When Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) arrives in Washington this week, he comes not as a reformer seeking American approval, but as a ruler who no longer needs it. In the seven years since his last U.S. visit, the Saudi crown prince has transformed his kingdom’s foreign policy, tested the limits of American patience, and discovered the leverage that comes from acting independently of Washington. His return offers a revealing measure of how much both Saudi Arabia—and America’s role in the Middle East—have changed. The last thing Donald Trump should do is undo the forces that compelled these shifts.

The last time MBS visited the United States was in the spring of 2018. On his so-called charm offensive, he met with figures ranging from Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to Oprah Winfrey. A few months earlier, he had pledged that Saudi Arabia would embrace “moderate Islam,” signaling his determination to remake both his country’s image and his own.

Less than a year before, in June 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE had stunned the world by abruptly imposing a blockade on Qatar. That November, MBS effectively detained Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri and coerced him into announcing his resignation. Soon after, he imprisoned hundreds of prominent Saudis—including senior royals—inside Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton in what he called an anti-corruption campaign, seizing potentially as much as $800 billion in assets and cementing his control over the kingdom. By March 2018, the Saudi-led war in Yemen had entered its fourth brutal year, with tens of thousands of civilians dead and widespread malnutrition caused by a Saudi-imposed blockade of Houthi-held areas.

Despite all this, the American establishment welcomed him with open arms. Thomas Friedman described him as “much more McKinsey than Wahhabi”; after dining with MBS, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson gushed on Instagram about the prince’s “modern views on the world.” Only months later, when it emerged that MBS had probably ordered the gruesome murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, did he briefly become persona non grata in Washington. Democrats attacked the Trump administration’s close ties to MBS during the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race. Yet, once in office, President Joe Biden met with the crown prince in 2022 and was even prepared to offer Saudi Arabia security guarantees as part of a potential normalization deal with Israel.

Meanwhile, MBS turned his focus to Vision 2030, an ambitious plan to attract investors and tourists while reducing Saudi Arabia’s dependence on fossil fuels. The envisioned economic transformation required deep social change, including the integration of women into public life. MBS pursued these goals through top-down reforms paired with harsh repression, making clear that loosening strict Islamic norms did not mean allowing greater political freedom.

Having effectively staked his rule on Vision 2030, MBS came to see his aggressive foreign policy as a threat to its success. But something else had also occurred that profoundly impacted Saudi Arabia’s calculations. When Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities in 2019, Riyadh expected Washington to retaliate on its behalf. But Trump showed little interest in starting a war with Iran on behalf of the Saudis, leaving Arab leaders in shock and much of the Washington foreign policy establishment accusing Trump of having abandoned the Carter Doctrine. Yet, rather than the Middle East descending into chaos without the U.S. “upholding order,” as Washington’s conventional wisdom had predicted, Persian Gulf states shifted toward regional diplomacy. Recognizing that the U.S. military was no longer at their disposal, Saudi Arabia and the UAE discovered the value of diplomatic options they had previously shunned.

Saudi officials quietly reached out to Iran through intermediaries to ease tensions. Tehran responded by proposing a nonaggression pact, setting in motion a process that culminated in the 2023 restoration of Saudi–Iranian relations, brokered by China, Iraq, and Oman. A year earlier, MBS had announced a truce with Yemen’s Houthis, effectively ending seven years of Saudi-led bombardment. And just before President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, MBS convened the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council to formally lift the blockade of Qatar.

Deprived of a carte blanche from Washington, Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy became more cautious and stability-focused.

Now, Mohammed bin Salman returns to Washington for the first time since 2018. Saudi Arabia had been negotiating a treaty-level defense guarantee with the Biden administration, but Donald Trump is more likely to offer a lesser commitment—similar to the assurance extended to Qatar following Israel’s airstrike on Doha in September. MBS will likely press for more. Trump should decline his request and avoid any promises that would deepen America’s military entanglement in the Middle East.

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MBS’s shift away from the reckless foreign policy of his earlier years should be lauded. Riyadh should be encouraged to continue on this path. But such progress does not justify a security pact that would do little to enhance U.S. safety. A defense pact with Saudi Arabia would be a one-sided affair—the very type of security agreements Trump has long vowed to dismantle.

Moreover, granting Saudi Arabia a NATO-style defense pact—and allowing it once again to shelter behind U.S. military power—would likely undo the key factor that pushed Riyadh toward moderation in the first place. 

America should welcome a more pragmatic Saudi Arabia, but not at the price of returning to old habits. The best way to encourage MBS’s newfound restraint is to keep responsibility for Saudi security where it belongs: in Riyadh. If Washington can resist the temptation to play guardian once more, it may finally achieve what decades of intervention never did—stability born not of U.S. protection, but of regional self-interest.