Hussein Ibish
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
for having put Iran in this situation, but it was under his presidency that Iran was crippled in its regional status. And the biggest blow by miles was the Turkish-engineered downfall of Assad in Syria. That's why letting the Saudis and the Emiratis and others do what they can in Syria without sanctions is part of that.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
He needs to take advantage of this moment of Iranian weakness and the fact that they need 20, 25 years to rebuild their power and to rethink their national security strategy, because it was all based on the idea that Arab militia groups led by Hezbollah in Lebanon would provide a powerful forward defense. against Israel and ultimately the United States. And that was tested and proved untrue.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Hezbollah was decimated by Israel. So Iran is in very bad shape. It needs to rethink everything and it needs time. And Trump understands this and Trump wants a deal because he doesn't want to be put in a situation of having to confront the Iranians militarily. And Iran wants a deal. And the only country left that doesn't want such a deal is Israel. With Obama, the Arabs were totally against it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
But now they're all for it because they want calm and regional stability.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
I mean, it certainly incentivizes Trump to think very carefully about doing what he can to restrain Israel's worst impulses in Gaza. The situation in Gaza is so dire after more than 70 days of complete blockade, no food, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no shelter, nothing, no supplies into Gaza.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
people have been reduced to the point of starvation that's that's where we're headed here and it's a crime it's certainly a war crime and it's probably a crime against humanity what the israelis are proposing to do is to go back into gaza with full force force all the population 2.2 million who are not hamas fighters and cadres and officials into a
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
tiny enclave in the south where they will be kept as supposedly protected, but actually kind of herded. where they'll be kept with what the UN says is very totally inadequate plans for their food and water and medicine and shelter. Meanwhile, Israel proclaims it will scour the entire rest of the country for anything and everything connected with Hamas and destroy it. Gaza delenda est.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
You know, the bottom line is this is kind of the war that the most extreme factions in Hamas have been waiting for. It provides them with an open-ended, long-term insurgency. Now, obviously, the Israelis can rely on brute force to crush Hamas. But I think they've started to get the hint that as long as there are Palestinians in Gaza, there will be some form of Hamas.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Because Hamas is not a list of people and equipment. It's a name. And if you take a bunch of Palestinians and some of them say they're Hamas, then there will be Hamas. And that's likely to persist no matter what Israel does. And we're getting closer and closer to the end goal of where I think the logic of this for Israel goes, which is depopulation.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Gaza has to be depopulated of Palestinians in order to be free of Hamas. And because the two go together in Gaza under the circumstances, right?
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Everything that has happened in the region incentivizes him to stop the Israelis from going ahead with this plan, at least as it has been structured now. It's too extreme. It's too brutal. It's too genocidal. It's too over the top.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And I really think the fact that he made such close friends again and reinforced his relationship with these countries that don't want that, both at the emotional and the strategic registers, that need it not to happen in every possible way, is really important. It gives him every reason to hold the Israelis back and say, guys, come on, don't do this. Don't do this this way. Don't do it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And he is the only person in the world at the moment who has real leverage over Netanyahu because of the nature of the Israel-U.S. relationship.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward, right? The Middle Eastern, not leaders, but countries, what they're getting ultimately is protection. They're getting military protection, which is often unsatisfactory from their point of view, But they don't really have a good alternative to the United States, so they have to try to work to make it as good as possible. And that's what they're doing.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
They're buying goodwill from the US. They're also buying weapons, which they want and need. you know, purely just gifting. However, what Trump is getting in return is lots of money and more for himself than for the country. There is money coming for the country. There are these large weapons sales of missiles and other things to Saudi Arabia, the biggest weapons sale in U.S. history.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And the UAE is looking at buying over a million semiconductor chips from NVIDIA. and so on. All three countries are buying lots of American stuff, which is a big boon to Trump's bid to revitalize American manufacturing. but there's also a grifting angle here, right? Trump is getting a lot of money for his own company. We've never seen this before.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
We've never seen, even in the first Trump term, the level to which this state visit is also a private business visit is amazing because the projects include a Trump Tower in both Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, another Trump Tower in Dubai in the UAE, and a Trump International Golf Course and Resort in Qatar.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
There's also a cryptocurrency scheme connected to his sons in which a UAE-linked company has just agreed to invest $2 billion, with a B, $2 billion. The company is not going to look the same after this trip. It's going to go from being very successful for its size, mom-and-pop shop, built on the vast inheritance that Trump's had from his father, Fred. But now he's taking it into the stratosphere.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
I mean, the amount of financial clout that's coming to his family-owned, privately held business is just amazing. And what the Arabs are doing here is buying goodwill. It's an investment. It's an investment in Trump as a friend. and, you know, ultimately also with the U.S. But right now, Trump has, you know, instituted l'État c'est moi. He is the country and the country is him.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And until somebody stops him or until he leaves the White House, that's the way it's going to be. And this is very understandable to a group of people who deal in patron-client relations as a matter of course.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
He is very relaxed. He's home. Yeah. He's come home. This is like outside the U.S. This is his favorite place.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Exactly. They get protection, and he gets money, we get money.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Well, it's the absolute, I was waiting for you to bring it up, because it is exactly the kind of icon, the avatar of this trip. It says it all. Qatar, which is an unbelievably rich country, 300,000, maybe 400,000 citizens. Most of the country, between 2 and 3 million people, are expat laborers, foreign workers, Arab and Western technocrats.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
But collectively, those 350,000 or so Qataris are the largest single exporter in the world of liquid natural gas. And obviously, all of the wealth goes to the citizens. I mean, it's just amazing. You've never seen a country with this level of per capita wealth. And it uses that money for national interest. In this case, what they've done is one of the former prime ministers, who is a royal,
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
has a jet, a luxury Boeing 747 that's kitted out, not for a president, but for a wealthy man who enjoys luxury travel on his own private plane. So what the Qataris have done is they've said, you can have the plane. for use as president while you're in office. And after that, it will be transferred to your presidential library, meaning he could still use it after that.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
I'm Hussein Ibish, and I'm a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, and I write for many publications, especially The Atlantic.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
So it's sort of been... They've very cleverly muddied the waters or blurred the line between private and public here in order to give this plane to Donald Trump as an individual, and they can say... that they haven't, that they've given it to his presidency.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Yeah, well, in a lot of ways, I think that's true. I remember a certain high-ranking, formerly very high-ranking Gulf individual who said just as much in 2016 after he was elected. They said he does the same things, and he listed a bunch of verbs that were unlawful actions and said, we do that and he does that. It's not obviously unlawful in their countries.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
It's normative, but traditionally not allowed in the United States and in Western countries in general. And I think this man was absolutely correct when he said, we do this and he does that. We do this and he does that. And that they would feel very comfortable with him. They certainly would disagree about how much pressure he should put on Israel regarding Gaza. Things like that.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
But I was thinking yesterday that there's really no daylight. between Trump's positions on all the really most important issues and those of Saudi Arabia. You can't find a major irritant there, which is really amazing. Such as what? What issues? Well, I mean, anything you think of.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
The war in Ukraine, the nature of U.S.-Saudi relations, how business should be conducted, the Yemen war, talks with Iran, they both want a deal. They convinced him that lifting the sanctions on Syria was a good idea. They just agree more or less on just about any issue. And that can change overnight, because if there was a spike in oil prices, they would disagree right away.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
But I was contrasting that in my mind with the problems that the US and Trump have with Israel right now, where there's disagreement about Gaza, about the ceasefire with the Houthis, about the talks with Iran. about the negotiations with Hamas. There are many irritants. Now, that's not to say the US is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is Israel. I don't think that's true.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
The Israeli relationship with the US is very deeply ingrained and protected by political influence in the US, especially from evangelical Christians on the right. But yeah, I think Trump is sort of ideal in many ways from, say, a Saudi point of view.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
administrations, whether they're Republican or Democrat, they do bring it up. Trump doesn't.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Well, I mean, yeah, well, I mean, MBS has learned. One of the big questions about him when he was a young, rash leader in, you know, beginning in 2015 when he came in as defense minister and a quick rise to where he is now, which is head of government, that is to say he's the prime minister. Saudi Arabia. So he runs the government.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And human rights issues became very serious in his early years with the arrest of the dissidents, the sort of adventure in Yemen that was ill-advised and badly done, to put it mildly, and also the jailing of Important people who are not perhaps on board fully with the changes, the reforms, the social liberalization, or other concerns that MBS had about them who were jailed at the Ritz-Carlton.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
I was coming to that. That's the big enchilada, right, for many people, including me, because he was a friend of mine for 15 years. And I, you know, I was just, I'm still scarred by it. And I think I always will be. MBS, what we've learned about him is that He's not a sociopath in the sense that he's educable.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
The question about him was always, is he young and rash and doing these things because he doesn't know better? Or is he kind of nuts? And the answer is no. He's educable. He's evolving. He's maturing. Saudi Arabia remains educable.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
a real human rights violator from the point of view of human rights norms it executes a lot of people rule of law does not apply in the way we would expect dissidents when they are found when they exist suffer you know arrest and imprisonment and long sentences and even if they go as far as saying
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
parts of the country should secede or leave Saudi Arabia, they can be executed, and they are sometimes. So it's not a happy story on human rights at all, but it's just way better than it was. And there are certainly more alarming cases around the world. You couldn't really say that around the time of the murder of Jamal because Saudi Arabia was really one of the worst violators at that time.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And now I think it's almost back to normative Saudi behavior. Hardly a good standard. It's a very low bar, but it's very different than he was years ago.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Yes. I think he's trying to reduce American exposure and involvement in conflicts in the region. Not in the region, but in regional conflicts. So, for example, the lifting of sanctions on Syria is a response to Gulf countries saying to him, in effect, You say you want us to handle our problems, fine. We want to invest in Syria and build.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
We can't have any influence in Syria if we don't spend money there because we don't have a militia or an army in Syria. The only way to get their attention is by investing in reconstruction and in other services where we can build constituencies of friends who will represent our interests and by extension yours.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
And we can't do that if every time we write a check, we have to worry about the Treasury Department slamming us. So if you want us to handle our business, you've got to take these sanctions off. The deal with the Houthis in Yemen is undoubtedly directly connected to another conflict ending or conflict containing policy of Trump, which is the negotiations with Iran.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
He lives in a world of patrons and clients. He lives in a world where Authority is not questionable. And that's very familiar. It's a very familiar space to especially the Saudi royals, but all of them. And he understands them and they understand him and he loves them and they love him. He can be himself, the unedited version. He doesn't have to check his instincts. He just go with it.
Radio Atlantic
Trump and the Crown Prince
Trump definitely wants a deal with the Iranians, another version. of the Obama peace deal, which he railed against, but is trying to resurrect, but he wants it to be longer and stronger and tougher on Iran. And he can get all of that because of what happened to the Iranians under Biden. I mean, he'll never give Biden the credit,