Donald Trump’s recent visits to the Vatican and Saudi Arabia brought no surprises in their wake, despite what some pundits might have hoped. The elegant and traditional dress adopted by Mrs Trump, and by Ivanka Trump, in the Vatican, almost seemed to sum up the deeply conventional nature of the meeting.
Mrs Trump wore a veil to see the Pope but was bare-headed in Riyadh – was this a very coded signal? If so, most will have missed its significance. But it is a reminder that one reason why Donald Trump was elected President of the United States was, it seemed at the time, because he promised a fresh approach not just to the problem of radical Islamic terrorism, but to Islam itself. Unlike his opponent, and unlike President Obama, he seemed ready to call a spade a spade, and ready as well to take firm action against ISIS. But how much of that was rhetoric? Now that Trump has visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we can perhaps judge just how radically different his Middle Eastern policy is from that of any of his predecessors.
