May 19, 2017 | Policy Brief

Trump Travels to Saudi Arabia to Tackle Extremism

May 19, 2017 | Policy Brief

Trump Travels to Saudi Arabia to Tackle Extremism

President Donald Trump departs today on his first trip abroad since his inauguration. He will spend the weekend in Saudi Arabia, where his conversations with Muslim leaders are expected to focus on combating terrorism and the extremism that feeds it. The visit provides a significant opportunity to start working with Riyadh to address religious incitement and to identify new joint efforts for pushing back against Iranian aggression in the region.

On Saturday, Trump will hold meetings with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and each of the king’s two heirs. He will also participate in a signing ceremony for bilateral agreements on economic and security cooperation. On Sunday, Trump will meet with leaders from the six Gulf monarchies, followed by a summit with representatives of approximately 50 Arab- or Muslim-majority countries. At that summit, he plans to deliver “an inspiring yet direct speech on the need to confront radical ideology.”

Both sides have billed the president’s visit as “historic,” in large part due to his speech to Muslim leaders and his plan to close a massive arms sale to the Saudis estimated at $110 billion over ten years. However, these initiatives are not exactly breaking new ground. In June 2009, President Obama delivered a similarly hyped speech addressing the Muslim world from Cairo after a brief stop in Riyadh. Obama also sold $115 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia over eight years.

Of course, Trump will diverge significantly from Obama by using his speech this Sunday to urge Muslim states to take a tougher line against Iran. He arrives in the kingdom having recently authorized limited military action against forces of the Iranian-backed Assad regime in Syria. But efforts to craft a more integrated approach to the Iranian challenge are still ongoing.

The president will also call for new efforts to “defeat terrorist groups and discredit radical ideologies” in the Sunni world as well. Earlier this week, Trump’s national security adviser asserted that inaugurating a counter-extremism center this weekend proves that the kingdom is “taking a firm stand against extremism and those who use a perverted interpretation of religion” to achieve their agendas. But Trump should push the Saudis further by calling upon them to remove intolerant passages that remain in their current, government-published school textbooks – such as calls for “fighting” infidels and polytheists. He should also urge Saudi Arabia to withdraw broadcasting licenses from Salafist television stations that broadcast intolerant messages internationally, and halt governmental gestures of support to preachers who propagate religious incitement.

Trump is unfortunately not expected to raise human rights during his visit, despite having criticized Saudi Arabia last year for its treatment of women and LGBT individuals. On the other hand, he does seem to be following through on pressing Saudi Arabia to invest in the U.S. (he described the kingdom in 2016 as a “money machine”). Since his inauguration, Riyadh has agreed to invest up to $200 billion in the United States. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump encouraged the Saudis to focus much of this spending on Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister boasted that Trump’s decision to visit his country before all other nations shows America’s “respect of the wise leadership of the kingdom” and that Riyadh is America’s “first partner” versus terrorism and extremism. Trump should encourage the Saudis to live up to that bold claim. He has a major opportunity to build a concrete agenda for tackling religious incitement as well as constraining the regional aggression of Iran. The success of his trip will depend on it.

David Andrew Weinberg is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAWeinberg.