the Middle East but they never walked the walk. You have a chance now to do precisely that,” Prince Turki grumbled in his letter to Trump.
“Take advantage of the four years to come and work with King Salman and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman to open the doors to peace for all of us,” he urged the president-elect.
The problem with that invitation is that Saudi officials and members of the royal family, including Prince Turki himself, have insisted normalization with Israel is impossible until a Palestinian state has been carved from Israeli territory. The Hamas atrocities made the Israelis less willing than ever to take that gamble.
In September 2024, Prince Turki told the London-based Chatham House think-tank that the October 7 attack derailed promising negotiations between Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States to “bring about a Palestinian state.”
“The Kingdom’s position has always been we won’t speak for the Palestinians. They have to do it for themselves. Unfortunately, of course, the Oct. 7 attack put an end to those talks,” he remarked.
Turki took a much tougher line against Israel in his September appearance at Chatham House than he did in his open letter to Trump. He criticized the U.S. and its allies for not applying more pressure against Israel, by going even further than an arms embargo.
“A lot of financial help goes to Israel from the US. If some of the privileges that (the) Israeli lobby, for example, in America, enjoys — of tax-free contributions to Israel — can be withdrawn from those Israeli lobbyists, that will (put) great pressure on Israel,” he suggested.
“There are many tools that are available to the US, not simply harsh talk, which seems to have gotten us nowhere. But is America ready to do that? As I said, I’m not too optimistic about that,” he said, less than two months before writing a letter to President-elect Trump that was brimming with optimism.
The BBC ventured on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf states are “aware of [Trump’s] closeness to Israel,” but they view him “much more favorably than Joe Biden,” and hope Trump’s “fondness for deal-making” might finally bring an end to the Gaza conflict.
