Saudi Arabia is designated a major non-NATO ally; the F-35 sale comes with a trillion-dollar handshake.

Wednesday’s announcement, on White House letterhead, on a ‘fact sheet’ the press shop emailed to reporters at noon, said the United States would sell F-35 fighter jets to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, designate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia a major non-NATO ally, and enter into a strategic partnership covering nuclear technology, AI, and critical minerals. Saudi Arabia, in return, would invest one trillion dollars in the United States.

Buddy. One trillion dollars. That is more than the entire annual gross domestic product of every country in Africa combined. That is more than the annual federal budget of Germany. That is, in real terms, the amount of money no country has ever invested in any other country in the history of countries investing in countries.

The two-hundred-seventy-billion-dollar number, which is the actually-signed number, is at least real. It includes about a hundred forty billion in F-35 procurement, a series of arms-sales letters of agreement, and some commercial-real-estate and AI-data-center memoranda of understanding. The trillion is pledged. Pledged, in deal-language, is the same word as we hope. There is no enforcement. There is no deadline. There is no escrow.

I have been to Atlantic City. I have watched a man, a real man with a real cigar, pledge to put a hundred thousand dollars into the high-stakes baccarat room at the Borgata “by the weekend.” That man, by the weekend, was at the Cracker Barrel off Exit 7. The trillion is the cigar version of the trillion.

The F-35 sale is real. The F-35 is the most advanced fighter aircraft the United States makes. We have, until this week, sold it only to NATO members and to Israel and Japan and South Korea and Australia, all of which are democracies with treaty obligations to us. Saudi Arabia is not a NATO member. Saudi Arabia is also, by the State Department’s own annual human rights report, governed by a man whose intelligence assessment, by our own government, says he ordered the killing of a journalist who lived in Virginia. The Israeli government, which has strategic reasons of its own to oppose the sale, was not in the room.

The major-non-NATO-ally designation gets the Kingdom into a club that includes Argentina, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The club used to mean something. It means slightly less now, because the President’s signature is on a piece of paper that handed out the membership card with the F-35 sale. The membership card was the closer.

I’m arguing with the television again, and the television is arguing back this time.