six countries, which would supplant [the GCC and] … form the nucleus of [a coalition of] pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli states” in the Middle East.9 According to two sources briefed on the 2015 Red Sea summit, “Nader said this group of states could become a force in the region ‘that the United States government could depend on’ to counter the influence of Turkey and Iran.”10
Prior to 2015, Turkey and Saudi Arabia had intermittently enjoyed strong diplomatic ties, but by the second-to-last year of the Obama administration relations had soured considerably. As explained by Nader Habibi, a Brandeis University economist specializing in the Middle East, the Turkey–Saudi Arabia relationship “deteriorated in the ’90s when the kingdom [Saudi Arabia] took Syria’s side in several disputes with [Syria’s] neighbor Turkey. These ups and downs in Saudi-Turkish relations were partly a result of Turkey’s political instability, including several military coups in the ’80s and ’90s. Relations tended to improve when Islamist or civilian parties—which felt close cultural and religious links with Turkey’s Muslim neighbors—were in power but worsened after the military deposed them.”11 This cycle continued unabated up until 2011, when, Habibi writes, “the Arab spring uprisings … led to the overthrow of governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. As an advocate of political Islam, [Turkish president Recep Tayyip] Erdogan welcomed the revolutions and the new governments they yielded. The Saudi government, on the other hand, saw the revolts as destabilizing.”12 Erdogan therefore supported, while Saudi Arabia did not, Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood–linked politician who took power in Egypt in 2012.13 So it is little surprise that, according to Foreign Affairs magazine, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were “bitter frenemies” by 2012.14
When a 2013 military coup ended Morsi’s tenure as president, replacing him with el-Sisi, “Erdogan strongly condemned it [the coup] and gave the Muslim Brotherhood refuge in Turkey, while Saudi Arabia offered billions in financial aid to cement Egypt’s new military rulers.”15 Saudi-Turkish relations immediately took a turn for the worse.
A similar reversal of historical trends—certain members of the Persian Gulf axis of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain supporting a military government and opposing an Islamist or civilian one—was seen in 2016 in Turkey, when a military coup sought to depose Erdogan; the Turks would subsequently accuse the Emiratis of sponsoring the attempted takeover.16 The Emirates’ alleged clandestine support for Erdogan’s overthrow in 2016 had been preceded in 2014 by a Saudi- and Egyptian-led campaign to end Turkey’s bid to become one of the nonpermanent members of the United Nations Security Council.17 The evidence suggests, therefore, that by 2015 Saudi-Turkish, Egyptian-Turkish, and Emirati-Turkish relations were at a low point.
Following the Nader-orchestrated anti-Iran/anti-Turkey summit on the Red Sea, the six-nation Arab coalition Nader and his patron MBZ had originally imagined contracts. Libya, having not sent a representative to the Red Sea gathering, ceases to be a central part of its plan; and per the Middle East Eye, Jordan eventually “fell out dramatically with the group which had gathered on the yacht: Saudi Arabia decided that Amman did not go far enough in enforcing the [June 2017 Saudi] blockade against Qatar.”18 The Saudis were further angered by Jordan’s refusal to vote in favor of Trump’s December 2017 decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; as Hearst writes in his exposé on the Red Sea Conspiracy, “The split between Saudi [Arabia] and Jordan widened further when Jordan voted against Trump’s move to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which threatens Jordan’s role as custodian of the Holy Places in the city.”19
Many months prior to the Red Sea summit, MBZ had begun advancing the political ambitions of his future co-conspirator MBS, “promoting Prince bin Salman in the Middle East and in Washington,” according to the New York Times.20 MBZ “has a history of personal antipathy toward [MBS’s rival for the Saudi throne] Prince bin Nayef,” the Times reports, and in April 2015, while meeting “a small delegation of top [Obama] White House officials … at his home in McLean, V[irginia] … the prince [MBZ] urged the Americans to develop a relationship with Prince bin Salman.”21 That Obama’s then secretary of state, John Kerry, was unable to do so despite apparent good-faith efforts—leading MBS to issue a public rant against what he perceived to be American foreign policy’s failures in the Middle East at the November 2015 G20 summit in Turkey—could not have been missed by MBZ.22 By comparison, the Times will later note, during Trump’s presidency “Mr. Trump has closely