Sitting in judgment
Why President Trump's speech at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum matters
Two days ago (May 13th), U.S. President Donald Trump spoke for 50+ minutes at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum. It was an eventful trip for both President Trump and the administration. Trump lifted sanctions on Syria and posed for pictures with new Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa — formerly an Al Qaeda leader.1 He accepted a “gift” in the form of a Boeing 747-8 from the Qatari royal family, which ABC News reports will be used temporarily as Air Force One until being transferred to President Trump’s presidential library foundation at the end of his presidency.2 The White House claims Saudi Arabia agreed to invest $600 billion in the United States, including a $142 billion arms deal — the largest defense sales agreement in U.S. history. There were rumors before the event that the U.S. planned to recognize a Palestinian state3 — that, obviously, didn’t happen, with President Trump instead doubling down on the nebulous notion of a future Gaza “Freedom Zone” whose security would be loosely guaranteed by the United Staes.
The two biggest losers from the event might have been India and Israel — countries that, until this week, were not just U.S. allies but were governed by leaders who prized and even bragged about their excellent relationships with President Trump.
President Trump congratulated his government, and his combo SecState/NSA Marco Rubio, for helping forge an India-Pakistan ceasefire. Trump also sharply criticized India, and Apple in particular, for moving manufacturing to India. In so doing, President Trump has — intentionally? unintentionally? — put Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a very difficult position. President Trump claims he used the issue of trade to bring peace — India says the president’s account is untrue, and behind the scenes, Indian officials are reportedly4 fuming that President Trump implied a moral equivalency between India and Pakistan.5
As for Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked President Trump not to lift sanctions on Syria last month.6 Between the president’s decision not to listen, his sudden and unilateral ceasefire with the Houthis, and his stated intention to conclude an Iran deal, Netanyahu suddenly finds himself left out in the cold.7
Meanwhile, in Washington, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security, part of the Department of Commerce, issued new guidelines on chips for artificial intelligence applications. The guidelines were important for two reasons. First of all, they rescinded the last major foreign policy initiative of the Biden administration — the so-called AI Diffusion Rule, that classified countries into three tiers and imposed strict limitations on exports of advanced AI chips to tier 2 and 3 countries. What will replace this rule is still TBD, but the goal will be to export more U.S. chips abroad.
Secondly, the U.S. now views using advanced chips from China — namely Huawei's Ascend chips — as a violation of U.S. export control rules. In effect, the Trump administration is doubling down on its assault on Huawei, which began in Trump’s first term and has been a massive failure, spurring Huawei and China’s semiconductor ecosystem to innovate at breakneck speed. One doesn’t have to be a geopolitical analyst to connect the dots on why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was at the event in Riyadh — and why Nvidia announced a strategic partnership with HUMAIN, the new full AI value chain subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.8
Meanwhile, in China, the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the China-CELAC Forum was held with great fanfare.9 (CELAC is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, i.e., the United States’s backyard, and much more important geopolitically to the U.S. than Saudi Arabia for as long as the U.S. is a net oil exporter, and arguably even if it isn’t.) Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a a 66 billion yuan-denominated (~$9 billion) line of credit for the region and promised development, independence, and fairness. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose country has arguably been the top U.S. security partner in South America for decades, committed to joining China’s Belt & Road Initiative. (Remember, Petro was the one who fought with Trump over deportation flights and vowed to look to China for leadership in the future.) China promised $5 billion in investment for Brazil, to produce everything from jet fuel to cars.10 Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said of China, ““China has often been treated as though it were an enemy of global trade when actually China is behaving like an example of a country that is trying to do business with countries which, over the past 30 years, were forgotten by many other countries.”
In other words, President Trump is doing the same thing he has (rightly) criticized so many of his predecessors for — getting bogged down in the Middle East and Asia and taking U.S. power in the Western hemisphere for granted.
But to be frank, none of this is particularly novel or surprising if you’ve been following geopolitics closely over the past few months. There was, however, a section of President Trump’s speech that I found surprising, and which I have seen people I respect (including dear Cousin Marko) claim is evidence of a deeper philosophy at work in Trump’s mind regarding U.S. foreign policy, one that favors peace and true diversity. Here’s what President Trump said and a link to watch the video of it:
“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins…I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment, my job to defend America, and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace. That’s what I really want to do.”
Now, there are a couple of reasons I want to call bullshit on the notion that President Trump is delivering a more enlightened approach to U.S. foreign policy with these words. The first two reasons are boring and strictly mechanical.
Those quotations come between a sandwich of President Trump bragging about the U.S. having the most powerful military in the history of the universe and how he won’t hesitate to use it.
Watch him actually say these words. He’s reading off a prompter for these sections. I’m guilty of psychoanalysis now, but we’ve all seen President Trump now enough to know when he is saying something he actually thinks — he can’t control it, it just spews out of him, it’s that authenticity that makes him so relatable to so many people — and when he’s reading a throw-away line off a prompter. These are lines that whoever the Trumpian version of Sam Seaborn11 is got through.
But let’s leave those points aside — in fact, let me grant them! Let’s say they show President Trump is primarily a peacemaker (peace can only be secured through strength) and that he was obviously just jet-lagged and tired bc he’s forced to fly on an Air Force One that is clearly not up to standards, necessitating a gift from the gracious Qatari Royal Family.
Instead, let’s take the substance of President Trump’s words head-on — even if I think he didn’t mean it.
Some have suggested Trump is “the first Western leader who seems to understand and criticize the West’s missionary zeal to remake others in its image.”12 Cousin Marko said on our most recent podcast that it was “the most profound statement by an American leader maybe this century” because it discards American hypocrisy — the U.S. is not going to make moralistic, normative calls anymore, and instead it is going to focus squarely on American interests.
This sounds seductive and elegant, but let’s consider what President Trump is actually saying. He is saying values don’t matter. That everything is permitted in the pursuit of U.S. interests.
Does the U.S. have an overwhelmingly virtuous moral record? Surely not. What the United States did (and continues to do) to Native Americans, the institution of slavery, Japanese internment, aligning with despots throughout the world because they serve U.S. interests, overthrowing democratically elected governments because they espouse policies regarded as anti-U.S. interests, lying about weapons of mass destruction as a pretense to war…the list of American moral failings is long and depressing.
But what has arguably set the United States apart from most nations and political experiments in the world is a) an articulation of trying to be better, of being the shining city on the hill, of trying to be a force for justice in the world, and b) an ability to change in order to realize a non-relativistic notion of what is just. Just because this task is impossible does not mean it should be jettisoned — just because the boulder always rolls back down the hill and smushes Sisyphus does not mean that Sisyphus gets to take a break. It is this dogged determination that the U.S. should be better, that its political institutions were created to protect basic rights encoded within the founding documents of the U.S., that has given the U.S.’s struggles with its demons meaning.
Consider the numerous crimes and atrocities the U.S. committed in the context of the Cold War. The U.S.’s record in places like Iran, the DRC, Vietnam, Chile, and countless other countries is reprehensible. For God’s sake the U.S. tolerated regimes like South Africa’s apartheid government because it was on the “right” side of the Cold War.13 The “everything is permitted except communism,” if you will. But even in this context, there was a notion of a larger battle and of a greater good being pursued — that communism represented a truly global threat, that the Soviet Union and its version of totalitarianism was qualitatively worse than the U.S. government dirtying its moral record by cozying up to dictators in order to defeat that larger enemy.
When the Soviet Union fell, the U.S. allowed itself to believe that history had ended, that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant everyone self-evidently wanted to be like the United States. When expressed in foreign policy, this became “neoconservatism,” which brought us the Second Iraq War and countless other foreign policy blunders as figures like George W. Bush and Joe Biden pursued moral goals as if they were geopolitical goals.
The problem with this type of foreign policy was not necessarily that it is the wrong way to thing about the role of the United States in the world. It was that it didn’t work. It did not achieve the goal of making the world a better and safer place, of safe-guarding U.S. interests, and of spreading peace and democracy to other parts of the world. Which is why policy nerds like me and Cousin Marko are allergic to this hypocrisy and why the notion of a U.S. President calling it like it is seems to refreshing.
But while there is a place for nihilism in the toolbox of the analyst, it is dangerous when in the hands of the people in power. The objective analyst can see the world as it is and argue pragmatically what the best path forward is for achieving narrowly-defined goals, but ultimately it is up to political leaders to make decisions that are beyond interests thus defined and to think about the soul, not of other leaders, but of their own people, and of the people who chose them to rule in their place.
In my view, and perhaps this is a bias, an interest-based U.S.-foreign policy is good because it will help achieve things that I think are fundamentally just. But the moment you throw the justice out with the bathwater and declare, “interest-based foreign policy is good because there is nothing but our interests, which are that we should be rich and powerful and everyone else should invest in us,” you have reached true political nihilism, and everything is permitted in the pursuit of U.S. interests (and it is clear to me that in President Trump’s mind his personal interests and the interests of the U.S. are the same).
I think this turn is especially ironic because the “American right” and “MAGA” movement thinks the “radical left” and “Woke” movement14 is guilty of promiscuous moral relativism.15 The endless culture wars about gender and identity politics and American history, the lambasting of U.S. universities and educational institutions, the loss of standards and cultural totems and a confident sense of security in American exceptionalism — these are the things the right demonizes the left for, and these are the things the right chose Donald Trump as their culture warrior to fight.
But in Riyadh, President Trump was basically articulating the reductio ad absurdum of the left’s political ideology. For all the world to see, here was the President of the United States essentially accepting an unalloyed morally relativistic argument — that under his watch, the U.S. would stand for nothing other than what his government defined as U.S interests, that it is not his job to make tough judgments about whether a man like Vladimir Putin can be trusted, that it is ok to use the institutions of the government to enrich himself because ultimately that’s good for America too, that it’s ok to deport people to Salvadoran prisons even if it turns out that person was not meant to be deported, that it’s ok to grab women by the pussy, that it’s ok to attack police officers at the Capitol on January 6th — that there is nothing ennobling the U.S. is fighting for, and that the notion of fighting for something ennobling is itself a political failing.
President Trump says it is his job to defend America and that he will leave task of judgment to God. That’s convenient, leaving the hardest part of your job up to God. I wonder how that would go with my clients. Jokes aside, you cannot defend without judging. You cannot defend America without making judgments — important ones, every single day.
It is arguably the President’s most important job to make the right judgments, judgements like, “Is this country a threat?” or “Will this leader do what he promises?” or “How does making a compromise on tariffs affect the left-behind lower middle class I have sworn to enrich?” Only by making judgments can President Trump live up to his promise of defending what he defines as fundamental American interests: “stability, prosperity, and peace.”
I have a bone to pick with that list of interests too, by the way. Am I the only one who noticed that “freedom” is conspicuously absent? If I told you a global leader was advocating for “stability, prosperity, and peace” and that you had to guess the identity of that leader, I’d bet good money your first answer would be the leader of China — not of the United States.
One of my favorite fictional characters of all time is Rustin (Rust) Cohle from True Detective Season 1, released in 2014. In the penultimate episode, Rust’s partner Marty says he doesn’t like being judged. And Rust responds with this pearl of wisdom:
“However illusory our identities are, we craft those identifies by making value judgements. Everybody judges, all the time. Now, if you’ve got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.”
I oppose moral relativism in all its forms, on whichever side of the aisle it lurks — I confess I wasn’t expecting it from this President or in this context, and I find the urge by some to praise it to be a symptom of a much deeper malaise in American/Western society…and from which it appears the current administration is not immune.
I think this is a positive development…but even so, there is significant cognitive dissonance of seeing Trump shaking hands with Sharaa for this elder millennial, who came of age around 9/11. Israel is pissed about this development, as are some members of Trump’s policy team…the ones that didn’t get the invite to Riyadh, presumably.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-poised-accept-palace-sky-gift-trump/story?id=121680511
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-853387#google_vignette\
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/world/asia/trump-india-pakistan-ceasefire.html\
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-asked-trump-not-to-lift-syria-sanctions-israeli-official-says/
See my most recent podcast with Marko for more —
Nothing about geopolitics will make such leading figures and luminaries choosing to gather in the Arabian desert make sense to me.
https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/wjbzhd/202505/t20250513_11622018.html
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2025/05/chinese-companies-to-invest-5-billion-in-brazil-to-produce-everything-from-jet-fuel-to-cars.shtml
https://x.com/rnaudbertrand/status/1922443275526668625?s=42
I put these things in quotations because I don’t think they actually exist but we have to be reductive to communicate things
And they may well be. I have the scars to prove just how unhinged voices on the left have become — have lost professional opportunities and friendships because of some of these issues, so please don’t come at me as an apologist for the left.