Before this can happen, however, MBS and MBZ must conclusively address the Qatar question, which in many respects has become a proxy, too, for the question of Jordan’s involvement in MESA. As noted by Al Jazeera in October 2018, “Doubts over MESA have … been raised over a protracted dispute between Qatar and four Arab states who launched a blockade against Doha in 2017. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt cut off travel and trade ties with Qatar in June 2017, accusing it of backing Iran and supporting terrorism.”4 Since the blockade began, Qatar has vehemently denied the four nations’ allegations, ensuring that the “Qatari crisis” will remain the reason that, as the Middle East Policy Council notes, “there is much that is unknown about the final composition [of MESA].”5
The timing of the Qatar blockade suggests that the longtime U.S. ally was always unwelcome in the Saudi-led MESA. When news first broke of the MESA proposal in Riyadh in May 2017—at the Arab Islamic American Summit, which Trump attended—Qatar was presumed to be a future member.6 The “Riyadh Declaration” that emerged from the summit “unveiled plans to establish the Middle East Strategic Alliance with the objective of establishing peace and security in the region and the world. The process of establishing the Riyadh-based Alliance with the participation of many nations will be completed by 2018.”7 Yet it was just days later that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt—which, according to Foreign Policy, would soon become known to many in the Middle East as the “Anti-Qatar Quartet,” and by others as the “Saudi Quartet”—“imposed a historic land, maritime, and air blockade on Qatar” in a move intended to “permanently ostracize [Saudi Arabia’s] rival.”8 In mid-2018, the Dubai-based Gulf News will report that the quartet is, according to Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, willing to “wait for ten to fifteen, twenty, fifty years” for Qatar to accept its list of demands, with al-Jubeir telling the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that the four nations’ patience is equal to that of the United States with respect to Cuba (the U.S. has had an embargo on its Communist neighbor to the south since 1960).9
According to Foreign Policy, in initiating a blockade on Qatar the quartet’s “real goal was to essentially make Qatar a vassal state unable to carry out any independent foreign policy. To that end, the Saudi camp initiated a massive public relations effort in Western capitals to increase diplomatic pressure on Qatar and turn public opinion against it.”10 This campaign appears to have begun in earnest during a secret meeting in Riyadh in May 2017 attended by Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, MBS, and MBZ (see chapter 8). Because MESA had already been announced as a Saudi-led alliance by the time of the blockade in mid-2017, the quartet’s actions clearly precluded Qatar from participating in the “Arab NATO” and, moreover, put the four nations behind the blockade at the forefront of the new organization—with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates clearly first among equals.
In January 2018, however, Michael Wolff’s controversial access-journalism tell-all Fire and Fury is released, and its content, an intimate look inside the Trump administration, risks creating a fissure between Trump and the Saudis—a danger Trump may have foreseen, given that he takes the extraordinary step of trying to block the book’s publication in court.11 After the president’s effort, which is predictably unsuccessful and (equally predictably) ensures that Fire and Fury is an instant New York Times bestseller, George Nader emails Elliott Broidy at least twice to “smooth over potential bad feelings created by the book … [which] portrayed the president’s views of the Saudi prince in an unflattering light.”12 Wolff’s book describes MBS as a man with “no education” who “know[s] little,” but these views are attributed to the book’s author; more problematically, Trump’s “foreign policy people” are described as considering MBS, prior to Trump’s trip to Riyadh in May 2017, an “opportunist” and “untested,” and Trump is quoted by Wolff as cavalierly saying, after his first meeting with MBS in March 2017, “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done deal.”13
The “deal” to which Trump is referring is one he implies his campaign or transition team has devised, though of course MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, Putin, and Netanyahu have long since—through their interlocutors, including Birnbaum, Simes, al-Otaiba, Flynn, Barrack, Prince, Nader, Broidy, and others—sold the deal to Kushner, Bannon, Trump Jr., and Trump