Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump used the first ma­jor for­eign trip of his sec­ond term to out­line a vi­sion for restor­ing glob­al sta­bil­i­ty that is ground­ed in prag­ma­tism and self-in­ter­est rather than val­ues, hold­ing out U.S. ties to wealthy Gulf coun­tries as a mod­el for Amer­i­ca’s long­time foes.

His four-day swing through Sau­di Ara­bia, Qatar and the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, which ends Fri­day, put a spot­light on Trump’s trans­ac­tion­al ap­proach to for­eign af­fairs as he was fet­ed by au­to­crat­ic rulers with a trio of lav­ish state vis­its where there was heavy em­pha­sis on eco­nom­ic and se­cu­ri­ty part­ner­ships.

His trip played out against the back­drop of stub­born glob­al con­flicts, in­clud­ing Gaza and Ukraine, that showed the lim­its of his in­flu­ence. But Trump in­sist­ed he was turn­ing the page on Amer­i­can “in­ter­ven­tion­al­ism” in the re­gion as he moved to recog­nise the new gov­ern­ment in Syr­ia for the first time and prod­ded Iran to en­gage on nu­clear talks be­fore it’s too late.