Four years later, President Jimmy Carter followed suit, visiting Saudi Arabia in January 1978. He met King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd and also made stops in Iran and Egypt. 

During the Gulf War, in a show of solidarity with coalition forces, President George H.W. Bush visited Saudi Arabia in November 1990. He met King Fahd and the Emir of Kuwait and delivered a speech to American and British troops stationed near Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia. He returned for a final meeting with King Fahd on Dec. 31, 1992, just weeks before leaving office, to address stability in the region in the aftermath of the Gulf War. 

President Bill Clinton carried the baton into the post-Cold War era. On Oct. 28, 1994, he visited Kuwait, meeting with Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah and addressing US troops still stationed in the country following Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 military campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein's invasion during the second phase of the Gulf War. In his second term, Clinton became the first and only sitting US President to visit Oman in 2000, where he met with Sultan Qaboos bin Said in Muscat. The meeting was reportedly a last-minute arrangement, with the two leaders meeting at the airport.

The presidency of George W. Bush saw a significant uptick in presidential visits to the Gulf following the September 11 attacks and amid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush became the first sitting US president to visit Qatar in June 2003, during which he met with Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and visited US Central Command headquarters in Doha, where he addressed military personnel.  

In January 2008, Bush toured Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. His tour included meetings in Bahrain with King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa, and in the United Arab Emirates, where he met with President Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. On this visit, Bush became the first sitting US President to visit both Bahrain and the UAE. In Kuwait, he met with high level US military officials in the country, addressed troops at Camp Arifjan and held talks with Emir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah.  

During his first term, current President Donald Trump chose Riyadh as the destination for his first foreign visit, arriving in Saudi Arabia on May 20, 2017. Trump met with King Salman and also with GCC leaders at the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh. During his visit to Saudi Arabia, he signed a $350 billion arms deal with the kingdom — the largest arms deal in history.  

While his visits were limited to Saudi Arabia during his first term, Trump’s Gulf engagement extended beyond the kingdom. His first administration signed the Abraham Accords, which saw the UAE and Bahrain normalize relations with Israel. Trump has previously said that he aims to bring Saudi Arabia into the fold of this agreement, but the war in Gaza has complicated any such plans, as Saudi Arabia has said normalization is contingent on a path to Palestinian statehood. 

President Joe Biden, for his part, made his own regional diplomatic push in July 2022, traveling to Jeddah to deliver a speech to the Gulf Cooperation Council +3 (Egypt, Iraq and Jordan) summit. There he met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a policy reversal after saying he would make Saudi Arabia a "pariah" state following the 2018 killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The reversal reflected a strategic shift, as Biden sought Gulf cooperation on stabilizing global energy markets in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.