Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is expected at the White House on Tuesday, in his first visit to the US in seven years.
President Donald Trump is going all out to welcome the Saudi royal, who he has called a "great ally", rolling out the red carpet for MbS and arranging a banquet that will be attended by major figures such as Tesla billionaire and X CEO Elon Musk.
Business deals and investments are expected to be a key component of the visit.
"We’re more than just meeting. We’re honouring Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince," Trump told reporters on Friday.
According to the White House, MbS’s visit will include a welcome ceremony in the morning, featuring a military band, a bilateral, and lunch with Trump at the Oval Office, and a formal dinner in the evening.
On Wednesday, a US-Saudi investment forum is due to be held, and CEOs from Chevron, Qualcomm, Aramco, Cisco, General Dynamics, and Pfizer will likely be present.
The event, hosted at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, will include panels on artificial intelligence, finance, technology, energy, aerospace, and healthcare, and is intended to open up financial opportunities between Saudi and American businessmen.
MbS's US visit is attracting significant media attention. His last visit was in 2018, months before journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA determined that the Saudi Crown Prince orchestrated his murder, for a time rendering him a pariah in the United States and elsewhere.
Trump, however, never fully cut ties with him and went on to embrace bin Salman as one of his key allies in the Middle East. He has tried to persuade MbS to establish relations with Israel, while the presidential family has invested heavily in the oil-rich kingdom.
Bin Salman's visit comes after Trump said he will greenlight the sale of F-35 fighter jets to the Gulf kingdom, in a move that could alter the military power balance in the Middle East, as Israel is the only country in the region with such fighter jets.
A US sale of F-35 stealth fighters to the kingdom will likely anger Israel, which has long voiced opposition to this.
Last week, The New York Times reported that the Trump Organization is seeking to bring a Trump-branded building to a Saudi government project worth $63 billion – also likely to be on the Trump-MbS agenda.
While the nature of bin Salman’s visit appears to be business-focused, Trump told reporters on Friday that he will discuss the controversial Abraham Accords with the royal. Since Trump brokered the Accords in 2020, which saw the UAE, Morocco, and Bahrain normalise relations with Israel, Washington has sought to lure Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest sites in Islam, into the mix.
Normalisation has been widely slammed by Palestinians, which they view as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause given Israel's decades-long occupation of the West Bank and genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Rumours swirled that Saudi Arabia was set to join in 2022 and 2023, but the outbreak of Israel’s deadly war in Gaza, which has killed over 69,000 Palestinians, stalled talks.
Saudi Arabia staunchly criticised Israel for its conduct, and often stressed that normalisation would not occur unless a Palestinian state was guaranteed, something which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected.
With a fragile ceasefire in place and Arab backing of a Trump peace plan for Gaza, the US is likely to see this as a window of opportunity to push for normalisation, although Saudi Arabia is not likely to immediately agree.
Since his second term began, Trump has sought to cultivate deeper ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies.
Earlier this year, the president announced Riyadh would invest $600 billion in the US, and he later met bin Salman in Saudi Arabia during his Middle East tour in May, in a visit centred on investments and economic deals.
The trip, Trump's first second-term state visit, saw him greeted grandiosely with a fighter jet escort, horses, and sword-wielding honour guards. Trump even visited one of Saudi Arabia's UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Diriyah.