President Donald Trump appealed for Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords against the backdrop of the US and Israel’s conflict with Iran in an address at an investment forum linked to the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.
“The Middle East will be transformed, and the future of that region is never, I don’t think it’s ever looked brighter,” Trump said Friday at the Future Investment Initiative Priority summit in Miami. “We did the Abraham Accords. I hope you’re going to be getting into the Abraham Accords finally.”
Trump cast Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as reluctant in the past to join the accords, agreements from his first term that normalized diplomatic relationships between Israel and some Middle East nations. But the US president indicated that with what he argued was a successful military campaign against Iran, “it’s now time.”
“We’ve now taken them out, and they are out bigly,” Trump said. “We got to get into the Abraham Accords.”
Momentum for normalizing relations with Israel stalled in recent years among its neighbors amid widespread backlash from Muslim-majority nations to Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which followed the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel.
The forum where Trump spoke draws business leaders and political figures and is organized by a group affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion Public Investment Fund with the aim of promoting investment opportunities in the kingdom. But Friday’s gathering has been overshadowed by the Iran war, which has sent energy prices soaring and the risk other nations will be draw into the conflict.
Trump on Friday said the war against Iran would transform the region, by eliminating a nuclear threat from Iran, benefiting US allies in the region and sparking an economic boom.
“We’re closer than ever to the rise of the Middle East that is finally free, at last, from Iranian terror aggression and nuclear blackmail,” he said. “For 47 years, Iran has been known as the bully of the Middle East, but they are not the bully any longer. They’re on the run.”
“We saved not just Israel, we saved the Middle East and it was proven by all those rockets that fired down upon you. Saudi Arabia got hit a lot,” Trump added, citing retaliatory drone and missile strikes from Iran on Gulf allies.
Read more: US, Israel Hit Nuclear Targets as Iran Vows Retaliation
Trump’s address comes a day after he extended a deadline for talks with Iran, announcing that he would hold off on plans to strike the country’s power infrastructure until April 6. The extension was the second Trump has offered since initially threatening on March 21 to hit Iranian energy sites if they did not swiftly reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The US president on Friday repeated his calls for Iran to reopen the strait and touted the negotiations with Tehran, even as he indicated that attacks on the Islamic Republic would continue, saying there were thousands of targets still left.
“We’re negotiating now, and be great if we could do something. But they have to open it up,” Trump said. He went on to refer to the waterway as the “Strait of Trump.”
“Excuse me. I’m so sorry. Such a terrible mistake,” he continued. “The fake news will say he accidentally said — No, there’s no accidents with me. Not too many.”
The US and Israeli war on Iran has put Saudi Arabia in a delicate situation. The kingdom is among the Gulf nations targeted by retaliatory attacks from the Islamic Republic. Iranian strikes have hit Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil refinery at Ras Tanura, and repeatedly targeted the Shaybah oil field, which has capacity to produce 1 million barrels of crude a day.
The Saudi crown prince has been pushing Trump to continue the war, according to a report in the New York Times, seeing it as an historic opportunity to remake the region. The Saudi government, though, has denied that the prince is seeking to extend the conflict.
Yasir Al Rumayyan, the top official at the Saudi wealth fund, has said it remains committed to investing around the world even as there are growing concerns about the mounting economic costs of the war.
Read more: Trump to Headline Saudi Conference in Miami as Iran War Rages
Trump has sent conflicting messages about the status of talks with Iran in recent days, repeatedly claiming that Tehran was “begging” to work out a deal while also at times suggesting that they were not taking talks seriously and casting doubt on the likelihood of a negotiated settlement.
The president’s announcement Thursday that he would extend the pause on Iranian energy sites for 10 days offered a brief calm to global energy markets jolted by his conflicting signals on the prospects for an end to the nearly month-long war.
This report is auto-generated from Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.