Commerce Over Chaos: US And Saudi Arabia Bet Trillions

Austin Bay on May 14, 2025

Commerce Over Chaos!

That's Donald Trump's MidEast strategy expressed as a peace and prosperity sound bite.

Will the sound bite bumperstick in reality?

Historical hint it might: ARAMCO: Arabian-American Oil Company (now Saudi ARAMCO, but, as Shakespeare asked, what's in a name?).

ARAMCO's a wealth and energy-producing historical stick that's stuck for eight decades -- since the 1940s for sure.

ARAMCO persisted through the chaos of World War II, through the nuclear-clouded Cold War, through wretched decades of Communist, Islamo-fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-American violence.

And the post-WWII creation of Israel.

Through these wickets of war ARAMCO persisted.

Why? Washington and Riyadh lived up to the contract.

ARAMCO attests to the benefits of honest business, wealth created despite cultural differences, heinous violence and media hysteria designed to shatter common interest.

How did it happen? I hope this story is true -- I've gotten it from multiple Arab, American and European sources. Allegedly, an adviser of King Abdul al Aziz ibn Saud (a British adviser) told the king the Brits and the French would cheat his Arab kingdom. But Americans? Those colonials will live up to the contract.

The Russians and Chinese never ever entered the conversation. (Draw your own historical conclusions as to why, but Moscow's and Beijing's 21st-century antics reflect 1,000 years of deceit.)

The modern oil bidnus (Texan word for business) originated in Pennsylvania, but it exploded in Texas and went supernova in Saudi Arabia.

Which is why ARAMCO's Western hemisphere headquarters is in Houston.

I rest my case. No, I don't. But that's a good intro into this week's serious Trump administration diplomacy.

Hard facts: Ayatollah Iran -- battered and chastened -- is still rhetorically at war with the world. Iran's Yemeni Houthi proxies are temporarily quiet. They say they have a ceasefire with the U.S. and global shipping (China, eastern Asia, Europe), but that doesn't apply to Israel.

The first Trump administration gave the world the Nobel Prize-worthy Abraham Accords, an extraordinarily inventive and initially productive diplomatic framework for normalizing relations between Israel and key Arab states.

The Biden-Harris administration's Middle East policy destroyed the Abraham Accords promise and its genuine initial progress. In a column written in 2021, I characterized the Biden-Harris administration's Middle East diplomacy as structurally incoherent and plagued by mixed messaging.

For the record, in February 2021, the Bidenites (given Joe's dementia, who was making these decisions in his name?) took the Houthis off the U.S. terrorist list.

Bidenite actors conceded the Abraham Accords were a decent idea -- but the ugly fact is they were not pursued because they were Trump's idea.

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Their behavior was arrogant, self-righteous, small and destructive.

However, the Abraham Accords concept continued to interest Israelis and Arabs. In mid-2023, Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly acknowledged someday he might be interested in Abraham Accord discussions. (See his interview with Fox News' Bret Baier.)

Then Hamas' evil October 2023 genocidal attack ended diplomacy. At the time I wrote a column calling the attack an Iranian operation to stop the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement.

And the Houthis started attacking ships in the Red Sea. Coordinated assault on commerce?

Yes.

Trump on May 13, after the Houthis told him no more: "After so many decades of conflict, finally it is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about -- a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation, and achievement right here in the Middle East."

Shakespeare or Trump?: "Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together -- not bombing each other out of existence."

Possible? Saudi Arabia and America are putting trillions on it.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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