Trump’s Iran war has left Gulf leaders keen to see the back of the US president
Amid the roiling diplomacy to end further chaos in world markets caused by the Israeli-American attacks on Iran, Saudi Arabia dipped into its pockets with a $3bn loan to Pakistan. This was no backsheesh moment; this was real politics in action, one which leaves US power yet further diminished.
Riyadh loaned Islamabad the money to meet a debt repayment obligation to the United Arab Emirates.
The support came in the nick of time, preventing a debt default to a neighbour and deep embarrassment when Pakistan is at the centre of global events.
It also comes as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, most of whom have deep economic ties to the Trump family and the US, are putting pressure on the 47th president to end his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is exported through the straits, as is the fossil fuel production from the rest of the Gulf region.
The Saudis can also get about four million barrels a week out through its 1,200-mile pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea.
But its economy risks being further crippled if that export opportunity to the west were to be cut or disrupted, as it has been in the past, by Yemen’s Iranian-allied Houthi rebels around the Bab el-Mandeb strait.
There has been no strategic upside to the Israeli-American attacks on Iran for Saudi Arabia or other Gulf nations.
Riyadh had been warming relations with Tehran and pivoting away from the US since the Obama administration.
Trump has made a theatrical effort to rekindle the commercial relationship with the region.
His first foreign trip in his first term was to the Saudi capital. Qatar reportedly gave him a new aeroplane; its investors have taken vast stakes in firms connected to his family and friends.
Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund put $2bn into Affinity Partners, a private equity shop opened by Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.
In January 2025, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the UAE president and chair of the emirates $1.5tn investment fund, invested $500m in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
A few days later, Trump lifted the ban on sales of Nvidia’s highest-end microchips to the UAE.
