President Donald Trump wrapped up a four-day Middle East trip on Friday, traveling to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
His first major foreign trip of his second term saw the U.S. secure more than $2 trillion in investment agreements in the Gulf region, according to the White House, as well as Trump announcing that he will move to lift U.S. sanctions in Syria.
Trump also said during the trip that he believed that the U.S. and Tehran are “getting close to maybe doing a deal” on Iran’s nuclear program and called on Qatar to use its influence to persuade Iran’s leadership to reach an agreement with the U.S. to dial back its rapidly advancing nuclear program.
The trip “creates some pretty interesting openings and opportunities,” Michael Hanna, the U.S. program director for the International Crisis Group, told ABC News.
“It looks like maybe the region, led by the Gulf, can have some really substantive, important input in shaping U.S. policy in a better direction,” he said, such as moving away from military conflict with Iran and the Houthis and engaging with Syria to stabilize the transition after the Assad family was removed from power.
But, he said, “one of the things that has been a huge problem for Trump, traditionally, is implementation and follow-through.”
President Donald Trump speaks at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Win Mcnamee/Getty Images
During Trump’s trip, the U.S. secured over $200 billion in commercial deals with the United Arab Emirates, more than $243.5 billion in economic deals and a $1.2 trillion economic exchange agreement with Qatar, and a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S., the White House said. Some of the deals focused on AI infrastructure, energy and defense.
“Increasingly, he’s convinced, as a former real estate developer and businessman, that pushing for expansion of America’s business interest should be the primary business of American government, so to speak. And he went there with that mission,” Manochehr Dorraj, a political science professor at Texas Christian University, told ABC News. “So far as that was a guiding principle, he took major strides toward achieving that goal.”
But, he noted, “the devil is always in the details.”
“We’ll see how that would pan out in practice,” Dorraj said.
Among his major announcements, Trump said during a keynote speech in Riyadh on Tuesday that he will order the cessation of U.S. sanctions against Syria, which has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. government since 1979, “in order to give them a chance at greatness.”
Following that announcement, there are “a lot of big question marks” in terms of implementation and follow-through, Hanna said.
“Some of these things he can do with the stroke of a pen,” Hanna said, while noting it’s unclear how his administration or Congress will react.
“He was pretty clear that this is happening, so I’m going to be keenly watching how first, [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio deals with this, because he can lift some of these sanctions with the stroke of a pen,” Hanna said. “There are other big issues with sectoral sanctions and the Caesar Act.”
“There’s a lot to unravel,” he said.
Syria’s interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa shakes hands with President Donald Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 14, 2025.
Bandar Aljaloud/Saudi Royal Palace via AP
Asked about the timeline on lifting the sanctions during remarks in Turkey on Thursday, Rubio said, “I was with the president when he made the decision to do this and included it in his speech. So we’ve been doing preparatory work in that regard.”
He said Trump intends to use waiver authorities under the Caesar Act, which have to be renewed every 180 days.
“Ultimately, if we make enough progress, we’d like to see the law repealed because you’re going to struggle to find people to invest in a country when in six months, sanctions could come back,” Rubio said. “We’re not there yet. That’s premature. I think we want to start with the initial waiver, which will allow foreign partners who wanted to flow in aid to begin to do so without running the risk of sanctions. I think as we make progress, hopefully we’ll be in a position soon, or one day, to go to Congress and ask them to permanently remove the sanctions.”
As negotiations are ongoing over Iran’s nuclear program, Hanna noted the technical and diplomatic effort that went into the negotiations over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal the Obama administration agreed to but which Trump pulled the U.S. out of three years later.
“Those negotiations were highly technical, highly detailed, very lengthy. And that’s not the way that Trump likes to operate, or [U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve] Witkoff, right? They’re not details guys. They’re the big picture, deal-making piece of it,” he said.
He added, “But for something like a nuclear agreement with Iran, there’s a lot that is required to make an agreement real, and that requires a lot of technical and diplomatic capacity. And if we got to that stage, it really would be a pretty big challenge — even if everybody got on the same page — to turn an agreement in principle into an agreement on paper.”
Dorraj said Trump’s transactional foreign policy can be an asset in the short term but “the drawback is there’s no long-term strategy.”
“These are quick initiatives,” he said. “The pragmatic part of it — ‘let’s see what works. Let’s see what will get us to the deal that we want. We will learn as we go along, and we will adopt and adjust as needed.’ Okay, so that can be an asset. But also you are zigzagging, flipflopping. You are changing course on a daily basis. Your parties you’re negotiating with, they’re on slippery ground. They don’t know what to count on, and that does not give us an image of continuity.”
