But the most significant part of Trump’s anti-interventionist speech, delivered on the first evening of a historic three-day trip to the Gulf, was not in its rhetoric but in policy. In a dramatic announcement, he stated that he would be ordering the “cessation of sanctions” against Syria. This, he said, would give the new government in Damascus “a chance at greatness”. From across the region, you could almost hear the collective sigh of relief.

Among the most punitive in the world, the sanctions on Syria were introduced during the long reign of the Assad family, starting in the Seventies. But the most debilitating sanctions were imposed in the last years of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, who was ousted in December by Islamist rebels led by the country’s new de facto president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Leaders with a stake in regional stability, including many assembled in Riyadh, had worried that absent sanctions relief, Syria could soon become a failed state — one that could potentially descend into full-scale sectarian civil war and even dissolution, sending more refugees towards Turkey and Europe.

In Syria, where some people haven’t received salaries for months, sanctions have strangled the economy, inhibited foreign investment, hampered the provision of humanitarian aid, and surely placed increased strain on existing fissures within society. As a result, the news boosted Syria’s beleaguered currency, with the pound strengthening against the dollar for the first time in years.

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Sanctions relief, coupled with Trump’s brief meeting with Sharaa yesterday — the first such meeting between a Syrian and American leader in 25 years — mean relations between the two countries have been suddenly transformed. This is due in part to Al-Sharaa’s wise choice to invest heavily in Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia, and aggressive diplomatic outreach that began immediately after his forces seized power. Indeed, convincing the region and the West to trust him despite his history as a leader of militant Islamist groups has been central to his government’s charm offensive. During the US occupation of Iraq, the new president spent years as an inmate in an American prison infamous for nurturing jihadists. Upon his release, he returned to Syria to fight, first with ISIS and then al-Qaeda, eventually severing ties with both to form his own ostensibly more moderate outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Since his ousting of Assad, Sharaa has embraced the language of inclusivity, meeting many minority leaders and securing cautious support from many corners of the EU. Even so, spasms of sectarian violence have tempered the initial optimism that accompanied Assad’s fall.

In Syria, there has been widespread jubilation at the news of sanction relief. But removing US sanctions will not be as simple or as straightforward as many might wish. As Alexander Langlois, a contributing fellow at Defense Priorities, explains, Syria has “multiple sanctions regimes in place” — making their revocation complicated. Some, such as Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) sanctions and Executive Order (EO) sanctions, can be lifted unilaterally by the president or his team. More difficult to remove will be the so-called Caesar sanctions, which require Congressional approval. The president can only waive these for up to 180 days, and even that requires him certifying to various congressional committees that this is in America’s national security interest.

One alternative might be simply to ignore the law once those six months are up — something the administration has proven more than happy to do elsewhere. Yet as Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics, says, not everyone in Washington will be eager to help the new Syrian government. “There are elements in Washington that are very skeptical towards this idea that Sharaa has moved past his extremist past,” Cafiero says. They would want the sanctions to remain in place for longer.

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Beyond the excitement that accompanied Trump’s sanctions announcement, though, there was another, quieter message that received less attention: removing sanctions on Syria would give the United States an exit strategy. Behind all his praise of the Gulf’s leadership for the region’s achievements, and denigration of failed Western nation-building projects, was an unspoken declaration of his administration’s plans for the Middle East: a policy that would swap Western dependence for regional self-reliance and a reduction if not total withdrawal of the US troops on the ground in northeast Syria.

The US military presence supports local forces in countering ISIS, but the specter of withdrawal has been in the air since Trump won the November election. Assad’s fall a few weeks later forced a reassessment in an altered security environment. But before this week, the Trump administration appeared to have no coherent policy on Syria. Certainly, the rest of the administration’s messaging on Sharaa has been skeptical at best. Sebastian Gorka, Director of Counterterrorism at the US National Security Council, expressed reservations in February: “He was a jihadist for a long time,” he said. “Has he reformed himself? Is he a better man now? Does he believe in a representative (democratic) government?… In my 24 years of studying jihadist movements, I have never seen a successful jihadist leader evolve into a democrat or embrace representative government.”

What’s more, during her confirmation hearing earlier this year, Trump’s current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, denounced Sharaa for “dancing in the streets on 9/11”. And while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not directed such pointed criticism at the Syrian president, there were other, subtler indications that he would not support the new Islamist leadership in Damascus: in March, new photos revealed that Hegseth had the word “kafir” — meaning “infidel” or “non-believer” — tattooed on his arm in Arabic. All this made this week’s developments particularly striking. After meeting President Sharaa, Trump had nothing but praise for him, calling him a “young, attractive guy, a tough guy with a strong past”.

Trump’s new Syria policy, then, seems to put him at odds with top members of his own team. It also suggests that there are other powerful figures who hold considerable sway over his decision-making. Trump has credited Sharaa’s two most ardent backers in the region, Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with convincing him to lift US sanctions on Syria. That they were able to do so suggests that both Riyadh and Ankara now play a preeminent role in shaping Washington’s thinking in the Middle East. It also implies that Trump is not taking all his cues from Israel. Earlier this year, it was reported that Israel had lobbied the US to keep its sanctions on Syria. And, just a few weeks ago, the IDF bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Damascus, only one of the many attacks it has launched against Syria since Assad’s fall. Now, in a dramatic turn of events, Trump is establishing friendly relations with the new Syrian president — on a trip to the Middle East with no scheduled stop in Israel.

Indeed, this week’s trip has exhibited Trump’s predilection for forming alliances with erstwhile foes. Trump emphasized that he was “willing to end past conflicts and forge new partnerships for a better and more stable world, even if our differences may be profound… I have never believed in having permanent enemies.” And in Trump’s world, new relationships are best solidified through dealmaking. This week’s deals have been of a historic size: on Tuesday, Trump secured a $600-million commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the United States. Sharaa has proven a quick study: though Syria lacks Saudi Arabia’s enormous financial resources, he reportedly offered Trump what he could: a Trump Tower in Damascus. During his meeting with Trump yesterday, Sharaa also invited the United States to invest in Syria’s oil and gas sector.

But, as Cafiero says, American investors will likely remain hesitant, at least initially. Instead, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will be Syria’s most important partners in making investments. The sanctions may soon vanish, but terrorism designations are just one reason why Western governments and companies may be reluctant to invest. With the US looking to reduce its military footprint in the region while strengthening its business partnerships, Trump’s friends in the Gulf appear poised to consolidate their influence in the new Syria.

In the darkness, you can’t quite make out the titans of Wall Street, the Chinese billionaires, the European ministers and asset managers, or the Russian diplomats with their flag friendship pins. But you can feel them and the new world order that MBS is trying to build — centred around Saudi and him. The Kingdom, flush from the energy war between Russia and the West, has never had so much money to spend. Nor has it ever been such a hub of diplomacy as Russia, China and America court it for their superpower ends. As a result, you might catch sight of the New York billionaire Stephen Schwarzman in a suit and trainers, or a tired looking Jared Kushner; perhaps you’ll see the former French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian off to the booth of his Saudi project, or George Osborne could give you a long suspicious look across the room.

Launched in 2017 to promote the Kingdom to the world, the Financial Investment Initiative Summit, or FII, became infamous a year later after the murder of Jamal Khassogi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the CIA says on the orders of the Crown Prince. In the fallout, scores of billionaires, tech companies, media giants, super corporations and Western officials pulled out. But “Davos in the Desert” is the perfect yardstick to see how little this murder really mattered for the West. Now it seems everyone is back at an event that is bigger than ever. In a tense air of unreality.

The Who’s Who of the speakers is a testament to the emptiness of Joe Biden’s pledge after Khassogi to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. The power surge of money and influence towards the Kingdom had made Riyadh indispensable. Not only for US diplomats struggling with Gaza, Ukraine and a combative China. But for Western companies for whom the flush Gulf has become a critical source of capital. Even Net Zero is helping MBS — at first that is — as oil gets more expensive to extract the share of it being produced in the countries that can do it cheapest will soar. With this backdrop, the TED-style talk by Jacques Attali, a French socialist politico turned global rolodex consultant — “Is Democracy In Peril?” — felt a bit too on the nose.

FII is a showcase for the Saudi surge. But the first thing that strikes you about Riyadh when you arrive, is how little it looks like the global megapolis that MBS wants it to be. Instead, driving out of the desert, into this seven-million-strong city that feels in so many ways it shouldn’t be here — you see miles and miles of scruffy square houses, the colour of sand, crammed close together with tiny windows. A city dissected by eight-lane freeways lined with squat, unimpressive blocks. It looks nothing like Dubai. The professional expats compare it to Abu Dhabi 20 years ago. And if you arrived clueless and somebody told you this was by some metrics the capital of the most cash rich society that had ever existed, you would struggle to believe them.

You can spend a week here and still fail to find your bearings at night, in this low-rise world glowing orange from the street lamps. Then you notice the construction sites: miles and miles of hoardings, blocking off mega sites announcing giga projects about to transform it. There’s King Salman Park, which when it is finished will be seven times bigger than Hyde Park. Then there’s the Mukaab, the square shaped skyscraper, the height and width of 20 Empire State Buildings. Neither exists yet — apart from in the futurist dreams and commands of MBS. Both projects, along with Neom and the Line, the 110 km long linear city crossing the desert for nine million people, and the skyscrapers of New Muraaba all have their stalls at “Davos in the Desert”.

Everyone’s feeds are full of charred Israeli babies, exploding homes in Gaza or the tieless Iranian foreign minister threatening America with hell. But in the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center — which is like what AI might generate if you asked for Versailles but make it a little Arab — the panels are very much “don’t mention the war”. Things looked so different four days before Hamas attacked. Not only was an Israeli minister seen publicly in Riyadh for the first time ever, he also joined a Jewish prayer service with a new Torah scroll dedicated to the Saudi King. This was widely interpreted as a key step towards an almost inevitable normalisation between the two countries. A stunning development in and of itself for a country that until recently banned Judaism from being practised, and in 1973 led an Arab oil embargo on Israel’s Western allies to punish them for supporting the Jewish state.

But money isn’t security. You have to leave Riyadh to see how vulnerable it really is: the pipelines bringing desalinated water from the coast, which could so easily be knocked out, or the oil infrastructure, which was partially disabled by Iranian proxy drones in 2019. This is why behind the PowerPoints and the panels MBS has been telephoning everyone he can to try to stop the Israel-Hamas war from spreading into what could easily become a full-blown war between Iran and the United States fought right over the Gulf. You can keep the war out of the convention centre, but you can’t keep Saudi Arabia out of the Middle East. And nobody knows this better than MBS.

Saudi Arabia has always been an ideological state. Its very beginnings are in a pact between the Al Sauds and the puritanical Wahhabi movement, whose strict vision of Islam has for generations been what people associate with the Kingdom. But under MBS it has suddenly pivoted. Pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are the old politics of failure for the Crown Prince. This, he thinks, has left Saudi 20 development years behind the Emirates. And this is why he is forcing his Kingdom into a phase of nationalism and neoliberalism. Those for MBS are the new politics of success. Not only the path to Saudi survival after oil — but into turning Riyadh into a super Dubai and the Kingdom into a Saudi superpower.

MBS wants a modern economy as quickly as possible. This is why he wanted normalisation with Israel and has normalised with Iran: because there is no chance of economic success in a Middle East mired in constant war. The plan is Vision 2030 and the FII summit, just over the road from the Ritz-Carlton where MBS imprisoned half the ruling class at the start of his rule, is what he wants it to look like. Music, previously banned, is softly playing. Women, previously segregated and forced to be fully covered are everywhere — working — with very few face veils and many without a headscarf at all. The light glints off glamorous designer sequinned abayas by the coffee. Princesses used to Knightsbridge are finally doing business at home. This is Saudi Arabia seven years after MBS castrated the morality police. But make no mistake: this is still a country where you can be beheaded for a tweet. The paradox is his Kingdom has never been more liberal or more dictatorial.

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To understand MBS, you need to understand his childhood. This is what unlocked a will to power that saw him, improbably, steer himself and then his father into the line of succession. Saudi rulers are not hereditary, they emerge from the clan, which makes his rise less like King Charles assuming power, and more like Cromwell seizing it.

Nothing much was expected of the seventh son of Salman, the 25th son of Ibn Saud. Obsessed by fast food and computer games, he was a typical lethargic princeling until he was handed a horrifying revelation at the age of 15: his father, despite being the governor of Riyadh, had not build a serious fortune and was perilously indebted to businessmen. Instead of making billions like their cousins, the family was living off a gigantic welfare check from the Saudi treasury — which often came too late — leaving the servants unpaid for months at a time.

Panicking at the implications of this — of drifting further and further from the centre of power and into princely poverty — he amassed cash, by selling gold coins he was given by King Fahd.  He then started trading, became obsessed with stocks and swiftly went broke. Only then did he work out that, with his name, he could simply phone up people and demand money before trying to build his own businesses. Staying in Saudi, unlike his Westernised cousins, he rose like this in Riyadh.

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This, writ large, is also the state of the Kingdom. MBS’s family has failed to invest the greatest fortune in human history. So, using Saudi Arabia’s giant sovereign wealth fund, which is behind FII, he is trying to do at enormous scale what he did with King Fahd’s coins: buying up, through stakes in foreign companies, the profits of the world and investing them in what he thinks is a new economy.

There is a saying in the Middle East: seize opportunities for they pass like clouds. And MBS knows as electric cars and batteries take off he is running out of time.

He is desperate for a new Kingdom. Social reforms, such as finally letting women drive or travel alone without a male guardian are real and, for millennials who make up the majority of his subjects, he is not only genuinely popular but has made their lives freer. One of the world’s great liberalisations is being led by one of its greatest autocrats.An impetuous 38-year-old determined to govern alone — with all the risks that entails.

This is the discussion you end up having, discreetly that is, over and over again in the Kingdom. Who is MBS? For the optimists, he is a Saudi Atatürk or Peter the Great, the latest Arabian incarnation of the Westernising dictator. For the pessimists, they see the smile of Saddam Hussein — pointing to the dismemberment of Jamal Khassogi and his strange facial tics. Few at FII seemed to believe that the linear city in Neom would ever actually exist. What the critics see is not a new economy — but building-crazed megalomania that will leave only ruins.

Billions and billions can silence these questions. Because being in Saudi Arabia feels like being on another planet, where the normal rules of politics are suspended by oil. A futuristic but also medieval world with no need for democracy. Even in Russia, or China, there is a system, a bureaucracy, and institutions, however frightful, that matters in politics. Here there really is a royal court, an absolute monarchy and one family — the richest ever to exist — that owns the country.

And what is happening now is the result of long running fights within that family over whether the Kingdom should choose Islamism or nationalism. Whether or not it should change or stay the same. And, fundamentally, should it be open or closed? The construction pits and the PowerPoints are the decisive victory of one side. The panic in the pace is that, as the world decarbonises, it has started too late: Saudi only has a few decades of oil wealth left until this planet is pulled back to earth. But will it crash or land safely? Will there be splendour or ruins in Riyadh? The answer now hangs on who MBS really is. Because he has ensured nobody else will have a say.

Still, the video got its message across: it’s really happening. The widest aerial shots reveal an enormous groove in the sand, stretching to the horizon. We are seeing the birth of “The Line”, an insanely ambitious project for a city extending 170km through the desert, sandwiched in a narrow space between two immense walls. The new construction footage is an update on the viral CGI trailers that overwhelmed the internet last year, showing us glimpses of what life will be like inside this linear chasm of a city: a city where there will be no cars or roads, where every amenity is always a five-minute walk away, and where, according to one planning document, there could be robot maids.

This scheme sounds mad enough, but The Line is only the centrepiece of a much bigger development, called Neom (a blend of neo and mustaqbal, Arabic for “future”). Neom will be a semi-autonomous state, encompassing 26,000 square kilometres of desert with new resorts and tech industry centres.

There may be no philosopher kings, but there are sci-fi princes. The dreams of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the Neom board, make the techno-futurism of Silicon Valley look down to earth. Bin Salman is especially fond of the cyber-punk genre of science fiction, which involves gritty hi-tech dystopias. He has enlisted a number of prominent Hollywood visual specialists for the Neom project, including Olivier Pron of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. A team of consultants was asked to develop science-fiction aesthetics for a tourist resort, resulting in “37 options, arranged alphabetically from ‘Alien Invasion’ to ‘Utopia’”. One proposal for a luxury seaside destination, which featured a glowing beach of crushed marble, was deemed insufficiently imaginative.

Such spectacular indulgence must be causing envy among the high-flying architects and creative consultants not yet invited to join the project — if there are any left. But it also makes the moral dimension difficult to ignore: how should we judge those jumping on board bin Salman’s gravy train? Saudi Arabia — in case anyone has forgotten in the years since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at its consulate in Istanbul — is a brutal authoritarian state.

In recent weeks, this has prompted some soul-searching in the architecture community, with several stinging rebukes aimed at Neom. Writing in Dezeen, the urbanist Adam Greenfield asks firms such as Morphosis, the California-based architects designing The Line, to consider “whether the satisfaction of working on this project, and the compensation that attends the work, will ever compensate you for your participation in an ecological and moral atrocity”. Ouch. Greenfield’s intervention came a week after Rowan Moore asked in The Observer: “When will whatever gain that might arise from the creation of extraordinary buildings cease to outweigh the atrocities that go with them?”

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You see, bin Salman’s blank slate in the desert was not actually blank (they never are); settlements belonging to the Huwaitat tribespeople have been ruthlessly flattened to make space for Neom. One man leading resistance to the clearances, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was killed by security forces in 2020, and three others have been sentenced to execution. Critics also point to the absurd pretence that The Line is an eco-friendly project, given the industrial operations needed to build and maintain a city for nine million people in searing desert temperatures.

There is an obvious parallel here with the criticism of celebrities and commentators taking part in the World Cup in Qatar, another unsavoury petro-state. International sporting events are notorious for giving legitimacy to dictatorships, so why wouldn’t we see architectural monuments in the same way? With Neom there is barely a distinction to draw. Zaha Hadid Architects, the British firm that designed one of the Qatari football stadiums — a project synonymous with the shocking treatment of migrant construction workers — is also working on one of the Neom sites, an artificial ski resort that will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games.

In the 21st century, Western architects have helped to burnish the image of repressive regimes, especially those big-name architects who specialise in spectacular monumental buildings. Zaha Hadid was the most wide-ranging: her trademark swooshing structures include a museum honouring the ruling family in Azerbaijan and a conference hall in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya (never completed due to Gaddafi’s demise). But the biggest patrons of globetrotting architects have been the Arab Gulf States — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — along with China. Among countless examples in these regions, the most infamous is probably Rem Koolhaas’s Chinese Television Headquarters in Beijing, a suitably sinister-looking building for a state organisation that shapes the information diet of hundreds of millions of people each day.

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The uncomfortable truth is that autocrats and architects share complimentary motivations. The former use architecture to glorify their regimes, both domestically and internationally, whereas the latter are attracted to the creative freedom that only unconstrained state power can provide. In democratic societies, there is always tension between the grand visions of architects and the numerous interest groups that have a say in the final result. Why compromise with planning restrictions and irate neighbours when there is a dictator who, as Greenfield puts it, “offers you a fat purse for sharing the contents of your beautiful mind with the world?”

This is not just speculation. As Koolhaas himself stated: “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost nobody that we know of today could even afford or contemplate.”

But really this relationship between architect and state is a triangle, with financial interests making up the third pole. Despite the oft-repeated line that business loves the stability offered by the rule of law, when it comes to building things, the money-men are as fond of the autocrat’s empty canvas as the architects are. When he first pitched the Neom project to investors in 2017, bin Salman told them: “Imagine if you are the governor of New York without having any public demands. How much would you be able to create for the companies and the private sector?”

This points us to the deeper significance of the Gulf States and China as centres of high-profile architecture. These were crucial regions for post-Nineties global capitalism: the good illiberal states. Celebrity architects brought to these places the same spectacular style of building that was appearing in Europe and North America; each landmark “iconic” and distinct but, in their shared scale and audacity, also placeless and generic. Such buildings essentially provided a seal of legitimacy for the economic and financial networks of globalisation. Can this regime’s values really be so different to ours, an investor might say, when they have a museum by Jean Nouvel, or an arts centre by Norman Foster? British architects build football stadiums and skyscrapers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while those governments own football stadiums and skyscrapers in Britain, such as The Shard and Newcastle’s St James’s Park.

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This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy: the ethical issues of working for repressive states have often been debated by architects. When the tide of liberal capitalism seemed to be coming in around the world, they could say, and believe, that their buildings were optimistic gestures, representing a hoped-for convergence around a single global modernity. It is the collapse of those illusions over the last decade that makes such reasoning look increasingly suspect.

With Neom, bin Salman is making explicit the publicity value of architecture, by pushing it to a whole new degree. Aware that breakthroughs in clean energy would essentially render his kingdom a stranded asset, he is trying to rebrand Saudi Arabia as a high-tech green state. He offers investors a package they, like many architects, dream about: breath-taking novelty and innovation, combined with sustainability and an apparent humanistic concern.

But ironically, what bin Salman has really shown is that architects are increasingly unnecessary for conveying political messages. They are being replaced by those masters of unreality who use digital technology to the same ends, like the Marvel film magicians creating a vision of Neom in the global imagination. Whether or not a city like The Line actually exists is almost beside the point in terms of its publicity value. After all, this is an era where the superhero realm of Wakanda is praised as a depiction of Africa, and where America tore itself apart for four years over a wall that never actually came into being.

Likewise, given the technological challenges involved, we can be certain the vast furrow appearing in the Saudi desert will never become The Line as portrayed in the promotional videos. But videos will be enough to project the desired image of an innovative, progressive state. That bin Salman himself might really believe in his futuristic city, encouraged by his army of paid-up designers, will only make him a better salesman.