Trump Says Saudi Arabia Is ‘Disintegrating’

Via Middle East Eye

Saudi Arabia is “disintegrating”, US President Donald Trump said in an interview released on Friday, which is likely to offend the kingdom, as it suffers missile and drone strikes from Yemen’s Houthis.

Trump passed judgment on Saudi Arabia, one of the US’s closest allies, in an interview with Stephen A Smith, boasting he could destroy Iran in three days by attacking civilian infrastructure but that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have asked him not to because of their own weaknesses.

“If I want to take them out, I hit their [energy] in one day. Their energy is gone. In one day, their bridges are gone, and in one day, their manufacturing capability is gone. It would only take me three days, one day each,” Trump said.

“Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while because they’re disintegrating,” Trump said. “Qatar, if you look at that, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, all of them would much prefer the waiting period,” he added.

This is not the first time Trump has appeared to enjoy bragging about the leverage he has over Gulf states and, particularly, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia has relied on the US as its security guarantor since WWII. 

“He (MBS) didn’t think this was going to happen… he didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass… he thought it’d be just another American president that was a loser… but now he has to be nice to me,” Trump said in March, when the war on Iran was in full swing. 

‘Tremendous investors’

While Saudi Arabia avoided the worst impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran that saw smaller Gulf states pummelled with missiles and drones in retaliation, it has since come under attack from Houthis in Yemen.

A ceasefire there between the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government and the Iran-aligned Houthis collapsed over the summer, with fighting now raging. The Houthis have struck Saudi airports, energy infrastructure and cities. The strikes have forced the kingdom to cancel key conferences intended to promote its non-oil economy and have interfered with the export of energy supplies. 

Trump’s assessment about the negative impact of the war on Gulf states is shared by many analysts, but his own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, brushed off concerns this week that Gulf countries were suffering.

Trump noted that the Gulf states have invested “trillions of dollars” in the US. The US State Department approved the sale of up to 48 F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia in September, in a historic deal that could total $24bn.

“They’re tremendous investors in our country. They spend trillions of dollars in our country,” Trump said, regarding the Gulf. “The people that we’re here to protect would rather have me do it the way I’m doing it now”.

The Trump administration says it has no plans to resume a full-scale war on Iran, but intends to strangle its economy by blockading the Strait of Hormuz. The only oil that’s not getting out consistently, through the Strait of Hormuz, is Iranian oil,” Rubio said earlier this week. “The economic pressure on Iran is so devastating… that the president’s concluded… there’s no need for major combat operations”.