President Donald Trump's Middle Eastern tour through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates has generated a lot of headlines, mainly for the hundreds of billions of dollars in business it's generating. But something else significant happened this week. Tuesday, during his address in in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the president lambasted the neoconservative-prescribed foreign policy that has put American taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars and destabilized entire regions of the world.

Wrecking Rather Than Building

Trump said on Tuesday:

The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions … failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad. … In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Trump also suggested it's been bad policy to try to take out every tin-pot despot and tyrant who poses no threat to the U.S., saying:

In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. … I believe it is God's job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.

Moreover, the American president suggested it is time to end America's long-standing obsession with turning Middle Eastern countries into Western-style "democracies" and let them flourish as they are — whether they be theocracies, monarchies, or dictatorships disguised as monarchies.

A Vibrant Middle East

Trump views an economically vibrant Middle East as one the U.S. can do business with, instead of one in which America's military ends up mired in unwinnable conflicts. He told the audience:

A generation of new leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.