Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East priorities, the fragile cease-fire between India and Pakistan, and voting allegations surrounding Albania’s parliamentary election.

‘Golden Age of the Middle East’

U.S. President Donald Trump kicked off his three-day Persian Gulf tour in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with a sweeping foreign-policy address that heralded an optimistic future for the Middle East.

“In the United States, we’ve announced the golden age of America,” Trump said at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh. “And with the help of the people of the Middle East, the people in this room, partners throughout the region, the golden age of the Middle East can proceed right alongside of us.”

Trump expressed hope that the White House could negotiate a deal with Iran to curb its proxy influence and ensure that Tehran never obtains a nuclear weapon. “If Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure and drive Iranian oil exports to zero,” Trump said.

At the same time, Trump appeared to de-prioritize White House efforts to convince Saudi Arabia to sign the Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements with Israel. “You’ll do it in your own time,” Trump said. Such a diplomatic benchmark was a major goal of both Trump 1.0 and the Biden administration.

Instead, Trump’s focus in Riyadh on Tuesday appeared to center on securing investment. The two countries announced a $600 billion Saudi commitment to invest in the United States that included deals on energy, critical minerals, defense, and health.

Among those was a massive artificial intelligence development pledge that would commit Saudi state-owned AI company Humain to build infrastructure in the kingdom over the next five years using hundreds of thousands of chips from U.S.-based Nvidia. This would be one of the largest U.S. AI chip orders by a state company, and it marks a major win for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has sought to diversify his country’s economy.

The United States and Saudi Arabia also signed an arms deal that will see Riyadh purchase nearly $142 billion in defense equipment and services from more than a dozen U.S. defense firms.

Toward the end of his speech, Trump announced that Washington will be lifting sanctions on Syria “to give them a chance to rebuild,” following in the footsteps of U.S. allies in Europe that have been urging Washington to do so. “Good luck, Syria,” Trump added. “Show us something special.” Trump is expected to “say hello” to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on Wednesday in Riyadh, according to the White House.

Trump will then depart for Qatar, whose royal family is poised to gift the U.S. president a $400 million Boeing 747 luxury plane to be used as Air Force One for the rest of his term. He will conclude his Gulf tour in the United Arab Emirates.

Notably absent from Trump’s schedule is a stop in Israel. Experts suggest that this demonstrates Trump’s focus on investment over security and his shift away from traditional Western allies. “The Gulf is the new Europe, basically,” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told FP’s Rishi Iyengar.

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What We’re Following

An uneasy truce. Pakistan on Tuesday said Islamabad is committed to maintaining the cease-fire deal with India but vowed to respond to any future aggression that might occur. This is in response to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday warning that New Delhi will target “terrorist hideouts” in Pakistan if new attacks occur, adding that India will not be deterred by “nuclear blackmail.”

India’s military operation in Pakistan last week “has drawn a new line in the fight against terrorism,” Modi added. “It has set a new benchmark—a new normal.”

According to Pakistan’s military on Tuesday, last week’s attacks by India killed 40 civilians and 11 troops. India, meanwhile, has said that at least five Indian military personnel and 16 civilians were killed by Pakistan’s reprisal strikes. The military exchanges were among the worst bouts of fighting between the two nuclear-armed powers in decades, and they reignited fears that a wider conflict could spill across regional borders.

Vote-buying allegations. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama won an unprecedented fourth term after his Socialist Party secured 52 percent of the votes in Sunday’s parliamentary election, according to a final count on Tuesday. The result gives Rama a comfortable majority to form a government and push forward legislation that will help Albania join the European Union by 2030.

However, allegations of vote-buying marred the election, with international observers and EU officials casting doubt on the vote’s fairness. Candidates “did not enjoy a level playing field,” EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas and EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos said in a statement, adding that Albanian authorities should investigate allegations of “electoral crimes.”

The opposition Democratic Party won just 34 percent of the vote, with three smaller parties taking the rest of the seats. Opposition officials have urged the country’s election commission not to count around 53,000 ballots mailed from neighboring Greece, as they claim that the ballots from there were manipulated.

Protecting Berlin’s democracy. Germany banned the largest Reichsbürger (or Reich citizen) group in the country on Tuesday and arrested four of its leaders, including self-proclaimed “king” Peter Fitzek. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt accused the far-right organization, which calls itself the “Kingdom of Germany,” of trying to “undermine the rule of law” in the country by creating an alternative state and spreading “antisemitic conspiracy narratives to back up their supposed claim to authority.”

The group, like many other adherents of the broader Reichsbürger movement, does not recognize modern Germany as a state or abide by its laws, instead claiming that the historical German Reich still exists.

According to Germany’s Interior Ministry, the group has around 1,000 members, though the Kingdom of Germany alleges that it has six times that number. Berlin said it will block the group’s online platforms and confiscate its assets to ensure that no further financial gains can be used for extremist purposes.

The German government estimates that the loose-knit Reichsbürger movement has more than 20,000 adherents, though German authorities say only a small percentage of those are also right-wing extremists. In 2023, German police searched the homes of about 20 people in connection with investigations into the Reichsbürger movement. And in 2022, dozens of people whom German prosecutors said were influenced in part by Reichsbürger beliefs were arrested for allegedly plotting to overthrow the German government, including by kidnapping the then-health minister, to create “civil war conditions.”

Odds and Ends

Just hours after becoming Sweden’s national security advisor, Tobias Thyberg resigned last Friday after sensitive images of him emerged from his profile on an LGBTQ dating app. “These are old pictures from an account I previously had on the dating site Grindr,” Thyberg said. “I should have informed [the government] about this, but I did not.” The photos were sent to the Swedish government by an anonymous individual. Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has since called the vetting process’s oversight a “systemic failure.”