There is so much criticism regarding President Biden’s Middle East foreign policy nowadays, it might be instructive to look briefly at the harrowing alternative. And let’s be frank here: one of two men — whether we are enthusiastic about it or not -- is going to be President this time next year: Joe Biden or Donald J. Trump. With that in mind it is worth considering what Trump has done and might do differently in the region compared to his successor.
Any such discussion, however brief, has to begin with an examination of Trump’s first major policy move as President -- the so-called “Muslim Travel Ban” on January 27, 2017. Executive Order 13769 separated many families and, to this day, barrs people from 13 countries from entering the United States. President Biden signed an Executive Order early on in his administration reversing that order. But by April an Axios poll found that half of Americans -- and 42% of Democrats -- supported mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. And so, as election season kicks off, Biden has cynically signed an executive order recently to restrict asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. Quien es mas macho?
Trump’s trip to the Middle East, featuring the mysterious, beguiling orb, was another significant regional event early in his Presidency. Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia (more on which in a bit), led to warm meetings with the leaders of Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. The orb photo marked a pronounced de-emphasis on human rights in Middle East policy in Washington. Four days after the orb photo was taken, Bahrain jailed 286 protesters and killed 5 people, which is dramatic even for the island nation in West Asia. “Human rights groups condemned the deadly crackdown on peaceful protesters while Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called it the ‘first concrete result’ of U.S. President Donald Trump ‘cozying up to despots’ in Saudi Arabia two days earlier -- ‘emboldening the Bahrain regime,’” commented Radio Farda at the time. In the days after Trump’s trip Egypt, also, jailed activists. And soon afterwards, the Qatar embargo happened. Consider the orb’s eldritch glow an indecent greenlight to pandemonium in the Middle East.
Further, Trump’s appointment in his first year in office of Michael Flynn (who resigned in disgrace) and subsequently John Bolton as National Security Advisor signaled an extreme hawkishness on Iran. Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from the nuclear agreement, his predecessors signature foreign policy achievement, occurred in May 2018, setting Iran on the course to reach the Bomb. And the appointment of David Friedman as his ambassador to Israel was also a regional game changer, vis a vis, especially, the West Bank settlements. “The Friedman pick sent a green light to Netanyahu’s coalition partners to accelerate settlement activity and push for annexation of West Bank territory,” wrote Martyn Indyk for Brookings. Ardent supporters of the Palestinians should expect to see more of Ambassador Friedman, who today endorsed his former boss, in an even more senior role. How would Netanyahu’s coalition partners see this?
The problem of Iran and the bomb appears to have accelerated, even as President Biden tries to get Tehran back to the bargaining table. This month, Iran purchased 300 tons of uranium from Niger. We can assume, to be sure, that this is not to heat up some baklava. In a Trump 2.0 reality, expect Iran’s acceleration in pursuit of the Bomb to increase proportional to the hawkish rhetoric spewed on Truth Social. Trump’s Pentagon targeted and killed the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in 2020, and threatened to bomb important cultural sites, which is quite literally a war crime. Which leads us to the fundamental incommensurability of basic human rights in the region and and “America First.”
Ardent defenders of the Palestinian people ought to take a serious look at Trump’s alarming neutrality on the subject of human rights. “Leaders appear to be leaving conversations with Trump feeling greenlit to act aggressively against their own people or their neighbors,” Daniel Benaim wrote in Foreign Affairs in the heydays of Trump 1.0, summing up how heads of state reacted to the America Firster. Civilian deaths in anti-ISIS operations increased dramatically under Trump, for example. As horrible as President Biden is on the Palestinian issue, dear reader, he is infinitely more acceptable than Trump, who generally has made every effort to portray himself on the campaign trail as the more Spaniel-like in his fidelity to Bibi Netanyahu.
And while we are all fixated on the subject of the doings of the children of the President, we need to talk a bit about Jared, the former President’s “brain” on the Middle East. What are Jared’s thoughts on the war being prosecuted at present by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? “I think Israel’s gone way more out of their way than a lot of other countries would to try to protect civilians from casualties,” Kushner told Tarek Masoud of the Kennedy School in February, according to the Harvard Gazette. Jared, ‘03, also told students at his alma mater that he considered Bibi a “family friend” and that he was “smart to move slowly and deliberately” in Gaza. This would explain in part why the Trump administration squandered so much of America’s diplomatic leverage with Israel, like when it moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, infuriating Palestinians. We cannot fail to note that Jared will probably not be returning to the bestride the Middle East like a Colossus in the event of a second Trump administration.
That having been said, the former senior advisor to President Donald Trump made out like a bandit financially off of 45’s “foreign policy” in the region. While performing his “public service,” he developed a close relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Kushner’s qualifications for that august role in such a dangerous region? Jared read 25 books on the subject. But more importantly, he was the President’s son-in-law, so, vis a vis the House of Saud, game recognize game.
After his service, “The Stupid Prince” launched a private equity firm and secured a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, chaired by — you guessed it — MBS. Ivanka and Jared couldn’t run away from the White House and begin spending that money fast enough! And what did the House of Saud get for their investment? Lots and lots of weapons. Trump also vetoed a Congressional resolution to cease military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. And, perhaps most appallingly, Trump’s rejecting the CIA’s assessment of MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s murder. No Middle Eastern potentate with hands incarnadine had a better friend in the White House 2018 than MBS. The best “Stupid Prince” that money could buy, really.
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Looking backwards, what are the origins of Trump’s “special relationship” with the House of Saud? David Fahrenthold told WNYC’s Ilya Marritz:
Trump's relationship with — business relationship with rich Saudis goes back to the early 1990s, where Trump had — his go-go days of the ‘80s had ended, and he ended up in a huge amount of debt and trying to get rid of some of his biggest assets. So Saudi princes bought both the Trump Princess, which was this giant yacht Trump had, and also the Plaza Hotel — two properties that, basically, Trump had bought in the ‘80s, and then in the 1990s couldn’t pay for. But we shouldn't look back at those areas and say, “Well, you know, the Saudis were cultivating him ‘cause they thought he would be a future president.” They just saw him as a guy who was highly motivated to sell and hey could get a good deal from.
The same could be said of the Russian oligarchs. Things, however, became seriously, irrevocably dodgy as Election night approached. Within a month of Election Day 2016, representatives of the Saudi government spent more than $270,000 through the Washington lobbying firm Qorvis/MSLGroup for an estimated 500 nights to house visiting veterans at Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington. Henry Garcia, a Navy veteran from San Antonio who went on three of the veterans fly-in trips, told the Washington Post in 2018: “It made all the sense in the world, when we found out that the Saudis had paid for it.”
As it happens, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who lost in his Vice Presidential bid as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, has been raising concerns about the Trump family connections to Saudi Arabia in the Foreign Relations Committee for some time now. He entered this thorough timeline (see below) into the Congressional Record. Kaine starts connecting the dots between Trump and the House of Saud, citing a speech at a campaign rally in Mobile, Alabama referencing his pre-Presidential business relationships with wealthy Saudi Arabian investors with a through-line to June 2019:
It reads, in part:
August 2015 – Trump in Mobile, AL: “Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them?”
May 2017 – President Trump’s first trip abroad is to Riyadh. Announces $110 billion arms deal.
December 2017 – Part 810 nuclear technology transfer secretly approved.
January 2018 – Brookfield Business Partners announces plan to acquire Westinghouse Electric for $4.6B.
May 2018 – Perry testifies that goal of civil nuclear discussions with Saudi is to convince to use Westinghouse to construct reactors.
August 2018 – Brookfield bails out Kushner.
October 2018 – Virginia resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi is murdered by Saudi regime.
October 2018 – Part 810 nuclear technology transfer secretly approved.
November 2018 – Trump says U.S. stands with Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi’s murder.
Jamal Khashoggi, a Permanent Resident, was a US-based journalist and critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman and Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler. Khashoggi was suffocated and dissected with a bone saw while in a Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul trying to pick up a document he needed in order to marry his Turkish fiancee. An intelligence report that the Biden administration released in 2021 found that MBS personally approved of the assassination. The Trump administration continued arms sales to the Kingdom despite bipartisan opposition in Congress after the murder. So there’s that.
Finally, no brief examination of what a Trump Middle East foreign policy might look like would be complete without a reference to the catastrophic war in Yemen. But catastrophe to some is opportunity for others. “President Trump enthusiastically promised Saudi Arabia wholehearted support for its campaign to roll back Iranian influence in the Arab world during his visit to Riyadh May 2021, offering a $110 billion arms sale package to prove it,” David Ottaway wrote for the Wilson Center in 2017. “And it will shortly begin re-supplying the Royal Saudi Air Force with $500 million worth of smart bombs and other munitions in preparation for what is shaping up to be a make-or-break battle in the stalemated Yemeni civil war.” It is interesting how much Trump, who is not a military micromanager, resembles Putin in the hands-on negotiation with arms exports.
Was it Tolstoy who said that all happy authoritarians are more or less similar?
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