Trump Says U.S. Will Sell F-35s to Saudis, Despite Pentagon Concerns

The president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that he planned to sell the advanced fighter jets to Riyadh.

President Trump said on Monday that he planned to sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns from national security officials in his administration that a sale could create an opportunity for China to steal the planes’ advanced technology.

“We will be doing that, we’ll be selling F-35s,” Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office, explaining that the Saudis “want to buy them, they’ve been a great ally.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement came on the eve of a White House visit from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, during his first trip to the United States in more than seven years. Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, and U.S. officials are expected to discuss a Saudi purchase of 48 of the fighter jets and a potential mutual defense agreement.

The F-35 is made primarily by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which produces anywhere from 150 to 190 of the warplanes per year. About 20 countries either have or have ordered the planes, which currently cost about $80 million to $110 million each, depending on the model, according to recent contracts.

A 2024 study from the Government Accountability Office found that the cost of sustaining a fleet of the warplanes, which are designed to last for decades with normal use, can be far higher.

Saudi Arabia has long been the biggest purchaser of American weapons. But its conduct on the world stage has made some in government wary of the potential national security implications of giving Riyadh unfettered access to some of the United States’ most sensitive stealth technology.

A recent report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon, raised concerns that China would be able to access F-35 technology if the United States were to finalize a deal to sell Saudi Arabia the warplanes, as Riyadh and Beijing have a security partnership.

Officials have also raised concerns that such a sale could compromise Israel’s regional “qualitative military edge” as the only country in the Middle East that currently has F-35s in its war arsenal. Israel has been pushing for the Trump administration to broker a deal to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, a goal that was showing some promise before Hamas’s deadly invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The bloody years of hostilities that ensued in Gaza have largely ended the prospect of such a pact. The Trump administration does not appear to have pressed Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for approval of the F-35 sale. And there have been no indications that Saudi Arabia plans to normalize ties with Israel soon, given the anger among many Arabs over Israel’s war in Gaza.

Some Republican lawmakers are uneasy about allowing the F-35 sale to go through without Saudi Arabia’s normalization with Israel, according to aides familiar with those discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations about potential legislation that is not yet before Congress. And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been lobbying members of Congress against it absent that condition.

By law, Congress will have an opportunity to block the sale, even if the Trump administration approves it. But despite a litany of objections to Saudi Arabia’s conduct in recent years — particularly concerning the actions of its crown prince — lawmakers have had little success in constraining arms deals. And Mr. Trump has shown a willingness to go around whatever roadblocks lawmakers try to put up.

In 2019, the first Trump administration invoked the president’s emergency powers to bypass Congress’s power to review an $8.1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and a number of other countries. Weeks later, Mr. Trump vetoed bipartisan resolutions aimed at blocking the sale of some of those weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

At the time, lawmakers in both parties were angry about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist who was killed by agents at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018. U.S. intelligence later determined that the crown prince had approved the assassination.

Lawmakers were also becoming increasingly frustrated with the crown prince over Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign during Yemen’s civil war, which human rights organizations faulted for worsening an already crippling humanitarian crisis.

Democrats have continued to periodically raise concerns about Saudi Arabia’s alleged human rights abuses. But during the Biden administration, even some of Saudi Arabia’s sharpest Democrat critics seemed willing to hear out the White House as it tried to reset relations with the kingdom through talks on normalization with Israel, a mutual defense pact and helping Riyadh set up a civilian nuclear program.

Democrats are likely to push back against Mr. Trump’s plans to sell F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia. But despite the misgivings of some in their party, several senior Republicans — including Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — are expected to back the move, given their previous support for Mr. Trump’s efforts to sell advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia as a means of countering Iran.

Robert Jimison and Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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