Trump blasts 'nation builders' and 'neocons' in Saudi Arabia speech

President Donald Trump on Tuesday excoriated the past two decades of American nation building and neoconservative interventions, telling a crowd in Saudi Arabia, that the region's future lay with them.

Trump has long opposed foreign interventions and has a strong record of opposition to the Iraq War. During his first term, he began the withdrawal process for Afghanistan and attempted to remove American troops from Syria. He has further sought to brand himself as a "president of peace" and campaigned extensively on ending American adventurism abroad. He made the remarks as part of a trip to the kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. So-called "neocons" have been among Trump's sharpest critics from within the GOP, though Trump insisted their moves under prior Republican leaders failed to achieve results.

"No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called 'nation builders,' neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Baghdad, so many other cities," he said. "Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way."

"You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way," Trump asserted.

"It's crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists, or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs," he said. "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."