Trump Engineered Saudi Soft Coup, attack on Qatar, to Save Self

Trump Engineered Saudi Soft Coup, attack on Qatar, to Save Self
By Juan Cole | Jan. 7, 2018 |


Michael Wolff in his new book Fire and Fury makes a number of allegations about Trump’s role in the Gulf crisis that, if true, help explain the mess in that part of the Middle East.

Wolff asserts that Trump and his then inner circle–Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Hope Hicks, etc.–hoped the mid-May foreign policy jaunt would change the conversation in Washington, DC, about trump’s having fired FBI director James Comey and about the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller. So the first thing to say is that the whole trip and the announcements around it were for the purpose of hype.

............

Trump was convinced that his son-in-law and Middle East plenipotentiary, Jared Kushner, had gotten the Arab world on the side of the US and that his administration was on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

..........

Trump misunderstood what was being offered by the Saudis. They had made a vague commitment in the Obama era to buy some US military weaponry, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They recycled this pledge for Trump, specifying $110 bn. Most of it was not a new commitment. Trump, on whom the Wizard of Oz has nothing, hyped this old pledge into hundreds of billions in new investments in the US and was sure that the Saudis all by themselves could in this way jumpstart the US manufacturing sector. While Saudi Arabia is heavily invested in the US stock market and in US real estate, and while it helps keep Boeing, Lockheed Martin and a whole phalanx of Washington fixers in business, that they are interested in more US F-18s is not new news and was not a game changer in the way Trump understood it.

............

So to conclude: Trump did not get hundreds of billions in new investments in the US from Saudi Arabia. He did manage to put in an erratic and aggressive crown prince in Riyadh, helping destabilize the region in ways Iran will take advantage of. The other corner of Wolff’s reporting on the May trip, that Trump thought it was a prelude to Peace in Our Time in Israel-Palestine, is too complex to take on here but that was also obviously a scam.