Has Trump really concluded Gulf offers worth 2 TN?

Coming home after his Gulf trip last week, President Donald Trump told journalists “who was an excellent four days, four historic days”.

By visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (Water), he added in this brass brassman that “jobs and money coming to our countries, there has never been such”.

Trump said he was able to get more than 2 TV (1.5 tn £) for the United States, but do the figures add up?

The journey itself was an extravagance, the three Gulf states pulling all stops.

Escorts of fighter planes, extravagant reception ceremonies, a salvation of 21 thunderous cannons, a fleet of Tesla cybertrucks, royal camels, Arab horses and sword dancers were all part of the ceremonial.

The United Arab Emirates also awarded Mr. Trump the greatest civil honor in the country, the order of Zayed.

The optics of the visit were striking; The richest petrostats in the region have displayed their opulence, revealing how ready they were to deploy to strengthen links with the United States while advancing their own economic objectives.

Before embarking on the trip, President Trump, who appeared as a “chief deal” was clear that the main objective of the trip was to invest billions of dollars. At first glance, he succeeded.

In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman reiterated a commitment to invest $ 600 billion in American-Saudi partnerships. There was a plethora of agreements announced in this, encompassing arms, artificial intelligence (AI), health care, infrastructure projects and scientific collaborations and various links and security initiatives.

The $ 142 billion defense agreement attracted a large part of the attention because it was described by the White House as the largest weapon agreement of all time.

However, there remains a doubt as to whether these investment figures are realistic.

During his first mandate from 2017 to 2021, Trump announced that Saudi Arabia had accepted $ 450 billion in agreement with the United States.

But the real trade and investment flows amounted to less than $ 300 billion between 2017 and 2020, according to data compiled by the Arab Gulf States Institute.

The report was written by Tim Callen, the former chief of the mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Saudi Arabia, and now invited scholarship holder to the Arab Gulf States Institute.

“The proof with all these (new) offers will be in pudding,” explains Mr. Callen.

The BBC contacted the White House to comment.

In Qatar, Trump announced an “economic exchange” worth at least 1.2 TN. However, in the information sheet published by the offers of the White House worth $ 243.5 billion between the two countries was mentioned.

One of the Qataric agreements that was confirmed was Qatar Airways buying up to 210 passenger jets for $ 96 billion at the Boeing American aircraft manufacturer.

The White House said that the agreement would support 154,000 jobs in the United States each year of their production, totaling a million jobs during the life cycle of the agreement.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates have signed an agreement to build the largest IA campus in the world outside the United States, which would have given it access to 500,000 advanced micropuices of the American giant Nvidia, from next year.

This project is in the wider commitment of water to invest $ 1.4 TN in the United States in the next decade.

In addition to the challenge of delivering what is promised, another potential obstacle to these figures made are oil prices.

Oil prices have dropped to a four -year hollow in April in the growing concerns that Trump prices could alleviate global economic growth. The decline was further fed by the group of oil producing nations, OPEC +, announcing plans to increase production.

For Saudi Arabia, the drop in world oil prices since the beginning of the year has still set its finances, increasing pressure to increase debt or reduce expenses to maintain its development objectives.

Last month, the IMF reduced forecasts for the greatest growth in the oil exporter in the world in 2025 to 3% compared to its previous estimate of 3.3%.

“It will be very difficult for Arabia to find this kind of money (the $ 600 billion announced) in the current oil prices environment,” added Mr. Callen.

Other analysts note that many agreements signed during the trip were non -binding understanding of understanding, which are less formal than contracts and are not always translated into real transactions. And some of the transactions included in the agreement were announced earlier.

Saudi oil company Aramco, for example, announced 34 agreements with American companies valued up to $ 90 billion. However, most of them were non -binding understanding of understanding without specified monetary commitments.

And its purchase agreement of 1.2 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas each year for 20 years of the American company NextDecade was also included in the list of new offers, although it was announced months ago.

However, massive investments mark a continuation of change in the American-burf relationship far from oil for stronger economic partnerships anchored in bilateral investments.

Bader Al Saif, deputy professor at the University of Kuwait and associate researcher at Think Tank Chatham House, says that transactions indicate that the United States and the Gulf States “predict the future together and that it was an important change for the relationship”.

He adds that AI deals with Saudi water and Arabia was at the heart of that because “they clearly demonstrate that they try to see how to build the new world order and the new way of doing things together”.

This emphasis puts on AI highlights the growing strategic importance of technology for American diplomacy. Trump was accompanied by the trip by Sam Altman, the boss of Openai, Jensen Huang de Nvidia and Elon Musk, owner of Grok Ai.

And on the eve of the visit, the White House abandoned the severe restrictions of the Biden era on exports of the advanced American semiconductors necessary to best execute the AI ​​systems. The rules had divided the world into levels, some countries with wide access to its high -end chips, and others have refused.

About 120 countries, including the Gulf nations, were grouped in the middle, facing strict ceilings on the number of semiconductors they could import. This had frustrated countries like Saudi Arabia, which have ambitions to become high -tech savings when they move away from oil.

Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are rushing to build large -scale AI data centers, while Abhabi, the capital of water, aims to become a center of global AI.

The United Arab Emirates have made visible efforts to reassure Washington – Deepening partnerships with American technological companies, limiting links with Chinese companies and aligning themselves more closely with American national security interests.

Mr. Al-Saif says that the United Arab Emirates “bet on the Americans with regard to AI”. “We have seen that the technological turn in the 90s came from the United States anyway.”

The two camps greet the visit as a triumph. For the Gulf, and in particular Saudi Arabia, he resets a partnership that has efforated under Biden, and underlines his ambition to act as heavyweight players on the world scene.

For Trump, praising “billions of billions” in new investments offers a timely boost – its pricing increases have worked world trade and pushed American production in its first quarterly decrease in three years.

These Gulf offers will be sold as proof that its economic gaming book works.

At the end of the trip, Trump feared that anyone succeeding him to the White House claim the credit for transactions once they are finished.

“I will be seated at the house, who devil knows where I will be, and I will say:” I did this “”, he said.

“Someone will take credit for this. You remember, the press,” he said, pointing to himself, “this guy did it.”