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Critics will argue upon first inspection that President Trump’s speech to Arab leaders in Riyadh today was scarcely a shift from President Obama’s infamous, fawned over lecture in Cairo in 2009. Those critics are incorrect.
They’re incorrect because they’ll tend to be journalists, activists, think-tankers, politicians, or pundits. In other words: no business people.
The speech President Trump gave in Riyadh was different because of his business acumen. No businessman concludes a meeting without the cliched “action points”. Otherwise, the whole thing is a waste of time.
We can easily find similarities in both their speeches: the usual diplomatic gratitude towards their hosts, the pledges not to lecture, the aggrandizement of the region’s history, and the aversion to describing Western vs. Middle Eastern philosophies as a “clash of civilizations”. Fine.
But where Obama stopped short, Trump continued full speed into making demands of the people in the room.