Multi-billionaire Donald Trump has vowed to beat terrorism in the Middle East if he was elected president of the United States, and warned that Saudi Arabia would be “nothing” without the US. In a speech at the famous Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York City, on Tuesday, the sixty-nine-year-old tycoon announced his intention to stand as a Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election. He told viewers: “Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East…Mark my words. Nobody would be tougher on ISIL than Donald Trump. Nobody.” Referring to reports last month that ISIL had re-opened a 262-key luxury hotel in Mosul, Trump said the terrorist group had become so rich he was now “in competition with them”. He said: “Now ISIL has the oil, and what they don’t have, Iran has. I said it, very strongly, years ago, that I want to have the strongest military we’ve ever had, and we need it more now than ever. But I said, “don’t hit Iraq”, because you’re going to totally destabilise the Middle East. “Iran is going to take over the Middle East, Iran and somebody else will get the oil, and it turned out that Iran is now taking over Iraq. Think of it. Iran is taking over Iraq, and they’re taking it over big league. He slammed current president Barack Obama’s Middle East foreign policy as “a disaster”. “We spent $2 trillion in Iraq, $2 trillion. We lost thousands of lives, thousands in Iraq. We have...thousands of wounded soldiers. And we have nothing. We can’t even go there. “Our president doesn’t have a clue… Take a look at the deal he’s making with Iran [intended to force Iran to scale back its nuclear weapons programme]. He makes that deal, Israel maybe won’t exist very long. It’s a disaster.”
Trump also said Saudi Arabia was in “big, big trouble” as a result of its staunch policy on oil production. “Now, thanks to fracking and other things, the oil is all over the place. “They’ve got nothing but money.” He also claimed the Kingdom was dependent upon the US for its economic survival. "Saudi Arabia without us is gone. They’re gone," he said. The real estate magnate, whose luxury $1.76 million Trump-branded Dubai homes at Damac’s Akoya were launched in March, added that he thought China posed a bigger threat to the US than ISIL in the long term. He said: “You have a problem with ISIL. You have a bigger problem with China. They’re building up their military to a point that is very scary…They’re building a military island in the middle of the South China sea.” The US, Trump concluded, needs a “truly great leader” to tackle such threats from foreign enemies. “Sadly the American Dream is dead,” he pronounced. “We need a leader that wrote [Trump’s 1987 business book] The Art of the Deal.” However, his withering attack on Mexico (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”) and his pledge to build a wall – paid for by Mexico – on the US southern border, prompted Hispanic civil rights group the National Council of La Raza to label Trump “an extremely silly man”. “This is a man who has a pathological need for attention,” Lisa Navarrete, a director at La Raza, told the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “I look at him as a two-year-old who will say a naughty word to get their parents’ attention. That’s what he’s doing.”
