Israeli and US officials concerned Trump could push F-35 sale to Saudi Arabia
Israeli and some US officials are concerned that President Donald Trump is prepared to move forward with the contentious sale of F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia after his visit to the kingdom, one US official and one regional official told Middle East Eye.
Trump unveiled an arms sales package to Saudi Arabia worth nearly $142bn this week. A White House statement called it "the largest defense cooperation agreement” in American history. Although it didn’t specify which arms the US would sell Saudi Arabia, F-35s are on the table, the officials said.
Some members of Trump’s National Security Council and US Senate allies are concerned about the sale because they want F-35s to be used as a form of leverage to entice Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords. Trump mentioned the accords in Riyadh, but barely made it the focus of his visit.
“It will be a special day in the Middle East, with the whole world watching, when Saudi Arabia joins us, and you’ll be greatly honouring me, and you’ll be greatly honouring all of those people that have fought so hard for the Middle East,” Trump said during his speech in Riyadh on Tuesday, “but you’ll do it in your own time”.
The officials said that US Senator Lindsey Graham and members of Trump’s NSC would continue to push for the sale of F-16s to Saudi Arabia in place of F-35s.
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Members of Trump’s National Security Council and US lawmakers opposed to the deal have cited the guarantees the US is required to provide Israel by law that it receives more advanced US weapons than its neighbours.
“I’m not sure whether Trump is ideologically committed to Israel’s QME (qualitative military edge), but he has to answer to Congress. There may be ways he could push through these arms sales with technological limits to address concerns about Israel’s QME,” Prem Kumar, director of the Middle East division at the DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group advisory, previously told MEE.
Senior Israeli officials have told their counterparts they are against the sale of F-35s to Riyadh, one regional official told MEE.
The Israelis have also said that if Trump agrees to sell the warplanes to Riyadh, it could set a precedent for Turkey to acquire them. MEE reported previously that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied US Secretary of State Marco Rubio against allowing Turkey back into the F-35 programme.
The US official told MEE that concerns over Saudi access to the F-35s are not at the same level of concern among some in the US government as those over the UAE buying the warplane. Trump promised the F-35 to the Emirates, but the Biden administration never saw the sale through, citing concerns about the UAE’s military ties to China.
Trump is finishing up his whirlwind tour across the Gulf on Thursday. The sale of advanced arms was just one part of the trip that was unnerving to some officials in the Departments of Defence, State, and Commerce, the US official told MEE.
On Thursday, the UAE and US signed an agreement that could give the Gulf state the ability to purchase hundreds of thousands of advanced artificial intelligence chips.
The White House said the AI agreement "includes the UAE committing to invest in, build, or finance US data centers that are at least as large and as powerful as those in the UAE”.
Like arms sales, the Biden administration put strict curbs on exporting advanced chips to the Gulf, citing concerns that China could gain access to them.
Trump, hunting for big-ticket business deals, has brushed aside those concerns. Some analysts and former officials say that his approach reflects the US’s diminishing lead to countries like China in critical technologies.
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the US has been surrendering its lead in critical technologies like defence, space and energy to China.
An August 2024 report said that between 2003 and 2007, the US led in 60 of 64 technologies, but its position rapidly shrank to leading in just seven between 2019 and 2023, as China pulled ahead to lead in 57 of 64 technologies.
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