About Trump, Saudi Arabia and my years in advertising

I should have published this piece much sooner, it’s been on my mind since the spring, but I feel the topic is sensitive and I suppose, as a French blogger writing for Saudis, I had this idea that you need to make sure you can walk before you start to run.

Anyway, here you go. This piece is about what my years in advertising have taught me about President Trump’s relationship to Saudi Arabia.

I have worked in communication and advertising for almost a decade. People sometimes think I was a creative because I am a good writer, but no. I was what you call a account person, what people sometimes call a suit, one of the rather serious ones. My job was to serve clients.

I actually started my career in management consulting. And after transitioning to communication and advertising, there is one thing I learnt after a while. There are two ways to serve a client: either you give a client what he wants, or you give a client what he needs.

You would think clients know what they need, but in my experience, they don’t always know, for a whole range of reasons. Sometimes, they come to you with something they want, but it’s not actually what they need.

I always thought my job was to understand the clients’ problems and to solve them. To give clients what they need. I always thought that precisely clients hired overeducated people like us to figure out what it was they needed to solve their problems and to make sure it’s delivered to them.

In France, this was never really an issue, only with clients who were in a rush, but mostly, clients understood their problems and they knew what they needed.

But then I moved to Dubai.

In Dubai it fascinated me how different it was. Most clients in Dubai have no patience, they are often quite immature professionnally speaking, they think they know what they need but they don’t. More than once, dealing with clients, I had the feeling I was dealing with a toddler who wanted his toy. “Just give it to me!” Thank God, I also had a few grown-ups among my clients to save the day.

I never got too much support from my bosses there. They too didn’t understand why I wasn’t just giving the clients what they wanted. They made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job properly. Account servicing felt a bit like a mild form of slavery sometimes.

Three years ago, I lost my third job in advertising for reasons that are not entirely related and I have decided not to go back. If advertising wants to continue with this short-term, toy-giving approach, fine, but I want no part in it. Truth is, I have better things to do with my life than help increase the market share of a particular brand of frozen chicken.

It might sound arrogant but I have a good brain and a true interest in solving complex issues. Since there is no shortage of complex issues to solve, I have decided I was going to do that for a living. Somehow.

At some point I found a complex problem that : why is Saudi Arabia’s image so bad abroad?

I started documenting it, I started researching things, I now understood that problem and I have a clear vision what should be done to solve it.

At some point on that intellectual journey, I watched the reception given in Riyadh for President Trump shortly after he was elected and over months now, I have been thinking about President Trump and his relationship to Saudi Arabia.

I see President Trump has quite a number of fans in Saudi Arabia. Yet, overall, I think you have no idea how your close relationship, not to America, but specifically to President Trump, is harming you in the eyes of some Americans, in the eyes also of most Europeans, worse, in the eyes of a lot of Arabs. It was a poisoned gift he gave you when he decided his first trip abroad was going to be to Saudi Arabia.

Overall, it saddens me that most Saudis think that President Trump is a better friend to Saudi Arabia than President Obama was.

President Obama certainly took a few shortcuts during his presidency. I think he made mistakes in Syria. He certainly didn’t involve Saudi Arabia as much as he should have in the talks that lead to the so-called nuclear deal with Iran.

But in my opinion this deal was still a good move, because it was something, because it was an incentive for Iran, because it was a starting point at least, a deal that could have been further negociated and improved, as Emmanuel Macron suggested in April.

I watched in despair the whole sequence this spring when his Highness the Crown prince went to the US, then to France, and when later President Trump announced he pulled out from the nuclear deal. I don’t see how Saudi Arabia is better protected now that the US have resumed sanctions. As I said in my previous post, Iranians are losing their jobs because European companies are moving out from Iran for fear of losing market shares in the US. How do you think this is going to make Iranians feel about Saudi Arabia?

I heard the Crown Prince explain that Iran did nothing for their people with the money after the embargo was lifted. But I would think that when a country has lived in isolation for decades, it takes a bit of time to get organized and to prioritize the needs when investments can start flowing in again. Coincidentally, as all of this was happening, a former colleague of mine who happens to be Iranian posted on Facebook about how, as she cut herself while on vacation with the family in a remote part of Iran, she was surprised to discover that region just got a brand new state-of-the-art hospital where she got treated for pennies. It made me wonder. I am not suggesting the Crown Prince is lying, but we live in a region where getting accurate information can be a challenge even, I suppose, for a Crown Prince.

I honestly don’t know what the Crown Prince asked President Trump. Your Crown Prince is an intelligent man, way more intelligent in my opinion than President Trump. I think he came to the US President with a problem. That’s something people do. And probably he was hoping the US president would find him a good solution. That’s not something unreasonable to expect from a US president.

But this US president is very different from his predecessors, Republicans or Democrats. This US president found him a rushed solution, a simplistic solution, a solution that actually doesn’t solve any of the region’s problems, but a solution that certainly makes him look strong in the eyes of his voters who have no idea about what the Middle East needs.

That’s what bad politicians do, they create problems so they can pretend to solve them.

I am not saying there are no problems with Iran, but it seems to me that actually, the situation is worse than it was a year ago. A year ago, Iranians had some incentive to be a peaceful nation. But now, what is their incentive?

Plus, I am sure Iran is just like any country on earth. A country with good people who are trying to live good, peaceful lives, and with no-so-good people who are only happy when they are creating trouble. In every country on earth, there is the battle between those two types of people, and unfortunately, I think President Trump’s policy change only fuels the troublemakers in Iran while making it more difficult for the peacemakers to be heard.

To President Trump, I am sorry to say, Saudi Arabia is nothing more than a client he wants to please. I was ashamed to watch the sequence when president Trump in the Oval Office started listing all the military equipment your country is buying. As a cheap salesman would. I thought it was a disgrace to his prestigious office, and a lack of respect to your Crown Prince.

That day, I got it. President Trump is little more than a cheap salesman who’s got a good client. President Trump doesn’t bother to give his clients what they need, he doesn’t bother to try and understand things at an intimate level, he doesn’t bother thinking things through. He just gives his clients what he thinks they want, what pleases him, and then he goes golfing.

Oh, Saudi Arabia, isn’t this special friendship starting to seriously sting?

What President Trump did with the so-called nuclear agreement is bad enough, but the real problem are the favors he probably asked in return.

The military orders are nothing, Saudi Arabia probably wanted most of this equipment anyway.

No, the problem are the other favors. And as the US embassy was moved to Jerusalem, as the PLO office in Washington was closed, as the Israelis move forward, taking over the bedouin village of Khan Al Ahmar, it’s quite obvious where the Republican administration expected some leniency from Saudi Arabia. The silence in the region is deafening. It’s as if we had let the Palestinians down.

How can a great Arab Nation like Saudi Arabia let this happen without a fight? How can the region take the side of the bullies by staying silent?

You might think that what happens in Palestine has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, but it does.

See, I think that your Crown prince is a great chance for Saudi Arabia. I think that under his ruling, Saudi Arabia can become one of the most respected nations in the world. I can see his Highness becoming one of those top global leaders known for their wisdom, a global leader that everybody listens to with respect, and I am ready to help him in any way I can, to make sure this happens.

But to be one day a respected global leader, his Highness first has to be a respected Arab leader, and this is not going to happen if people throughout the Arab world have the feeling that under his ruling, Saudi Arabia let the Palestinians down, to please an administration that will hopefully be remembered for the worst foreign policy in American history.

I have the feeling that his Highness is actually trying to help the Palestinians, but that is not how things are perceived by the Palestinians and by people throughout the Arab world. And perceptions matter.

To be honest, an element of luck might come at some point. The same way President Trump lost patience with the Palestinians closing the PLO office in DC, he might also lose patience with the Israelis at some point, after he already gave them so much, precisely because they are too eager to gain advantage of the situation. But it certainly would help if Saudi Arabia put some pressure there. It would certainly help if Saudi Arabia made it cristal-clear that the way the Palestinians are treated is not acceptable. Could I suggest to cancel a few hundred of millions of military equipment? That always sends a message.

I actually don’t understand why anybody should have to give up on Jerusalem. Why isn’t a neutral entity, why aren’t the United Nations administering Jerusalem, at least for a while, a decade or two? It certainly would be a difficult job but isn’t Jerusalem a city that actually belongs a bit, in a way to humanity anyway?

I might be naive but to me the narrow corner where we are right now cannot be it. If anything, it might be better to wait until the people around the table are more enclined to find a solution that is actually acceptable for all parties involved. With President Trump and even more so with Benyamin Netanyahu, it certainly isn’t the case today.

Sometimes, one can do nothing but learn patience.