A snowstorm helped to seal the alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump. Only seven weeks into the Trump administration, on the morning of March 14, 2017, the Saudi deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was scheduled to meet briefly with President Trump at the White House. After that the president was supposed to have lunch with the German chancellor Angela Merkel, but a massive snowstorm was making its way across the northeast of the United States, resulting in more than a thousand flight cancellations at the three Washington, DC, area airports.
Merkel was already on the tarmac in Germany waiting to take off for the United States and aides had told her that her trip might have to be postponed; there was no way her flight could land in Washington given the scale of the storm.
In the Oval Office, as he heard the reports of the snowstorm roaring toward Washington, Trump said, “Oh, I hate to cancel on her. I hate to cancel.”
Merkel insisted she wanted to hear from Trump himself if her trip was going to be put off.
So Trump called Merkel, telling her, “I really hate to postpone, but this storm is huge.”
The postponement of Merkel’s trip meant that the brief meeting between Trump and Mohammed bin Salman was extended to include a formal lunch with the president and key members of his cabinet, which was quite an honor for the thirty-one-year-old prince who wasn’t the Saudi head of state, nor even the second in line to the Saudi monarchy, but rather the third in line to the throne. The royal treatment accorded to Mohammed bin Salman—widely referred to by his initials MBS—was indicative of where the Trump team was planning to take its relationship with the young prince who was the country’s defense minister. MBS’s eighty-two-year-old father, King Salman, was monarch in name, but it was clear that his youngest and favorite son was the emerging center of power in the Saudi kingdom.
Both the scions of wealthy families and only a few years apart in age, MBS and Jared Kushner bonded over a belief that together they could transform the Middle East. They sometimes communicated their plans on WhatsApp, the messaging app that is widely used in the Arab world, including by members of the Saudi royal court.
MBS approached his courtship of Kushner with considerable ardor. Kushner told a senior Trump administration official, “Mohammed bin Salman rushed me in ways that no woman had ever rushed me.” For his part, MBS radiated charisma.
The Saudis understood the power of family relationships, and an alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump made intuitive sense to them, particularly after their tense relationship with President Obama, who seemed intent on upending the traditional power dynamics of the Middle East with his nuclear agreement with their archrivals, the Iranians. The Saudis also felt that Obama, who had ascended to the presidency on merit, wasn’t much of a fan of hereditary autocracies. On Obama’s last visit to the kingdom, King Salman didn’t even bother to go to the airport to greet Obama when he arrived, as was customary.
The Gulf States’ disenchantment with Obama had begun with the Arab Spring in 2011. They couldn’t believe that Obama had withdrawn his support from the Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak, a longtime US ally who faced a popular uprising in the streets of Cairo. What did this say about Obama’s loyalty to other Arab authoritarian regimes?
The disenchantment only deepened with the Iran nuclear deal. The Gulf States didn’t think it hampered Iran’s considerable regional ambitions, while it gave Iran access to tens of billions of dollars in Iranian assets that had been frozen in the United States following the 1979 revolution. From the perspective of the Gulf States, Lebanon was now controlled by Iran through its proxy, Hezbollah; Iran controlled Syria through its backing of Bashar al-Assad; Iran controlled much of Iraq because of its influence over many Iraqi political figures; and Iran also lorded over much of Yemen because of its support for the Houthi rebels. The United States under Obama seemed to have given Iran a free hand in the Middle East.
This was also the view of key members of Trump’s national security team, who thought that the Obama administration had made a fundamentally flawed assumption that the nuclear agreement and the subsequent lifting of sanctions would enable Iran to be welcomed into the international economy, and the regime would then moderate its behavior. In fact, the tens of billions of dollars in cash that the US gave Iran and the business contracts that were signed by the Iranians generated revenue not for the Iranian people but for the regime and key components such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which accelerated its operations across the region in countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.[*]
On the campaign trail, Trump had repeatedly denounced the Iranian nuclear agreement as “the worst deal ever.” The Trump administration and the Gulf States were therefore in lockstep in their deep suspicion of the Iranian regime. What’s more, Trump, who had campaigned on a promise of excluding Muslim immigrants from the United States, could use some Arab allies to show that he wasn’t anti-Islamic.
Bonding over their common fears about Iran, the Saudi royal family and the Trump family believed they could do business. Trump also respected great wealth, and the Saudi royal family certainly had plenty of that. For his part, Kushner believed that MBS could help deliver a US-brokered solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that their personal relationship could achieve what decades of professional diplomacy hadn’t. The Saudis felt that Kushner spoke for the president and were comfortable with his role as the shadow secretary of state.
Like much of the rest of the world, the Saudis hadn’t expected Trump to win the presidential election. When he did, the Saudis and their close allies scrambled to build bridges to the Trump team. The Saudi view of Trump was as transactional as Trump’s view of them. A Saudi close to the royal court explained, “Look, he’s the emperor of Imperial Rome. We’re a satellite state. Whoever is emperor, we come bearing homage. You fucking elected him. You take him out, we’ll come to the next guy.”
The morning after the election, the Saudis realized with a shock that they hadn’t cultivated anybody on the Trump team. Thomas Barrack, a billionaire Lebanese American businessman who had done deals in the Gulf for decades, suddenly became their go-to guy. Barrack was a longtime friend of Trump’s and was one of the few people Trump treated like a peer. For the Saudis, Barrack was the way into the president-elect and his team.
The Emiratis, who were closely allied to the Saudis, had done a better job of cultivating the Trump team. Kushner had met with the Emirati ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba in June 2016, a meeting brokered by Barrack. Otaiba was widely regarded as the most well-wired and effective ambassador in Washington, having served there for more than a decade. Suave and handsome, Otaiba spoke effortless American English and knew anyone who was anyone on both sides of the aisle. Otaiba entertained the great and the good with a fleet of servants and Michelin-level dinners at his massive modernist glass-and-concrete compound with its own basketball court, children’s playground, and swimming pool that hugged the cliffs above the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia.
Kushner asked Otaiba smart questions, consulting with him on a big foreign policy speech that his father-in-law was delivering during the campaign. Kushner didn’t claim to know what he didn’t know. This was a welcome change from the Obama team, who didn’t ask questions, tending instead to issue instructions.
The fruit of the discussions between Otaiba and Kushner was a meeting during the transition in Manhattan on December 15, 2016, between Mohamed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and Kushner, Steve Bannon, and Mike Flynn. The meeting was at the Four Seasons Hotel rather than at Trump Tower, which was always crawling with reporters. Mohamed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, was the key leader of the seven statelets that made up the United Arab Emirates. In his midfifties, MBZ was something of a mentor to MBS, who saw the wealthy city-states of the Emirates as a model for the business-friendly, more open society that he hoped that Saudi Arabia would one day become.
The meeting was in the penthouse; there were around thirty Emirati officials and security guards milling about. MBZ was dressed in jeans, untied combat boots, and a T-shirt that showed off his buff physique. He looked like a Middle Eastern Sean Connery. Flynn and Kushner talked with MBZ for an hour. Kushner saw the Emiratis and their close allies the Saudis as the key to remaking the Middle East. The Gulf States and Israel could even collaborate on a US-brokered peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
The meeting was winding down and MBZ looked over at Bannon. “You haven’t said anything.”
Bannon said, “Well, the conversation has been great, but I only came to talk about one thing.”
MBZ asked, “What’s that?”
Bannon said, “The Persian expeditionary force of Hezbollah and their takeover of the Middle East.”
MBZ said, “Excuse me. Did you say Persia?”
Bannon replied, “Persia, yes.”
“I’ve been looking for an American like you all my life,” MBZ said.
The meeting then went on for another hour, now focused on Iran. MBZ was as perturbed as Bannon that the Iranians had become the most powerful regional player in the Middle East. To counter Iranian plans for hegemony in the Middle East, the group at the Four Seasons discussed how the US had to lead a military alliance with the Gulf States that would also include Israel eventually.
Usually a meeting between the president-elect’s team and a key foreign leader such as MBZ would have been flagged to the Obama administration, but this one was not.
MBS’s White House lunch helped to tee up Trump’s first overseas trip, which was to Saudi Arabia, a trip that Kushner pushed hard for. Traditionally, American presidents make their first overseas trip to close democratic allies such as Canada, but in a coup for the Saudis, the honor went to them. Tillerson and the State Department opposed the idea, saying that much more time was needed to plan such a trip. Mattis was also against the trip on the grounds that the first overseas visit that Trump made should not be to an autocracy. McMaster favored the trip because it would be a chance for the president to move beyond the travel ban controversy and explain that the war against jihadist terrorists was a war of all civilized people against criminals who had perverted their religion. Trump intervened to say he would go if the Saudis promised major weapons purchases and more help on counterterrorism.
On May 19, 2017, three days after Mueller began his work as special counsel, as Air Force One was preparing to take off from Washington for Riyadh, Trump was stewing. The New York Times had just run a story that implied that Trump had tried to obstruct the Russia investigation. According to the Times, Trump had told senior Russian officials visiting the Oval Office that the reason he had fired Comey was because “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” As Air Force One was taking off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, DC, around 3:00 pm, everyone’s phones were blowing up with the news. Maggie Haberman, the ace New York Times reporter who had broken many important stories about the Trump administration, appeared on the TV monitors on the president’s plane and started to recap the breaking news on CNN. Haberman said, “I don’t know what was in his [Trump’s] head, but this is obviously going to be an explosive remark.”
Despite Trump’s frequent attacks against the New York Times and CNN as purported enemies of the people and “fake news,” Trump read the Times carefully and watched a lot of CNN because those were the two media outlets that had mattered the most when he was coming up as a businessman in New York.
“Trump was in the foulest mood I’ve ever seen him in my entire life. He was in a fucking foul mood,” recalled an official traveling on Air Force One. It was going to be a long twelve-hour flight to Riyadh. Trump barely slept.
Trump was visiting Saudi Arabia at a moment when King Salman had empowered MBS to transform the kingdom from a deeply religious, consensus-based absolute monarchy to a less fundamentalist totalitarian dictatorship with ambitious plans to wean itself from dependence on its vast oil wealth. The Saudi monarchy was now at an inflection point. For the first time in decades, the Saudis could no longer rely on the revenues from oil to maintain their position as the leading Arab state and to buy off any aspirations that their population might have to play a real role in politics. The days of $100-a-barrel oil were now long gone. When oil wealth seemed an endless spigot of gold, the Saudi monarchy had created an almost perfect socialist state: Most Saudis worked for the government, and they all enjoyed subsidies for water, electricity, and gas. No one paid taxes, while health care and education were free. But in 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that, given falling oil prices, the Saudi government could run out of financial reserves in five years if it kept up its present rate of spending. With oil prices dipping down to below $40 a barrel, the Saudi government started cutting government salaries and reducing subsidies.
MBS also tried to diversify the Saudi economy. The Saudi government called it “Vision 2030.” The aim was to privatize chunks of the education, health-care, agriculture, mining, and defense sectors and to sell off parts of Saudi Aramco, perhaps the wealthiest company in the world, which was estimated to be worth as much as two trillion dollars. Its annual profits were more than those of Apple and Exxon combined.
At the same time that MBS was trying to implement Vision 2030, he was also moving fast in another direction, trying to curb the power of the religious Wahhabi establishment who together with the Saudi monarchy had turned the kingdom in a more conservative direction following the fall of the American-backed shah of Iran to Shia religious fanatics in 1979. As a counter to the Shia revolutionaries in Iran, Saudi Arabia began to export Sunni Wahhabi ideology around the Muslim world. Curbing the spread of Wahhabism was a goal of US foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. After all, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and their overall commander was another Saudi, Osama bin Laden.
Riyadh sits in the Nejd heartland of Saudi Arabia, where in the mid-eighteenth century the first Saudi king allied with Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab, a cleric who promoted a harsh interpretation of Sunni Islam. This alliance was a marriage of convenience that had survived in one form or another for more than two and a half centuries and was the key to the Saudi polity in which the Saudis had retained absolute authority—so much so that their family name was embedded in the name of the country—while the Wahhabi religious establishment sanctioned the rule of the absolute monarchy and largely held sway over the social mores of Saudi society. Compliance with the dictates of Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam was rigorously enforced by members of the feared religious police, known as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the same name that was used by the Taliban’s religious police when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan.
The religious police patrolled the streets looking for purported malefactors and were given a more or less free hand to do so. In one notorious episode in 2002, in the holy city of Mecca, the religious police prevented girls from fleeing a school that was on fire because they were not properly dressed. Fifteen of them perished in the flames.
Imagine Houston run by an efficient version of the Taliban, and you get an approximation of Riyadh, a sprawling city of more than six million souls built by massive oil revenues, punctuated by soaring skyscrapers, stitched together by smooth freeways, and surrounded by endless sand-colored suburbs that march ever outward to the empty deserts.
In 2016, Riyadh began to change because the wings of the religious police were clipped by MBS. They no longer had the power to arrest suspects. In addition to getting the religious police to back off, MBS also allowed music concerts to be staged. Also important, he allowed women to drive. It was hard to overestimate the symbolic power of this. The issue of women driving was a cultural litmus test in Saudi Arabia, dividing its conservative religious establishment from more liberal Saudi elites, including a good chunk of the vast royal family. As a precautionary prelude before allowing women to drive, MBS had arrested a number of key conservative clerics. MBS also allowed women who were divorced the right to keep their children without having to go to court, a relatively enlightened policy that put Saudi Arabia ahead of a number of other Arab countries.
So far, so good. MBS not only brought new energy to the Saudi royal family, he also had a somewhat plausible plan to prepare the Saudi economy for a post-oil future. MBS also promised a magical moment in the Middle East when the Arab states would deliver a peace deal with the Palestinians, while he was liberating his people from the stultifying yoke of the Wahhabism that had nurtured so many of the 9/11 plotters. For many years, Washington had puzzled over whether Saudi Arabia was more of an arsonist or a firefighter when it came to the propagation of militant Islam. MBS was clearly a firefighter.
The Trump administration also saw great value in the more than $100 billion of putative arms deals that were to be signed during Trump’s Riyadh visit. And that was in addition to $55 billion in deals with US companies that would also be announced during Trump’s visit.
In return, Trump would receive the perfect platform to give a major speech to the Islamic world. After all, where better to make that speech than in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina? And who better to convene the leaders of every Muslim country (minus Iran) to hear Trump speak than the Saudi royal family, who styled themselves as “The Custodians of the Holy Places [Mecca and Medina]”?
When they arrived in Riyadh on May 20, 2017, Trump, Kushner, and key members of Trump’s cabinet were treated to a visit designed to appeal to Trump’s fetish for being fawned over. King Salman greeted Trump at the steps of Air Force One. A massive honor guard and what seemed to be the largest red carpet in the country ensured it was a royal welcome, a stark contrast to how the Saudis had blown off Obama on his final visit to the kingdom. As Trump’s convoy sped through the highways of Riyadh, massive billboards of Trump’s face lined the route, a satisfying sight for the man who had made a career out of putting his name on buildings.
The Saudis feted Trump in blinged-out opulent palaces that made Trump Tower look modest. At an old castle, royal guards chanting war songs greeted Trump and his retinue. It was a scene out of Lawrence of Arabia. Following a private dinner in the castle with some fifty guests, the ceremonial sword dances began. Trump, Rex Tillerson, and the octogenarian commerce secretary Wilbur Ross all gamely swayed along.
Tillerson, who had spent decades in the Gulf doing deals for Exxon, made what appeared to be his only joke in public during his tenure as secretary of state when he told Chris Wallace of Fox News, “I hadn’t been practicing, Chris, but this wasn’t my first sword dance.”
In Riyadh, Tillerson told reporters that Iran had to end its ballistic missile testing and also had to restore freedom of speech in the country. This was an odd point to make in Saudi Arabia, which was one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, where there was no independent media, no freedom of assembly, and no political parties.
Wilbur Ross seemed similarly oblivious when he told CNBC that on the Saudi trip “there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard.”
The trip was something of a high point for Trump’s cabinet: Sword dances! Big arms deals in the offing! A bunch of important Arabs giving them love! No protesters! Trump wasn’t tweeting crazy stuff!
In Riyadh, Trump delivered his much-anticipated speech to leaders from around the Islamic world. Candidate Trump had previously opined that “Islam hates us” so the speech was billed as a “reset” with the Muslim world, just as President Obama’s was eight years earlier when he went to Cairo and declared, “I have come here . . . to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and respect.” During the presidential campaign, Trump had panned Obama’s Cairo remarks, castigating Obama for a “misguided” speech that didn’t condemn “the oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations, and the systematic violations of human rights.”
Of course, it was all a lot more nuanced and complicated when you were the president, and Trump raised none of these issues in his Riyadh speech, instead emphasizing the scourge of terrorism, which was something that pretty much anyone in the Islamic world and the West could agree upon.
Deviating from the printed text of his speech, Trump used the phrase “Islamic terrorism” rather than “Islamist terrorism”—a term that didn’t conflate the religion of Islam with terrorism. Old habits can die hard. Since Trump’s speech was a largely anodyne account of the need for civilized countries to work together to defeat terrorist groups, the leaders of the fifty-five Muslim-majority countries in the audience paid polite attention to Trump, and no one stirred when the president said “Islamic terrorism” in the land where the Prophet Mohammad had received the verses of the Koran and founded a new religion.
Crucially, during his speech Trump told the leaders of the Gulf States and other Muslim heads of state that he wasn’t going to hassle them about human rights, declaring, “We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be.” Trump’s audience found this refreshing. No more lectures about human rights; the United States was backing its traditional allies in the Arab world.
Privately, Trump told the leaders of the Gulf States, “We got to start prioritizing radical Islamic terrorism. It’s now blowing back into your societies. We’re not going to be allies with you if you’re going to be financing this stuff through the back door. These games are going to stop.”
While Trump was in Riyadh, Saudi officials described to him what they asserted was their gas-rich neighbor Qatar’s support for terrorism. The Saudis had long found Qatar to be an irritant because it hosted the Al Jazeera TV network, which was often critical of other Arab states, and because Qatar was sympathetic to Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood that the Saudis had officially designated as a terrorist group.
The Saudis and Emiratis were also enraged by the hundreds of millions of dollars of ransom payments that were paid by Qatar in 2017 to Shia militias in Iraq and to jihadist groups in Syria in exchange for the return of members of Qatar’s royal family who were taken hostage in Iraq two years earlier when they were on a hunting expedition. It seemed to the Saudis and the Emiratis that Qatar was funding both their Shia and Sunni militant enemies.
The Saudis and Emiratis had contemplated launching a blockade before Trump’s visit to Riyadh but didn’t want to take the shine off his visit, so they waited until Trump’s overseas trip was finished to initiate it.
During one of the meals for the ministers gathered in Riyadh, the Qatari foreign minister was seated off with the staff by the kitchen. He refused to sit there. It was a not-subtle indicator of where things were heading. Tillerson also noticed that the emir of Qatar wasn’t being treated respectfully during the meetings in Riyadh. Other White House officials noticed a distinct chilliness aimed at the Qataris from other Gulf leaders.
With the Trump team’s acquiescence, a blockade of Qatar began two weeks after Trump’s visit to Riyadh. The Saudis led an Arab blockade of Qatar, closing all border crossings and cutting off air and sea travel. The blockade even extended to animals; twelve thousand Qatari camels were expelled from Saudi Arabia.
Blockades are against international law and are acts of war. For that reason, the Saudis and Emiratis framed the issue as a “boycott” rather than a blockade.
The blockade was a long-term goal of the Saudis. They knew that with Obama in the White House a blockade of Qatar wouldn’t fly, but Trump was another matter.
Like so many other events in the twenty-first century, the blockade was ushered in with a false news story. Three days after Trump left Riyadh, on May 24, the Qatari government-run Qatar News Agency issued a report that its relations with Israel were “good” and that Iran was an “Islamic power.” The news agency attributed these comments to Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. Qatar quickly issued a denial about those reports, which were improbable on their face, but media outlets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates aired them frequently. Malware had been planted in the systems of the Qatar News Agency a month earlier, and IP addresses in the United Arab Emirates were implicated in the cyberattack.
Qatar sat on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world. As a result, Qatar had among the highest per capita GDP globally and, by Gulf standards, it had a relaxed approach to social mores. It was also home to Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American base in the Middle East. The Qataris paid almost all the costs for the base, the kind of deal that Trump should have found to his liking—an American base almost entirely paid for by another country. Qatar also housed the regional hubs of several leading American universities, including Cornell and Georgetown.
So it was surprising to those who understood Qatar’s importance to the United States that President Trump endorsed the blockade and immediately aligned himself with Saudi talking points about Qatar, tweeting, “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding . . . extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!” Was Trump simply unaware of Qatar’s importance to the United States?
When the blockade was announced, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were traveling together meeting their counterparts in Australia. They were both completely blindsided. What were the charges against Qatar? The Saudis and the Emiratis claimed that the Qataris were supporting terrorism, but the evidence for this was thin, according to the CIA. It was also brazenly hypocritical for the Saudis to accuse another Arab country of supporting jihadist terrorism when they were long the principal arsonists in this arena. Twenty-five hundred Saudis were estimated to have joined ISIS, while only a handful of Qataris were believed to have joined the terrorist army. The Qataris saw themselves as the “Norway of the Middle East,” yet they were being treated like they were a pariah state.
Mattis and Tillerson were the two members of the Trump cabinet who had had the most extensive dealings with the Qataris and they both strenuously objected to the blockade. Mattis understood the key importance of the American base in Qatar for the fight against ISIS. As the former CENTCOM commander, he knew that in many ways the most important American base overseas was the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. It was not only the “forward” headquarters of CENTCOM, but it was also where the wars against ISIS and the Taliban were coordinated.
The massive base sprawled for miles in the Qatari desert and was home to around eleven thousand American military servicemen and -women. Trump didn’t seem to know about these facts, or if he did know about them he didn’t care when he applauded the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar.
Tillerson also had long experience working with the Qataris when he was the CEO of Exxon. It was Tillerson who had helped the Qataris to develop the largest natural gas field in the world, which Qatar shared with its neighbor Iran. As a result, Exxon was the largest investor in Qatar, and Tillerson had known the emir of Qatar since he was a teenager. “Tillerson and Mattis were like holy fuck. This can’t last. This is literally insane,” a senior Trump administration official recalled.
The US ambassador to Qatar, Dana Shell Smith, found out about the blockade from Twitter when she woke up on the morning of June 5. Smith called officials on Mattis’s staff. They were not happy.
The Qataris were convinced that they were about to be invaded. Derek Harvey, the overall director of Middle East policy at the White House, called a meeting to discuss the Qatar crisis. Like most Trump administration officials, Harvey was caught totally by surprise by the blockade. During the meeting Sebastian Gorka chimed in to say, “The president is very clear the Qataris have been involved in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. They are behind Brotherhood groups in Libya. They are behind Palestinian Brotherhood groups. They are funding political opposition parties to the king in Jordan.”
Mattis met with Trump in the Oval Office and warned him that the blockade would negatively affect the Pentagon’s ability to resupply the critical Al Udeid base. Trump said, “Well, General.”
When Trump wasn’t happy with something, he would call Mattis “General” as opposed to “Secretary” or “Jim.”
Trump said, “General, some of my people are telling me that it’s not that bad with Al Udeid, that it’s not an issue.”
Mattis said, “Well, it could be an issue if we don’t get this resolved.”
Mattis pushed back on the blockade to no avail, while the Saudis persisted with it, confident that Trump had their back.
Six days after Trump had celebrated the blockade on Twitter, Mattis met with the Qatari defense minister to sign a deal selling thirty-six F-15 fighters to Qatar for $12 billion. While the deal had long been in the works, this was Mattis’s way of signaling his displeasure with the blockade. This was an actual arms deal rather than the weapons deals that had been announced in Riyadh, which were mostly agreements only on paper. Mattis hadn’t even gone on the Riyadh trip.
Tillerson got on the phone and started calling the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, telling them that they could not invade Qatar. Trump hated the idea that his secretary of state was effectively creating policy and acting on his own in ways that the president wasn’t convinced were right, because he had bought into the Saudi arguments that the Qataris were dabbling with the Muslim Brotherhood, that Al Jazeera really was a problem, and that the Qataris had relationships with the Iranians.
A month after Trump’s visit to Riyadh, in a palace coup MBS forced his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef to step down as crown prince. Nayef was long regarded as a safe pair of hands by the CIA because of his aggressive efforts to stamp out al-Qaeda in the kingdom when he was the minister of the interior. After removing his cousin as crown prince and making himself the heir apparent, MBS also set out to remove all other possible challenges to his total grip on power using a Stalinist playbook, minus the gulags. MBS detained not only critics of the regime but anyone he didn’t absolutely control.
In November 2017, some two hundred wealthy businessmen and princes were jailed on charges of corruption in the luxurious confines of the five-star Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh—where six months earlier Trump and Kushner had been royally welcomed. A few days before the arrests, Kushner had made a secretive trip to Riyadh to meet with MBS. What was discussed was murky. The businessmen and princes were only released after more than $35 billion was extracted from them, according to MBS himself in an interview with Bloomberg News. Other Saudi officials put the eventual take at $100 billion. This was surely the most expensive hotel bill in history.
Corruption was also an odd charge in Saudi Arabia, where there was little separation between the ruling family and the resources of the state. For his part, MBS thought nothing of buying expensive trophies for himself, such as a half-billion-dollar yacht he took a fancy to when he saw it docked in the south of France.
Concerned by the erratic actions of MBS, foreign investors began to stay away. Between 2016 and 2017, foreign investment in Saudi Arabia dropped from more than $7 billion to just over $1 billion.
In addition to the prisoners in the Ritz-Carlton, MBS jailed a range of clerics and civil society activists, some of whom faced possible death sentences. Saudi prosecutors sought the death penalty for a twenty-nine-year-old Shia female activist accused of organizing demonstrations for greater Shia rights who was arrested in December 2017. Similarly, the Saudis sought the death penalty for a prominent reformist cleric with more than ten million Twitter followers, Salman al-Awdah, who had called for elections in the Saudi kingdom. Boys were arrested and jailed for many years for taking part in protests. MBS literally crucified some of his opponents. The young crown prince was turning into a millennial Saddam Hussein.
MBS even arrested some of the women activists who had pushed for the right for women to drive on improbable charges that they had conspired with a foreign power. Didn’t they get it? Only MBS could bestow rights on his own people; those who demanded their rights were enemies of the kingdom.
In February 2018, MBS fired much of the leadership of the Saudi military and replaced them with his picks. He was even rumored to have put his own mother under house arrest. White House officials ascribed her house arrest to an embarrassing case of dementia. MBS didn’t want his mother to be seen in public. MBS even told his father that his mother was receiving treatment for her condition in New York. When King Salman traveled to Manhattan for the annual UN General Assembly, he was excited that he might get to see his wife. Saudi officials told the king that if he saw her, it would upset her treatment.
MBS also upended decades of conservative Saudi foreign policy. In the past, the invariably geriatric Saudi monarch had presided over a foreign policy that was characterized by doing little or nothing overseas. Saudi Arabia was long protected by a US national security umbrella, as it was during the first Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and President George H. W. Bush sent half a million soldiers to roll back Saddam’s army. The joke at the time was that the Saudi national anthem was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
A longtime goal of American foreign policy was for the Gulf States to take more ownership of their security. In a case of be careful what you wish for, MBS not only led the blockade of Qatar, in November 2017 he forced the Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, who was a dual Lebanese-Saudi citizen, to announce his resignation when he was visiting Saudi Arabia. MBS believed that Hariri was in the pocket of Iran-backed Hezbollah, which was a major political force in Lebanon. Hezbollah assassinated Hariri’s father in Beirut in 2005 so this was an odd conclusion to draw. Hariri eventually returned to Lebanon as prime minister and MBS’s play backfired badly because Hariri and Hezbollah both emerged stronger after this strange episode.
It was, above all, MBS’s conduct of the war in Yemen that damaged his international standing. In 2015, MBS began a campaign in Yemen against the rebel Houthis, who were aligned with Iran, that helped to precipitate what the UN described three years later as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
For the Saudis, the war in Yemen was deemed existential; after all, around a tenth of the Saudi population was of Yemeni extraction, and Iran seemed to be encircling them through their support of the Houthis, who had seized the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, in the fall of 2014. The Houthis subsequently fired more than two hundred missiles into Saudi Arabia during the next five years, many of them supplied by Iran. Imagine the reaction in the United States if a Chinese-supported militia had taken over most of Mexico, including Mexico City, and then had fired scores of missiles at major Texan cities and you get an approximation of how the Saudis felt about the Iranian-supported Houthis on their southern border.
The Trump administration largely turned a blind eye to the Saudi conduct of its war in Yemen, despite the fact that the Saudi war effort was dependent at least in part on American intelligence and the US aerial refueling of their jet fighters. In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo certified to Congress that the Saudis were trying to reduce civilian casualties in Yemen, a move that was intended to avert any congressional action to stop the American support for the Saudis in Yemen. A month after Pompeo’s certification, however, the UN charged the Saudi-led coalition with killing thirteen hundred children in air strikes in Yemen during the previous three years. The UN had earlier charged that air strikes had “hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities.” In fairness, the Houthis didn’t wear uniforms and launched their missile attacks from civilian areas.
In addition to supporting their war in Yemen, the Trump administration delivered on another key Saudi foreign policy goal when the United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. The agreement that the Obama team had inked with the Iranians in 2015 hadn’t constrained Iran from intervening around the Middle East from Syria to Yemen, nor had it stopped their aggressive ballistic missile program. Also “sunset” provisions in the deal meant that Iran could theoretically resume enriching uranium a decade and a half after signing the agreement.
Meanwhile, the Iranian regime had benefited when the United States and the other parties to the nuclear deal—Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia—had lifted their crippling sanctions.
Certainly, these critiques were all true, but supporters of the deal could point to the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly certified that Iran was sticking to the agreement and wasn’t developing nuclear weapons. The United States’ European allies broadly supported keeping the Iran deal in place. Indeed, supporters of the deal pointed out that if Trump were ever to strike a deal with North Korea about its nuclear weapons program, he would be lucky to get something that looked like the Iran deal.
Trump hated the Iran agreement. Tillerson and McMaster and to some degree Mattis made the point that if the Trump administration was going to try to rebuild strategic relationships with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States so that they were prepared to face off against Iran, then it was much better to do that with nuclear weapons off the table. A regionally aggressive Iran without nuclear weapons was a much better outcome than a regionally aggressive Iran armed with nukes. The deal meant that Iran was not able to begin to enrich uranium until 2030 and this gave the administration an open field to run in. But the president never bought into that. Trump believed he had made a campaign promise to kill the deal, and he was listening very closely to what the Israelis and Saudis were telling him about their archrival.
On October 3, 2017, Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iran was adhering to the agreement. When Senator Angus King of Maine asked Mattis whether he believed the deal was in US national security interests, he replied, “Yes, Senator, I do.”
Seven years earlier, when he was CENTCOM commander, Mattis had told President Obama that Iran was his priority one, two, and three. Once he left CENTCOM and was out of uniform, Mattis had time to reflect. In retirement Mattis was living in Washington State and he was also spending time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a fellow. Mattis’s views on Iran started to mellow because the Iranians were sticking to the terms of the nuclear deal.
Mattis wanted to stay in the Iran deal not only because it was working but also because it had been negotiated together with close American allies—the British, French, and Germans—and the United States. In Mattis’s view, if the United States had made an agreement, you should stick to it. Otherwise, you risked eroding what America’s word meant. A sign of Mattis’s evaporating wasta was how utterly his counsel on the Iran deal was ignored by Trump.
Trump’s CENTCOM commander, General Joseph Votel, agreed with Mattis that the United States should not pull out of the deal. For Votel, the deal was performing a function. It addressed one of the threats that Iran posed: the nuclear threat. “So, my issue was, okay, if you are going to take the deal away, then you’ve got to give me something else. You’ve got to give me something to offset that,” Votel recalled. The number of US aircraft carrier visits to the Middle East was down significantly over the past few years and the US had also pulled some of its Patriot missile batteries out of the region. This meant that the US had less flexibility of maneuver in the Middle East. Pulling out of the Iran deal exposed the US to more risk, not less, in Votel’s view.
When it came to Iran, Trump asked, “What are my military options?”
McMaster asked Mattis to produce some options. Mattis simply ignored the president’s directive.
Mattis said that the United States was not well positioned “to go up the escalatory ladder in the Middle East” because military assets had been moved from the Middle East to Asia to confront the Chinese threat. Other resources had also been moved to Afghanistan, which for Mattis was the top priority. Of course, it was Mattis himself as secretary of defense who had ordered these moves, which had reduced the American military presence in the Middle East.
Assuming that Hillary Clinton would likely win the 2016 presidential election, the Republican-controlled Congress had passed a measure that the president needed to certify to Congress every ninety days that the Iranians were in compliance with the nuclear agreement. This measure meant that every three months Trump had to sign off on a deal that he hated. This would invariably lead to arguments between the president and key members of his national security team such as Mattis, McMaster, and Tillerson, who thought that exiting the deal didn’t make much sense since it might lead to a rift with the European allies who were also parties to the deal, and that the Iranians might also restart their nuclear program. Better to determine if the US could negotiate with its European partners to see if they all collectively might come to an agreement to impose limits on Iran’s ballistic missile program, or to extend the sunset clauses on the deal.
The State Department under Tillerson was largely rudderless and many of the key undersecretary and assistant secretary jobs had yet to be filled. There were also no US ambassadors in key countries across the Middle East such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Much of the senior Trump team and Tillerson himself came from the business world, where if the CEO decided something, then it got done. From his office at Exxon—known as the “God Pod”—Tillerson had handed down decisions, which his team of executives would immediately execute. The US government was a much more complicated place to make things happen and required that each department be staffed appropriately at the subcabinet level to ensure that the levers of government actually worked.
Brian Hook, who ran policy planning at State, was one of the only officials on Tillerson’s team who got things done, and he was dispatched to Europe to see if he could get the British, French, and Germans to agree to revise the Iran agreement.
Trump told his team, “Don’t let the bad existing deal in front of you blind you to the better deal that we can get down the road.”
On the campaign trail, Trump had repeatedly called the Iran agreement the worst deal in history. It was also, of course, an Obama deal and Trump took particular satisfaction in killing those. The most reliable guide to what Trump did when he was in office was what he had said when he was campaigning so it was only a matter of time before Trump would kill the deal. McMaster had tried his best, going to Trump twice to present him options on the Iran deal that included keeping it in place. McMaster reasoned that if the US walked away from the deal, the whole conversation would become about the Americans, rather than keeping the focus on Iran’s “malign activities” in the Middle East and the inadequacies of the deal, which included not having ballistic missiles covered in the agreement, and its sunset clauses.
Toward the end of his tenure as secretary of state, Tillerson, a deeply religious man, told colleagues that when he had first taken the job he thought he had understood what his role and historical purpose would be, telling them, “I thought I knew what God’s plan was for me.” Over time, Tillerson realized that his purpose was not so much to do important things but to make sure that disasters did not happen or were mitigated, whether that was the blockade of Qatar, or the undoing of the Iranian nuclear agreement, or Trump irretrievably damaging the NATO alliance.
As Tillerson gained a deeper understanding of Trump’s personality, and as he understood the forces that were circling the president such as Stephen Miller, he realized that this was a fairly toxic mix that had to be managed in a skillful way. For his part, Trump thought that Tillerson was trying to control him and limit him and that was beginning to define how Tillerson understood his role. And so Trump decided to fire his secretary of state.
Tillerson ingloriously received the news of his impending defenestration when he was on a trip to Africa, sitting on the toilet suffering from a stomach bug. Kelly called Tillerson when he was in medias res and told him that he was likely to be terminated by tweet at any moment. Tillerson hurried back to Washington, landing at Andrews Air Force Base on March 13 around 4:00 am. He went home and went to sleep.
At 7:44 am, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job!”
One of Tillerson’s aides called Tillerson at home to wake him up and tell him, “You’re fired.”
McMaster’s departure from the White House was presaged a month before Tillerson was sacked when he spoke at the Munich Security Conference, a meeting of the world’s national security leaders that is held annually in Germany. On February 18, McMaster told the Munich audience that the recent indictment in the United States of thirteen Russian officials for meddling in the 2016 presidential election showed it was “now incontrovertible” that Russia had interfered in the American election.
Trump quickly tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”
Once Trump started publicly contradicting his top aides, they were generally toast. It would be only a matter of the time and the method for the inevitable parting of ways.
McMaster had wanted to stay on as national security adviser until August 2018, but it was now clear that this wasn’t going to happen.
As a consolation prize, McMaster was offered the choice of a couple of promotions to four-star general. One was to oversee all army soldiers stationed in Asia and the other was to run forces command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but McMaster was done and wanted to retire to the Hoover Institution, where he could write books.
On March 22, John Bolton met with Trump at the White House about taking over as national security adviser. Mattis didn’t want Bolton in the position and instead pushed for Steve Biegun, who had served on the NSC during the George W. Bush administration. Nonetheless, Trump tapped Bolton.
A week later, Mattis greeted Bolton on the steps leading up to the front entrance of the Pentagon, saying, “I heard you’re actually the devil incarnate and I wanted to meet you.” They both chuckled at the joke, but the bonhomie wouldn’t last.
On the lovely, sunny afternoon of April 6, 2018, McMaster was “clapped out” of the White House by hundreds of cheering staffers. They gathered on both sides of the private road that separated the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and the West Wing of the White House to give McMaster an ovation. McMaster was beloved by National Security Council staffers, some of whom were crying. This was a far from routine send-off for departing senior Trump officials, many of whom had simply slunk away without any celebration of their service.
Three days later, Bolton started in his new job. The mustachioed sixty-nine-year-old had been a movement conservative since he was a teenager. The son of a Baltimore firefighter, Bolton volunteered to work on the Barry Goldwater Republican presidential campaign in 1964 and later interned for President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew. Bolton went to Yale and then to Yale Law School, where he was a contemporary of Bill and Hillary Clinton, though they moved in different circles.
During President Reagan’s first term, Bolton was appointed to senior jobs at the US Agency for International Development, and he went on to work in a number of other key positions, culminating in serving as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Bolton was a workaholic who would routinely rise at 3:30 am, and he understood on a deep level how to operate in the DC bureaucracy. Bolton was inclined to bring a gun to any bureaucratic knife fight. As soon as he assumed office as the national security adviser, Bolton immediately fired Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, who reported directly to the president and was, at least theoretically, of equal stature to Bolton.
In his memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option, Bolton explained that when it came to diplomatic “carrots and sticks,” he was “not much of a carrot man.” That approach had made him plenty of enemies in Washington. In 2005, Carl Ford, a former assistant secretary of state who had worked with Bolton in the George W. Bush administration, testified before a Senate committee that Bolton was a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.”
Bolton was a prominent proponent of the Iraq War, and he never evinced any doubt about the wisdom of that decision, telling the Washington Examiner in 2015, “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.”
Bolton believed that State Department Foreign Service officers were “overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal,” and he was deeply skeptical about any kind of constraints on American power. Bolton was an America First guy long before this became a common slogan. The happiest moment Bolton had working at the State Department was “unsigning” the agreement that would have made the United States a party to the International Criminal Court, which he saw as a grave risk for US political and military leaders who might be hauled in front of it. When Bolton pulled the US out of the agreement in 2002, he felt like a kid on Christmas Day.
After Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser, he ensured that anyone working for the International Criminal Court who was investigating American soldiers or intelligence officials for possible war crimes in Afghanistan was denied a visa to the United States.
Bolton was also steeped in the arcana of arms-control negotiations and weapons-of-mass-destruction issues. He had served as the top official at the State Department working on arms control in the George W. Bush administration, as a result of which Bolton’s skepticism toward Iran was longstanding. In 2015, Bolton wrote in the New York Times that the US should bomb Iran because “Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program,” which is exactly what Iran did that same year by negotiating the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration.
It was hardly surprising, then, that with Bolton now in place as national security adviser, Trump announced on May 8, 2018, that he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement. As Bolton stood off to one side behind him, Trump gave a press conference at the White House announcing the pullout, saying, “The fact is that this was a horrible one-sided deal that should never, ever have been made.”
The Trump administration imposed tough new sanctions on Iran while the Europeans stuck to the deal, as did the Iranians, at least initially. Trump’s Iran strategy didn’t seem like much of a real Plan B beyond trying to destroy the Iranian economy in order to foment protests against the regime leading to regime change, long a goal of Bolton’s.
The Saudis were elated at the actions taken against their archrival. The Saudi Foreign Ministry announced that it welcomed the Trump administration’s pulling out of the Iran deal and the reimposition of draconian sanctions.
The Saudi celebration would prove short-lived because a week later Trump fulfilled another of his campaign promises. This one was not at all to their liking. Trump had appointed his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, to serve as US ambassador in Israel. After his nomination was announced, Friedman said he looked forward to moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to “Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.” Palestinians also regarded Jerusalem as their capital, while Muslims in general look upon it as a sacred city as it was the place from which the Prophet Muhammad was supposed to have ascended into heaven from the Al Aqsa mosque in east Jerusalem, the third holiest site in the Muslim world. It was for this reason that the United States embassy was always in Tel Aviv rather than in Jerusalem.
Friedman was an ultra-Zionist who had called supporters of the progressive Jewish group J Street “far worse than kapos” for supporting a two-state solution. Kapos were the Jews in Nazi concentration camps that guarded other prisoners. Friedman also said that he did not believe Israeli settlement activity was illegal and that the Trump administration could support Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.
On May 15, 2018, Friedman, together with Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, opened the new US embassy in Jerusalem alongside the buoyant Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was so close to the Kushner family that he had once slept in Jared Kushner’s childhood bedroom in New Jersey.
Kushner declared, “Peace is within reach.” While the Kushners were celebrating peace, only fifty miles away Israeli forces in Gaza were simultaneously killing scores of Palestinians who were protesting the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem.
Trump was becoming increasingly sure of his moves on the world stage. His critics had predicted that if he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, it would inflame the whole Middle East. They said that pulling out of the Iran deal would deeply anger European allies and set Iran down the path to nuclear enrichment again. They said that slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum would damage the American economy, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement would accelerate global warming. When these bad things didn’t immediately come to pass, the phrase around the White House was “Well, that was a nothing burger.” What that didn’t take into account was that Trump was gradually eroding the US-led global order that had generally worked in America’s favor.
Four months before the US embassy was moved to Jerusalem, Kushner had his interim top-secret security clearance downgraded to secret, which meant he joined the more than three and a half million other Americans with secret clearances. That was nearly the population of the city of Los Angeles. Kushner’s inability to secure a top-secret clearance was in part tied to the various foreign powers that were attempting to manipulate him through his multiple businesses, including China, Israel, Mexico, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.[*]
When the news broke in late February 2018 that Kushner’s clearance was downgraded, Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, claimed that it would “not affect Mr. Kushner’s ability to continue to do the very important work he has been assigned by the President.” This was baloney, served with generous helpings of bunkum and balderdash. To operate effectively with adversaries such as the Chinese and even allies such as the Saudis, Kushner required, at a minimum, a top-secret clearance. Meetings of the National Security Council operated at the top-secret level as a baseline and pretty much anybody doing any work of any significance in national security would not discuss what he or she knew with someone holding clearances only at the secret level. Without a top-secret clearance, Kushner was no more well informed than a careful newspaper reader since materials at the secret level were typically smart diplomatic analyses, not real intelligence of the kind that top national security officials needed for decision-making.
Kushner also was now barred from receiving the President’s Daily Brief, the crown jewel of the intelligence community, which was delivered to the president and a dozen other top officials every day.
Trump publicly said he would let his chief of staff, John Kelly, make the call about the level of Kushner’s clearance. In late February, Kelly downgraded Kushner’s clearance, but in May the president secretly reversed that decision, ordering that Kushner receive a top-secret clearance, ignoring the concerns of both Kelly and the White House counsel, Don McGahn.
This decision was of a piece with the administration’s somewhat cavalier approach to national security, underlined by the granting of clearances to twenty-four other Trump administration officials—including Ivanka Trump—despite the objections of the intelligence community because of a variety of possible concerns that included foreign influence, conflicts of interest, personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct. Intelligence officials concerned about what they felt were “illegitimate clearances” worked hard to conceal “sources and methods” when they circulated intelligence to Trump officials.
The sloppy approach to national security extended to Kushner’s use of the commercial platform WhatsApp to communicate with MBS, President Trump’s regular use of an iPhone, and the casual atmosphere at Mar-a-Lago, where the business of state was sometimes conducted by Trump in full view of the club guests.
Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem was long a goal of the Israeli government, but previous US administrations had punted on this to avoid losing influence with the Palestinians. Trump had ordered the embassy move while extracting no concessions from the Israeli government, such as ceasing or even slowing its settlement-building in Palestinian territory. It was the Art of the Giveaway.
After the embassy move, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas declared that Kushner and his team could no longer be considered honest brokers. Palestinian officials stopped meeting with Kushner. What was the point?
The Trump administration kept driving a stake into the heart of any US-brokered peace plan with punitive measures against the Palestinians, such as withdrawing American support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which educated hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian kids living as refugees in countries around the Middle East.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was angered by the vote at the UN in December 2017 in which 128 countries had condemned the United States for its plan to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and only 8 countries had voted with the United States to support the move. UNRWA was a convenient target for Haley.
Kushner felt that UNRWA was part of the old paradigm that was preventing peace from emerging in the Middle East. The only way forward was “BREAKING!” organizations such as UNRWA, Kushner wrote in an email that he sent to senior Trump administration officials in January 2018.
Neither Haley nor Kushner suggested a Plan B for what would happen if UNRWA failed. The State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence community had a consensus view that UNRWA was contributing to stability in the region since it was providing a secular education to half a million Palestinian kids around the Middle East. If UNRWA failed, who would teach the kids: Hamas? No one? Also, historically the US government had not used humanitarian aid as a political tool. The States had continued to provide aid to Syrians, for instance, even as it was trying to force Assad out of power.
Tillerson, who despised Haley because she operated as if he didn’t exist, went to Trump and told him that it was important to continue funding UNRWA. Trump didn’t know or care about UNRWA and told his secretary of state that it was fine to keep funding the organization.
Haley found out and she went to Trump and got the decision reversed.
Tillerson went back to Trump and argued for half the money for UNRWA. After all, the funds for UNRWA were State Department monies that he controlled, not Haley. After this meeting, Tillerson released $60 million to UNRWA before anyone could stop him.
King Salman, the Saudi monarch, repeatedly condemned the US embassy move to Jerusalem. In 1986, the Saudi monarchy had awarded itself the title “Custodian of the Holy Places.” It was a title that the Saudis took seriously and there was no way they were going to play along with Kushner’s peace plan if the Trump administration seemed intent on ceding the holy city of Jerusalem to the Israelis. Kushner’s much-vaunted plan remained a work in progress, but one thing was clear: the fantasy that the Saudis could bribe or strong-arm the Palestinians to accept a Kushner-constructed peace agreement was now dead on arrival. The Art of the Non-deal.
A further confirmation that Kushner’s peace plan had blown up on the launchpad came after an election in Israel on April 9, 2019, following which Netanyahu was unable to form a coalition government and had to call for new elections to be held in September 2019. It was inconceivable that Kushner or Trump would put forward any peace plan that required even the most minimal of concessions from the Israelis during an election season when their key foreign policy goal was the maintenance in power of the right-wing government of Netanyahu, which had not the slightest interest in moving forward on any plan that gave the Palestinians anything even approximating their own state. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, said that the Trump administration would likely push back the announcement of the overall peace plan until November 2019.
Kushner’s plan to bring peace to Palestine was to secure $50 billion of investment for Palestinian projects as a prelude to a political settlement. But no country, including the United States, actually put a dime of that money on the table. Talk about a leveraged real estate investment. This was like Kushner’s father-in-law’s real estate play where investors paid him to put the Trump name on a building while he put no money up himself. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians boycotted the much-ballyhooed “Palestinian investment conference” that Kushner hosted in Bahrain in late June 2019 to discuss the $50 billion plan. At the conference, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a reliable Trump family retainer, declared that the West Bank and Gaza were “going to be a hot I.P.O.”
As far as could be discerned from reports about what else might be in the tightly held Kushner plan, there was no provision for an actual Palestinian state nor for the return of any Palestinian lands annexed by the Israelis. In fact, quite the reverse, the plan would likely try to codify Israel’s annexations of Palestinian territory. It was as if the British in 1947 had told Jewish leaders in Palestine (now modern-day Israel): “We have a really great deal for you: we will offer you a lot of nonexistent investment, and we will also prevent you from gaining your own state.” It was not an obvious recipe for success.