Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president’s birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it’s not even close to Trump’s most insidious assault on the US military’s historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.In fact, it’s not even the most worrying thing he’s done this week.On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.That’s not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump’s speech was a partisan tirade that targeted “radical left” opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be “aggressive” toward the protesters they encountered.The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” one note read.To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.“That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military’s professional ethic is breaking down internally,” says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.”This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it’s part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military’s professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration’s whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces’ political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.“The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that’s what’s making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,” says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump’s handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president’s claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump’s politicization.But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy’s future could well be profound.The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explainedA military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.Democracies typically do this through a process called “professionalization.” Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of “objective control”: one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians’ affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn’t deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials’ policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.In such cases, the issue isn’t the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.Many of Pete Hegseth’s major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military’s lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military’s deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities. In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren’t normal times. And this isn’t a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.“It’s really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,” says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). “This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.”This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression. Is it time to panic?Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military’s professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn’t just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.For all its faults, the US military’s professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump’s efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump’s efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.Or, at least theoretically.The truth is that we don’t really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump’s second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.First, what we’ve seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump’s thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.“We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military’s non-partisan norm. But not in a way that’s definitive at this point,” Blankshain says.Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump’s record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.“The fact that he’s getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there’s actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,” Saideman says. “There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.”See More: Politics

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that revises and rolls back cybersecurity policies set in place by his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In a White House fact sheet, the administration claims that Biden’s Executive Order 14144 — signed days before the end of his presidency — was an attempt “to sneak problematic and distracting issues into cybersecurity policy.” Among other things, Biden’s order encouraged agencies to “consider accepting digital identity documents” when public benefit programs require ID. Trump struck that part of the order, with the White House now saying this approach risks “widespread abuse by enabling illegal immigrants to improperly access public benefits.” However, Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, told Politico that “the fixation on revoking digital ID mandates is prioritizing questionable immigration benefits over proven cybersecurity benefits.”  On AI, Trump removed Biden’s requirements around testing the use of AI to defend energy infrastructure, funding federal research programs around AI security, and directing the Pentagon to “use AI models for cyber security.” The White House describes its moves on AI as refocusing AI cybersecurity strategy “towards identifying and managing vulnerabilities, rather than censorship.” (Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have complained repeatedly about the threat of AI “censorship.”) Trump’s order also removed requirements that agencies start using quantum-resistant encryption “as soon as practicable.” And it removed requirements that federal contractors attest to the security of their software — the White House describes those requirements as “unproven and burdensome software accounting processes that prioritized compliance checklists over genuine security investments.” Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | July 15 REGISTER NOW Going back even further, Trump’s executive order repeals Obama’s policies around sanctions for cybersecurity attacks on the United States; those sanctions can now only be applied to “foreign malicious actors.” The White House says this will will prevent “misuse against domestic political opponents” and clarify that “sanctions do not apply to election-related activities.”

There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don’t know where they came from.Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception.I don’t know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word “Machiavellian” means. It’s someone who’s cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, “the teacher of evil.”But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work?Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince.For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it’s actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government).I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he’s very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What’s incomplete or wrong about that view?What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn’t think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we’ve got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn’t think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn’t see them as devils when they behave badly.But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don’t put yourself above other humans because you’re one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist?I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood?I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It’s a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that’s the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that’s a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he’s a moral writer. Rousseau says, “He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.” If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don’t read them that carefully because they’re kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom.And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it’s like, Wow! It’s about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he’s probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up.So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens?It’s complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He’s absolutely gutted that Florence’s republican experiment has failed and he can’t speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It’s taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can’t be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he’s really writing to expose the ways of tyrants.Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist?He’s a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you’re not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it’s very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words “tyrant” or “tyranny.” So if there’s a guiding political view, whether you call it “ideology” or not, it’s republicanism. And that’s an ideology of shared power. It’s all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone’s got to have a share.Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today?If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He’d totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He’s pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don’t want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics?This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they’re very subtle, you start to see that he’s exposing a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that’s when you’re going to clash. And he says, That’s when you as a leader — and he’s playing like he’s on the leader’s side — that’s when you’ve got to decide if you’re going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit?What would he make of Trump?He would put Trump in two categories. He’s got different classifications of princes. He’s got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he’d also call him this word “astutia” — astuteness, which doesn’t really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people’s weaknesses and dissatisfactions.This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don’t know how to build a solid state. That’s what he would say on a domestic front. I think there’s an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don’t think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that’s not really Machiavellian.Exactly. I wouldn’t say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I’ve often felt like he’s getting advice from people who haven’t really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they’re picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You’re absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You’re going to get pure hate. So if you think it’s ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again.This obviously isn’t an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there’s real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed?This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had “great men” coming up and saying, “I’ll save you,” and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally “saved” them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn’t as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.See More:

A Washington DC-based think tank claims it has discovered evidence of a covert network of digital front companies operated by the Chinese intelligence services that are targeting laid-off US government employees. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, thousands of people have been let go across the US government – including many in cyber security threat intel and research functions – following audits by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). The mass lay-offs, which the White House says are being done in the name of saving money, have dramatically slowed and even halted many government functions. In some places – such as at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), they are being reversed. Now, the Federation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), a research institute that focuses primarily on America’s national security and foreign policy, says that Beijing is moving to try to exploit the lay-offs for its own intelligence-gathering purposes. FDD senior analyst on emerging threats Max Lesser said these fraudulent organisations were posing as geopolitical risk consultancies and headhunting firms that appeared to be based in Japan, Singapore and the US. “The tactics employed by this network closely resemble previous Chinese intelligence operations targeting US government officials and other high-value targets across the US, Europe and beyond,” said Lesser. “Despite the network’s efforts to create the illusion that several separate firms outside of China are seeking to recruit laid-off federal employees, the network’s technical features point both to its Chinese origins and the role of a single entity in creating all of its components,” he said. Read more about nation state threats UK cyber security chief warns of ‘direct connection’ between Russian cyber attacks and physical threats to the UK. Two spyware variants are being used to target the mobile devices of persons of interest to Chinese intelligence, including individuals in the Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur communities. Advanced persistent threat group UNC3886 deployed custom backdoors on end-of-life Juniper Networks routers, underscoring the need for timely patching and advanced security monitoring. The FDD named the companies as Smiao Intelligence, Dustrategy, RiverMerge Strategies, Tsubasa Insight and Wavemax Innov. Of these, said Lesser, only Smiao Intelligence appears to be a real company. The others are alleged to be little more than digital fronts operating cloned websites, with artificial intelligence (AI)-generated text and clearly fake customer references. Lesser said it was likely that individuals associated with Smiao created the network themselves for intelligence-gathering purposes, because they all rely on the same China-hosted Tencent server to run their websites, and all but one of them are using – or once did – a China-based email service called chengmail. Additionally, he said, four out of five of the sites share the same SSL certificate. The FDD was also able to ascertain Smaio was likely the nexus of the covert operation. It has the oldest domain in the group, dating back eight years, and its homepage directs to an apparent parent company, Beijing Simiao Intelligent Information Technology Co Ltd, which is apparently a trademark application agency, officially recognised by China’s State Intellectual Property Office, and was registered as a company in 2012. Notably, one of the companies, RiverMerge, appeared for a while to have an office in the US – the state of Colorado, to be precise – as well as Singapore, although these references were scrubbed from its website some time before 26 March 2025. US registries do show a company called RiverMerge Strategies LLC, formed in 2024, with a domain registered in Beijing and evidence of a shared phone number with Smiao. The Chinese state has form dating back the best part of a decade when it comes to using recruitment websites to gather intelligence on US targets. Back in 2020, a Singapore national, Jun Wei Yeo, was sentenced to jail after obtaining more than 400 resumes, 90% of them from American military and government officials with some level of security clearance, and passing them to Beijing. Nor have European targets been immune – a German intelligence report from eight years ago revealed how China was able to obtain data on 10,000 German citizens as potential intelligence sources, while in 2019, the French told a similar story. Two years ago, in 2023, British intelligence chief Ken McCallum revealed that 20,000 Britons had been approached in a similar manner. In many cases, this targeting was conducted using legitimate job websites, including social network LinkedIn, which has been described as the “ultimate playground” for intelligence gathering. It is not known if the operation targeting laid-off federal workers was successful, but the effort certainly comes at a dangerous time for the US, and an opportune moment for China as it seeks to exploit Trump’s unique approach to government and policymaking. “This threat is heightened at a time when thousands of former and current federal workers are seeking new employment,” said Lesser. “If the public and private sectors do not act quickly to address these vulnerabilities, China and other adversaries will continue preying on former public servants who may not be aware of the threat and face pressure to find new jobs quickly.” He called on the US government to take more active measures to raise awareness of this gathering cyber threat – such as sending representatives to discuss the issue in the media. It should also proactively work with the likes of LinkedIn and other networking sites to monitor potentially suspicious activity, such as job postings that explicitly seek out ex-government employees. LinkedIn could also implement more stringent Know Your Customer policies for people creating company pages on its site. Lesser also called for Congress to exercise additional oversight through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Finally, Washington could also turn the situation to its advantage by creating sock puppet accounts to bait Chinese intelligence operatives into coming out of the shadows to make contact.

U.S. President Donald Trump opened his four-day Middle East trip on Tuesday by paying a visit to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for talks on U.S. efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, end the war in Gaza, hold down oil prices and more.Prince Mohammed warmly greeted Trump as he stepped off Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital and kicked off his Middle East tour.The two leaders then retreated to a grand hall at the Riyadh airport, where Trump and his aides were served traditional Arabic coffee by waiting attendants wearing ceremonial gun-belts. Fighter jet escort The pomp began before Trump even landed. Royal Saudi Air Force F-15s provided an honorary escort for Air Force One as it approached the kingdom’s capital.Trump and Prince Mohammed also took part in a lunch at the Royal Court, gathering with guests and aides in an ornate room with blue accents and massive crystal chandeliers.As he greeted business titans with Trump by his side, Prince Mohammed was animated and smiling.It was a stark contrast to his awkward fist bump with then-President Joe Biden, who looked to avoid being seen on camera shaking hands with the prince during a 2022 visit to the kingdom.Biden had decided to pay a visit to Saudi Arabia as he looked to alleviate soaring prices at the pump for motorists at home and around the globe.At the time, Prince Mohammed’s reputation had been badly damaged by a U.S. intelligence determination that found he had ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.But that dark moment appeared to be distant memory for the prince as he rubbed elbows with high-profile business executives — including Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — in front of the cameras and with Trump by his side.Later, the crown prince will fete Trump with a formal dinner. Trump is also slated to take part Tuesday in a U.S.-Saudi investment conference.“When Saudis and Americans join forces, very good things happen — more often than not, great things happen,” Saudi Investment Minister Khalid al-Falih said. Oil production Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC+ nations have already helped their cause with Trump early in his second term by stepping up oil production. Trump sees cheap energy as a key component to lowering costs and stemming inflation for Americans. The Republican president has also made the case that lower oil prices will hasten an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.But Saudi Arabia’s economy remains heavily dependent on oil, and the kingdom needs a fiscal break-even oil price of $96 to $98 a barrel to balance its budget. It’s questionable how long OPEC+, of which Saudi Arabia is the leading member, is willing to keep production elevated. The price of a barrel of Brent crude closed Monday at $64.77.“One of the challenges for the Gulf states of lower oil prices is it doesn’t necessarily imperil economic diversification programs, but it certainly makes them harder,” said Jon Alterman, a senior Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Qatar and UAE next Trump picked the kingdom for his first stop, because it has pledged to make big investments in the U.S., but Trump ended up traveling to Italy last month for Pope Francis’ funeral. Riyadh was the first overseas stop of his first term.The three countries on the president’s itinerary — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — are all places where the Trump Organization, run by Trump’s two elder sons, is developing major real estate projects. They include a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.Trump is trying to demonstrate that his transactional strategy for international politics is paying dividends as he faces criticism from Democrats who say his global tariff war and approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine are isolating the United States from allies.He’s expected to announce deals with the three wealthy countries that will touch on artificial intelligence, expanding energy cooperation and perhaps new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration earlier this month announced initial approval to sell $3.5 billion worth of air-to-air missiles for Saudi Arabia’s fighter jets.But Trump arrived in the Middle East at a moment when his top regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are far from neatly aligned with his approach. Trump’s decision to skip Israel remarkable, expert says Before the trip, Trump announced that Washington was halting a nearly two-month U.S. airstrike campaign against Yemen’s Houthis, saying the Iran-backed rebels have pledged to stop attacking ships along a vital global trade route.The administration didn’t notify Israel — which the Houthis continue to target — of the agreement before Trump publicly announced it. It was the latest example of Trump leaving the Israelis in the dark about his administration’s negotiations with common adversaries.In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t notified by the administration until after talks began with Hamas about the war in Gaza. And Netanyahu found out about the ongoing U.S. nuclear talks with Iran only when Trump announced them during an Oval Office visit by the Israeli leader last month.“Israel will defend itself by itself,” Netanyahu said last week following Trump’s Houthi truce announcement. “If others join us — our American friends — all the better.”William Wechsler, senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s decision to skip Israel on his first Middle East visit is remarkable.“The main message coming out of this, at least as the itinerary stands today, is that the governments of the Gulf … are in fact stronger friends to President Trump than the current government of Israel at this moment,” Wechsler said. Restarting efforts to normalize Israel-Saudi ties Trump, meanwhile, hopes to restart his first-term effort to normalize relations between the Middle East’s major powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s Abraham Accords effort led to Sudan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco agreeing to normalize relations with Israel.But Riyadh has made clear that in exchange for normalization it wants U.S. security guarantees, assistance with the kingdom’s nuclear program and progress on a pathway to Palestinian statehood. There seems to be scant hope for making headway on a Palestinian state with the Israel-Hamas war raging and the Israelis threatening to flatten and occupy Gaza.Prince Mohammed last week notably hosted Palestinian Vice President Hussein Sheikh in Jeddah on the sheikh’s first foreign visit since assuming office in April.Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the crown prince appeared to be subtly signaling to Trump that the kingdom needs to see progress on Palestinian statehood for the Saudis to begin seriously moving on a normalization deal with the Israelis.“Knowing how the Saudis telegraph their intentions, that’s a preemptive, ‘Don’t even think of asking us to show any goodwill toward normalization,'” Abdul-Hussain said. Madhani reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. —Zeke Miller, Aamer Madhani and Jon Gambrell, Associated Press