Saudi Crown Prince Stuns Trump by Reaching Out to Carney — A $1 Trillion Deal No One Expected!

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]There is a moment in geopolitics when the loudest announcement in the room turns out not to be the most important one. That is precisely what happened in November 2025. And most of the world's cameras were pointed in entirely the wrong direction. Let's start with what the cameras were pointing at. On November 18th, 2025, President Donald Trump warmly greeted Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman at the White House, signaling a closer relationship than had existed under the Biden administration.

[00:00:29]Trump called bin Salman a very good friend and stated that Saudi Arabia had agreed to invest 600 billion in the United States with the crown prince then revealing that the total would be closer to 1 trillion spanning artificial intelligence, energy production and defense. The Oval Office filled with theatrics. Trump nodded with visible satisfaction. MBS declared to the press that Saudi Arabia was going to increase that $600 billion dollars to almost$1 trillion dollars of investment, real investment, and real opportunity in many areas. Trump responded, "You know, that's great. We're doing numbers that nobody's ever done." The cameras rolled.

[00:01:10]The headlines ignited. Every network and every outlet was fixated on the spectacle of the world's most talked about crown prince sitting in the Oval Office writing what appeared to be the biggest check in modern diplomatic history. But here is what the cameras missed. While all of that Oval Office theater was unfolding quietly and without fanfare, Saudi Arabia's investment minister Khaled Alfali had already made a trip to Ottawa. He spent a day in meetings with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and a range of Canadian senior ministers. Then he spent a day on Bay Street, Canada's financial capital, meeting with the people who actually move money. And in those same weeks, NBS himself reportedly picked up the phone and called Carney directly.

[00:01:58]That call was not televised. There was no press pool. There were no posters of military equipment being brandished.

[00:02:04]There was just a quiet conversation between two leaders. and what emerged from it would shake the assumptions of anyone who believed Saudi Arabia had handed itself entirely to Washington. To understand why this matters, you have to understand what the trillion dollar pledge to Trump actually was and more importantly what it was not. Muhammad bin Salman got an impressive hall from his November visit to Washington. He received a long sought deal on advanced US chips to fuel Saudi Arabia's ambitions to become a global hub for artificial intelligence. He secured a strategic defense agreement and was designated a major non-NATO ally, which together eased some of the impediments to US defense sales. Saudi Arabia was offered the F-35, one of the most sophisticated pieces of hardware in the US arsenal and signed agreements on critical minerals and civil nuclear cooperation. For Saudi Arabia, it was a productive visit. But what exactly did Trump get in return? That is where the analysis begins to cut against the triumphalism on normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which Trump reportedly believes is within reach. He got little satisfaction. Publicly, MBS said Saudi Arabia wants to be part of the Abraham Accords, but he made clear that normalization remains linked to a credible path to Palestinian statehood.

[00:03:25]In other words, the Saudis didn't budge.

[00:03:28]on the trillion dollar figure itself.

[00:03:30]NBS's language was more ambiguous than the White House fact sheet would later suggest. While the White House announced that Saudi Arabia would be increasing investment commitments to almost $1 trillion, MBS only said the agreements would amount to almost $1 trillion of investment, real investment, and real opportunity in many areas that will create a lot of investment opportunities. and creating investment opportunities does not necessarily mean actual investment in the US economy. MBS said nothing about a time frame. What Trump extracted from the crown prince was mainly a trillion dollar sound bite.

[00:04:07]Not just a big number, but a number so large it is difficult to take seriously, particularly in the absence of any defined time frame. The history of Saudi investment pledges is instructive here.

[00:04:19]Analysts from the Arab Gulf States Institute pointed to the precedent of the 2017 Riad Summit, where a heralded 450 billion dollar investment package resulted in actual exports of only roughly $92 billion between 2017 and 2020, less than 25% of the promised total. Similarly, a 2017 defense agreement valued at $110 billion resulted in formal notifications to Congress of only 23 billion over three subsequent years. This announcement to execution gap raises the possibility that the $1 trillion figure is a rhetorical device used to justify the political cost of normalizing relations with MBS rather than a binding economic reality.

[00:05:05]At the earlier May 2025 Riad summit, both leaders claimed Saudi Arabia would invest $1 trillion in the US, but signage at the conference itself put the cumulative total of the deals at actually worth over $300 billion. Hours earlier, the White House had cited a $600 billion investment. The discrepancy was enormous. The $1 trillion investment is equal to Saudi Arabia's entire annual economic output in 2023, approximately 1.07 trillion. And economists questioned whether such a figure was feasible at all with no time scale given. Experts warned that much of the promised money exists only on paper and may take years to materialize. One economist noted that while such deals can stimulate confidence and markets in the short term, their most meaningful returns often unfold over years, well beyond a single presidential term. So Trump got a headline. MBS got chips, F-35 potential, a NATOike status designation and a diplomatic rehabilitation from the Kosogi era pariah label. The exchange was not remotely equal in substance. And all of this was happening while Canada, that country Trump had spent months threatening, belittling, and attempting to economically coersse into submission, was executing one of the most methodical geopolitical pivots of the year. Let's go back to what Carney was doing. A few years ago, Saudi Arabia and Canada were barely on speaking terms. Now they are exploring trade deals, investment opportunities, and if plans come together, A visit to the Kingdom by Mark Carney. In the age of Trump, they are among a host of midsized powers looking to carve out a new economic and geopolitical path. The rapidly evolving relationship was on display when Saudi investment minister Khaled Alfali spent a day in Ottawa with Carney and a range of senior ministers, then a day on Bay Street. What could redefine the Saudi Canadian relationship spans five sectors? energy including renewables, nuclear and EVs, advanced manufacturing including drones and satellites, AI and quantum, mining and critical minerals, and advanced education and healthcare.

[00:07:17]This is not a small list. This is a full spectrum partnership agenda and it maps almost perfectly onto what MBS needs most for vision 2030, his grand domestic transformation plan to succeed. Saudi Arabia does not just need American chips. It needs Canadian critical minerals to build the batteries of the future. It needs Canadian nuclear expertise to build the civilian reactors that will power a post oil economy. It needs Canadian AI talent to complement the hardware it is acquiring from the United States. It needs Canadian agri food capabilities to position itself as the food hub of the Middle East and North Africa. It needs Canadian clean energy technology to make the pivot from fossil fuels look credible to the international investors it is wooing.

[00:08:04]Carney walked into every single one of those needs simultaneously. And Carney was not doing this in isolation. He had just concluded a landmark visit to Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital that demonstrated in real time how Canada's Gulf pivot was structurally organized. Canada's new government declared itself on a mission to double non US exports over the next decade and unleash $1 trillion in new investment in Canada over 5 years. As part of this mission, Carney concluded his visit to Abu Dhabi where he deepened the trade relationship and secured new agreements to attract massive pools of foreign capital. During the visit, Carney and the president of the UAE signed the new Canada UAE foreign investment promotion and protection agreement, which establishes clear, predictable rules for investors and ensures a stable business environment to unlock billions in bilateral investment.

[00:09:00]Carney said Canada is a global leader in AI, quantum, and life sciences, and that it is time to begin commercializing those strengths for the benefit of humanity. The prime minister personally invited Emirati investors to visit him in Canada to spur more major projects.

[00:09:16]And when the numbers came in, they were concrete. Carney's office confirmed the UAE had agreed to invest 70 billion dollar Canadian dollars in Canada as part of a bilateral investment framework agreement focused on critical minerals, energy, ports, and AI. Consider what this architecture looks like from the outside. Canada and the UAE sign an investment protection agreement and launch free trade negotiations, the first bilateral leader meeting in over 40 years. Canada and Saudi Arabia begin structured dialogue covering five complete sectors. MBS calls Carney directly. The Saudi investment minister visits Ottawa and Bay Street and all of this unfolds in the same two-week window that Trump is celebrating his trillion dollar oval office soundbite. The contrast is almost cinematic in its clarity. On one side, you have a transactional performance, a choreographed Oval Office exchange where a number was extracted not through detailed negotiation, but through public pressure in front of cameras with no time frame, no binding commitment, no structural framework, and a historical track record of Saudi pledges delivering less than 25 cents on the dollar. On the other side, you have a methodical sector by sector, institution by institution architecture being built quietly between Canada and the Gulf States, signed investment protection agreements, formal trade negotiations launched, ministerial delegations dispatched, sovereign wealth funds invited to tour specific project sites with a prime minister personally committing to host investors himself.

[00:10:52]One of these is dealmaking as theater.

[00:10:54]The other is dealmaking as engineering.

[00:10:57]The Trump NBS relationship has been described as more transactional than ever with Trump presenting the kingdom's domestic economic transformation as a bonanza that can deliver extraordinary amounts of investment dollars as a reward for the political rehabilitation of NBS. But analysts note that many of the agreements that came out of the crown prince's Washington visit are less than meets the eye. NBS's clearest gain from the visit was his personal rehabilitation as a valued US security partner. After more than seven years of being out in the cold following the assassination of journalist Jamal Kosigible, NBS enjoyed a warm welcome from the Trump administration complete with a rare F-35 flyover, a black tie dinner, and an investment conference featuring titans of Silicon Valley and private equity. That rehabilitation has enormous value for MBS's domestic and regional standing, but it also illustrates who extracted more from the transaction. Now, zoom out to the broader strategic picture because this is where the Carne MBS dynamic becomes genuinely consequential for the global order. Saudi Arabia is not a country that bets on one horse. It has a history of maintaining parallel relationships with Washington, with Beijing, with Moscow's energy markets, and increasingly now with the new group of midsized powers navigating the post-unipolar world. What MBS is doing with Canada, is not a betrayal of the US relationship. It is the expansion of Saudi strategic optionality, the kingdom ensuring that no single country, not even the most powerful one on Earth, has a monopoly on its future. Having reconciled with Iran in 2023 through Chinese mediated diplomacy and extricated itself from a devastating war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia bolstered its national security and reduced its dependence on external powers for security guarantees. However, the announcement of a trillion dollar investment plan signals a shift toward increasing dependency on the United States, a power whose commitment to Riad has wavered since the 2010s. The engagement with Canada is part of the counterbalance to that dependency, a way of maintaining strategic leverage even while deepening the US relationship. The spending spree also creates tension with MBS's vision 2030. With a 2025 budget deficit of 27 billion dollar and oil prices below $70, far from the $90 needed to balance the budget, Riad needs to weigh domestic reforms like job creation against its international commitments. A trillion dollar US investment pledge, if fully honored, would prioritize American jobs through infrastructure contracts for US firms and defense deals sustaining Boeing and Loheed Martin plants.

[00:13:44]Canadian partnerships, by contrast, offer Saudi Arabia the possibility of building domestic capacity, critical minerals technology that can be deployed at home, AI partnerships that train Saudi engineers, EV manufacturing ambitions that employ Saudi workers. The Canadian relationship has a reciprocal developmental logic that the American relationship, structured largely around arm sales and capital outflows, does not fully offer. And then there is the factor that almost no mainstream analysis of this moment acknowledged the context of Trump's trade war against Canada and what it meant for Saudi Arabia to be seen engaging Carney directly during that moment. Trump had spent months treating Canada not as a partner but as an adversary, threatening tariffs, dismissing Canadian sovereignty, suggesting that Canada might as well become the 51st state. The explicit goal of much of this pressure was to isolate Canada economically to force Ottawa into a posture of submission and dependence. Canada's government responded by declaring its mission to double non- US exports over the next decade, fundamentally reorienting its trade strategy away from dependence on American markets. Every major Gulf deal Canada struck during this period was in a structural sense a direct answer to American pressure. That MBS chose this exact moment to engage Carney personally to dispatch his investment minister to Ottawa to initiate a five- sector partnership framework sends a signal that goes far beyond bilateral economics. It tells every midsize power watching that Saudi Arabia, recipient of Trump's most lavish diplomatic praise, is simultaneously building independent relationships with the countries Trump is trying to isolate. It tells the world that the Gulf States are not going to let American transactionalism dictate the boundaries of their strategic portfolios. And it tells Canada that its pivot to alternative markets is being taken seriously not just by second tier economies, but by one of the most consequential sovereign wealth pools on the planet. Carney's pitch for over 1 trillion in new investment, most of it private capital, will need to include sources like Saudi investment funds and corporates. Saudi's ambitions to diversify its energy sector, including green and blue hydrogen, green ammonia, and EVs, will need a lot more Canadian technology, talent, and investment. The alignment here is structural, not merely rhetorical. These are not two countries announcing a photo opportunity. These are two economies with genuine complimentarities. One rich in capital and hungry for technology, the other rich in technology, resources, and policy stability. and hungry for diversified investment. There is also a dimension to this that is almost entirely absent from popular coverage.

[00:16:40]The role of critical minerals. This may be the single most important strategic commodity of the next 20 years.

[00:16:48]Outpacing oil the way oil once outpaced coal. Canada sits at top extraordinary reserves of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. Saudi Arabia via its sovereign wealth fund PIF has identified critical minerals as a core investment thesis and both countries have now formally agreed that the UAE a close Saudi partner will invest in Canadian critical mineral development.

[00:17:15]The connections here are not coincidental. They reflect a coordinated Gulf strategy to secure supply chains for the technologies that will define the 21st century economy and Canada is at the center of that chain. What makes Mark Carney such a consequential actor in this story is not just his political decisions. It is his background. Before becoming prime minister, Carney served as governor of the Bank of Canada and then governor of the Bank of England, arguably the two most important central banking posts outside of the United States Federal Reserve. He speaks the language of sovereign wealth funds, of institutional capital, of long horizon investment frameworks. When he walks into a room with Gulf sovereign wealth managers, he is not learning on the job.

[00:18:03]He is operating in his native professional vocabulary. That credibility, that ability to speak as an equal to the world's most sophisticated pools of capital is a diplomatic asset that no amount of Oval Office theater can replicate. And so as the cameras were focused on NBS and Trump congratulating each other in Washington, Carney was quietly doing the work that actually reshapes long-term economic geography. Now to be analytically complete, we have to hold all of this with appropriate nuance. The Canadian Gulf engagement is not without its critics. Some analysts argue that Carney's trade push with the UAE will lock Ottawa into fossil fuel expansion, lacks rights protections in trade agreements, and closer ties to prostate autocracies. Critics contend that indulging Abu Dhabi with trade deals and investment opportunities does not make for a safer or more united world. These are legitimate concerns and any honest account of this pivot has to acknowledge that deepening partnerships with Gulf monarchies carries real human rights and governance tensions that Canada will need to navigate carefully. Similarly, the Saudi Canadian relationship is still in its early stages. Ministerial visits and phone calls are not the same as signed and funded projects. The announcement to execution gap that afflicts Saudi investment pledges to the United States applies in principle to any country. Canada will need to do the hard institutional work of translating these highlevel engagements into bankable projects, regulatory frameworks and on the ground capital flows. But even accounting for all of that, the directional shift is unmistakable.

[00:19:47]In the age of Trump, Canada and Saudi Arabia are among a host of midsize powers looking to carve out a new economic and geopolitical path. The old architecture of international order, where Washington sets the terms and everyone else adjusts, is being quietly renegotiated deal by deal, phone call by phone call, ministerial visit by ministerial visit. And what is perhaps most striking about the moment we are analyzing is how perfectly it illustrates the difference between power performed and power exercised. Trump performed power in the Oval Office.

[00:20:24]Flags, cameras, trillion dollar numbers with no timeline, a rehabilitation ceremony for a man in Washington's own Congress refused to be photographed with. Carney exercised power in Abu Dhabi and Ottawa, signed agreements, investment protection frameworks, sovereign wealth fund invitations, a five- sector strategic framework with the kingdom that Trump thought was exclusively his. The reputational gains for MBS in making it back to the White House are significant. not simply rehabilitating the crown prince as an essential part of the US Saudi relationship, but reinforcing his claims to domestic and regional leadership. But MBS is too sophisticated a strategist to have gone to Washington only for a photo. He went to Washington for chips, for F-35s, for the MNA designation, for the diplomatic cover. And then with all of that secured, he called Carney because Saudi Arabia does not pick one lane. It picks every lane it can sustain simultaneously.

[00:21:30]That is the story the cameras missed.

[00:21:32]While Trump was celebrating a deal that analysts say doesn't hold up to scrutiny, MBS was already engineering the next chapter. one that includes Canada not as an afterthought, but as a core pillar of a Saudi strategic diversification that will outlast any single American presidency. The trillion dollar headline belongs to Trump. The trillion dollar architecture being quietly built belongs to a world that is moving faster and in more directions than Washington's Oval Office cameras can