“Things must change in order to stay the same,” the young aristocrat Tancredi tells his nostalgic uncle Don Fabrizio in The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel of an old family weathering the power struggles of the new Italy in the late 19th century. Lushly adapted by Luchino Visconti in 1963 with Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio, The Leopard has lately demonstrated Tancredi’s principle in a bright but shallow refurbishment by Netflix. Still, the plot remains the same. The Leopard cannot change its spots.

President Donald Trump’s address at the Riyadh Development Summit is the most significant statement of American purpose in the Middle East since Barack Obama’s Cairo speech of 2009. In Cairo, Obama proposed a “new beginning” between “America and Islam,” based on “mutual interest and “mutual respect,” and sharing “common principles” such as “mutual tolerance” and the “legitimate workings of the political process.” In Riyadh, Trump dropped the airy abstractions and renounced the cult of democracy promotion. He reduced the mutual interests of America and the Arab monarchies to the mutual language and mutual realities of money and power.