The Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states understand better than anyone else the power of a gift.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
What could possibly go wrong with Donald Trump’s gleeful acceptance of the free gift from the emir of Qatar of a $400 million luxury Boeing-747 as an interim substitute for Air Force One? The short answer is just about everything.
Chances are, these days hardly anyone remembers the fiasco of the Great Seal. In 1945, a group of school children in Moscow presented the American ambassador with a beautifully hand-carved wooden rendition of the Great Seal of the United States. The Soviet Union had been an ally during World War II, and the ambassador, moved by the enthusiasm of the children, placed the seal on the wall behind his desk. It stayed there until 1952.
It later turned out that the seal contained a resonating chamber with a membrane. When the Russians aimed a high-intensity radio wave at the resonating chamber from a van parked across the street, they could hear virtually everything the ambassador said in his office. Later, the Russians perfected the system and were able to record conversations simply by aiming a high-energy radio beam at the embassy’s windows and detecting the vibrations caused by conversations inside.
There is a reason that it is now routine to restrict highly sensitive conversations to a SCIF — Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — a safe room that uses high technology to block even the most sophisticated listening systems.
The greater issue concerning Qatar’s more-than-generous offer is not security. It is what the offer signifies to the Middle East, namely that the White House is now open to brazen bribery.
Would the politically ambitious emir of Qatar — who personally financed the creation of Al Jazeera, the Arab news conglomerate that functions as the Middle East’s equivalent of Fox News — have an interest in knowing the content of classified conversations that the president normally has while traveling on Air Force One?
The gift of the plane might be free, but making sure that it is secure would very likely prove more expensive, and take longer, than simply waiting for Boeing to complete the two new versions of Air Force One that are already on order and that were contracted with a fixed price, meaning that Boeing would be responsible for paying for any future cost overruns.
The greater issue concerning Qatar’s more-than-generous offer is not security, however. It is what the offer signifies to the Middle East, namely that the White House is now open to brazen bribery.
When Trump announced the gift of the plane, I was immediately reminded of a friend, a correspondent for a major news publication, who had just come back from a press junket to Saudi Arabia. “They gave each of us a gift bag,” she said. “Mine contained a Patek Philippe watch that must have cost $60,000. Of course, I had to return it.”
The major news organizations, at least, understood that in the Middle East, there is no such thing as a free lunch. If Trump has a transactional approach to international relations, then the Middle East has one too, but on steroids.
A Long History of Buying and Selling
During the several years I covered the Arab world and the Gulf states, an official in one of the emirates explained to me the blunt reality:
When we order a bunch of F-16s from the United States, no one intends to actually use them. Everyone knows that the administration needs to sell us the planes, not just for the money, but also so the president can boast about the jobs that manufacturing them will produce. We need support from Washington, and these arms purchases are a way to pay for it.
This kind of transaction is, historically, a regular practice on the part of the Middle East’s monarchs. The emirates along the Persian Gulf used to be known as the “Trucial States.” Before oil became a major issue, they were mainly important because they were positioned along the critical sea route that Britain used to bring back loot from its colonial empire in India, the major source of Britain’s wealth.
The constant fear in England was that France or Germany might try to cut the route through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. To keep that from happening, the British offered to guarantee the security and independence of the Gulf emirs in exchange for a promise that Britain could oversee their external affairs and prevent them from forming any alliances with other European powers.
The arrangement worked until World War II triggered the collapse of Europe’s colonial empires. As British influence evaporated and American influence grew, the ruling class in the increasingly dependent Gulf states counted on the US to take over where Britain had left off. “We hoped that you Americans would replace the British and take up the reins of empire,” a Gulf official told me. “But you Americans never seemed to understand that.”
From a regional perspective, the Gulf’s dependence on Britain and later on America turned the emirates into political anachronisms. In a world increasingly veering toward democracy and at least some pretense of popular representation, the emirates remained absolute monarchies, resisting social change.
That phenomenon is particularly apparent in Saudi Arabia — where the monarchy is not only absolute, but a segment of the ruling elite genuinely believes in the divine right of kings.
“When you see an Arab with a dagger in his belt,” a friend explained, “that means that he is a sheikh, which means that he can kill anyone if he feels that it is justified. It is a symbol of absolute authority.”
It’s Just How They Do Business
The gruesome murder in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident from a prominent family who wrote columns criticizing the monarchy for The Washington Post, illustrated the sense of personal omnipotence that permeates the royal family.
Khashoggi — whose murder was generally believed to have been ordered by the kingdom’s heir apparent, Mohammed bin Salman, usually referred to by his initials, MBS — was lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, where a hit squad murdered him and then sawed his body into pieces and managed to “disappear” it.
While most people outside Saudi Arabia were horrified, inside Saudi Arabia the assassination seemed nothing more than the royal family’s business as usual. Although MBS has pledged to reduce Saudi Arabia’s taste for bloody executions, the opposite has taken place. According to the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights, the Saudis executed 345 people in 2024, nearly doubling the number executed in the previous year. Most executions involve beheading with a sword, often in a public place.
Trump, who is likely as ignorant of Saudi Arabia’s history as he is of everything else, avoided questions about Khashoggi, and especially dodged a reference to reports that the CIA had attributed the assassination to MBS. Instead, Trump focused on a proposed agreement for a $600 billion Saudi investment spread over a package of deals.
As for MBS, Trump described him as an “incredible man” and “a great guy.” Then Trump announced that he was dropping US sanctions against Syria because MBS had asked him to.
“Oh, the things that I do for the prince,” Trump said.
The message received in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf was that the president — and, consequently, the US and, more importantly, US policy — was up for sale.
The president might be venal but, from a Middle East perspective, that is a laudable trait, especially if you want an Arab role in shaping US policy.
The fact that, while Trump occupied the spotlight, his sons Eric and Don Jr. were busy signing billions of dollars in personal deals throughout the Gulf for the direct profit of the Trump family, was further proof that the US was essentially for sale. The president might be venal but, from a Middle East perspective, that is a laudable trait, especially if you want an Arab role in shaping US policy.
Two Planes and an Automobile
There is a particular irony in the fact that no one had taken the Arabs seriously until the two world wars showed the importance of oil in maintaining a navy, the key to projecting global power.
The British had originally tried to cultivate the Sharif of Mecca, whom they hoped to position as a kind of “pope of the Islamic world.” In the process, they ignored Ibn Saud, who, with his father, had sought political asylum in Kuwait after being forced out of Riyadh by the Rashidi clan.
In 1902, Ibn Saud gathered a group of men and rode camels to Riyadh, where he attacked the castle occupied by the Rashidi. Ibn Saud cut off the head of the Rashidi’s chief and threw it to the crowd assembled outside the castle. Ibn Saud then began the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, which he completed in 1932.
Both Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt competed for Ibn Saud’s affections. Roosevelt met Ibn Saud on a US Navy cruiser. Roosevelt sent a destroyer to pick him up, and equipped it with 20 sheep to satisfy his guest’s lunch requirements. He then offered him a US-built DC-3 airplane and an American crew to fly it. Ibn Saud was delighted.
Churchill met Ibn Saud at Fayoum, south of Cairo, and offered him a Rolls-Royce as a gift. Ibn Saud accepted it and turned it over to his chauffeur. He never used it.
The upshot of those fateful meetings, and their respective gifts, was to give the US preference in terms of access to Saudi oil for the rest of the 20th century. The Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states understand better than anyone else the power of a gift.
Rather symmetrically, both Roosevelt’s gift to Ibn Saud and Qatar’s proposed gift to Donald Trump feature a plane. The difference is that, then, it was the US openly bargaining for influence in the Arab world, and this time it is Qatar that wants to buy influence in Washington. The tables may be turned, but the nature of the transaction remains the same. You might conclude that, when it comes to such corrupt exchanges, what goes around comes around.
