Phone call between Trump and billionaire monarchs ends in embarrassment

The Saudi Arabian government has helped President Donald Trump and his family rake in billions of dollars — and yet, according to a recent report, Trump returned the favor by humiliating the Saudi royals when describing a recent presidential phone call.

"Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly called Trump twice after the pipeline hit, asking the United States to bomb the Houthis to slow their advancement," reported Foreign Affairs journalist Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois and editor of Arc Digital, on Thursday. "The White House declined, and when asked about Yemen at a press conference, the U.S. president said this: 'The Houthis called us. They don't want to fight with us. They let us know they don't want to fight with us. They don't want us to go after them. They would much prefer not having us involved, and they are letting most ships go through. There's just one country they're not too happy with.'"

Grossman added, "That may be Trumpian fantasy or an actual conversation where he chose to take the Houthis at their word. Either is terrible for Riyadh."

Earlier in the same piece, Grossman wrote that Saudi Arabia invested a lot — figuratively and literally — in its relationship with Trump, only to be left in the lurch.

"Saudi Arabia is in serious trouble," Grossman argued. "Its global influence primarily comes from its leading position as an oil producer and the money resulting from that role, but now the Middle East is on fire. Today, Saudi tankers are blocked in the Persian Gulf and under threat in the Red Sea, and the country’s biggest oil pipeline had to shut down after a drone attack. Yet Saudi Arabia’s biggest long-term problem may be that its longtime security guarantor, the United States, is unable to put out the fire and doesn’t seem especially interested in trying."

In September, University of Illinois — Champaign international relations professor Nicholas Grossman warned journalist Greg Sargent that Trump has "blown credibility" when it comes to the Middle East in part because of his handling of Saudi Arabia.

Grossman added, "And another — perhaps the biggest current example of Trump's blown credibility — is the way that the United States has not been providing security to its Middle Eastern allies, to all these different Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has had to deal now with the biggest attacks against it of the war so far, where an Iran-backed militia attacked its east-west pipeline, and they went and asked Trump for help. MBS (Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman) reportedly called Trump twice and asked him to get involved in this Yemen conflict and clear it up. And both times, the United States said no."

Even Trump's much-ballyhooed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is highly controversial, at least according to experts.

"Since the dawn of the Nuclear Age, U.S. policy has denied the ability to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium to other nations because it is a shortcut to nuclear weapons," Joseph Cirincione, a national security expert who currently serves as the vice chair of the Center for International Policy Board of Directors, told MS NOW in July. "The huge and expensive facilities can be developed openly and legally until a government takes the quick jump from making fuel rods to making the cores of bombs. With this deal, Trump has effectively just green-lit a Saudi nuclear bomb program. How did we get here?"