American presidents have been visiting Saudi Arabia for decades, and travel has often produced memorable moments – some dramatic, others downright strange.
While President Trump returns to Saudi Arabia, here is an overview of four moments of the former presidential trips to visit leaders of the Gulf of oil rich in oil.
2022: Biden fist bump
The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia seemed to be withered before President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Biden, as a candidate in 2019, had promised to make Saudi Arabia in a “pariah” on the murder of the journalist of the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, who, according to the CIA, had been ordered by the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.
But as Mr. Biden worked in 2022 to manage oil prices, which increased after the invasion of Russia on the scale of Ukraine, the president obtained a different approach. Arriving at the Royal Palace, Mr. Biden, a slightly smiling, gave the Crown Prince a handbrk while a cameras bank was rolling.
The Saudi government quickly published an image of the fist bump on social networks. Mr. Biden later told the journalists that he had confronted Prince Mohammed about the murder and that the prince “essentially said that he was not personally responsible for it”.
Back in Washington, Mr. Biden became impatient when he was in a hurry on the bump. “Why don’t you talk about something that matters?” He reprimanded a journalist.
In a few months, Mr. Biden acknowledged that the trip had not produced the sharp increase in the Saudi oil production which he had sought.
2017: Trump and the Orb
It looked like something of a children’s film.
During a visit to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, at the start of his first mandate, Trump found himself putting his hand on a brilliant white Orb.
Besides him, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi of Egypt also placed their hands on the sphere. An image of men touching the Orb – with the First Lady, Melania Trump, looking – widely disseminated on social networks, with memes multiplying in a short time.
A meme compared the image to that of Saruman, the villain of the “Lord of the Rings”, by typing in a stone which sees.
But the orb in Riyadh was not, turned out to be, magic.
The sphere was a translucent globe, apparently decorative, in an installation filled with computer terminals and devoted to the fight against extremist ideology.
1974: Nixon says: “We need wisdom”
President Richard Mr. Nixon met with a warm reception in Djeddah during a five nations scan in the Middle East in the spring of 1974.
Nixon has arrived in the hope of encouraging the country to reduce oil prices, according to the passages of its memories published by the Richard Nixon Foundation.
But he also came with another objective – pushing Saudi Arabia to use its considerable regional influence to put pressure for peace in the Middle East.
In remarks at the State Palace, he underlined to his hosts that he had not only come to gain cheaper oil.
“We can use oil, but we need more, something much more than oil,” said the president. “We need wisdom.”
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Although he has not traveled in Saudi soil, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, on an American warship in the Grand Lac Amer, which is part of the Suez Canal in Egypt.
Roosevelt charmed the king, who had a hard time walking, presenting him with the gift of a wheelchair.
