allied himself with the Emiratis, endorsing their strong support for the new heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia,” MBS.23
As Nader is coordinating a new coalition of Sunni Arab nations on the Red Sea, and doing so alongside the future ruler of Saudi Arabia and the current ruler of the UAE, the Saudi government is publicly presenting a different face with respect to its regional ambitions. In December 2015, Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir announces a thirty-four-nation Islamic military alliance against terrorism, which—despite MBS’s intention of kicking Qatar off the GCC—includes the long-standing American ally; Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain will be blockading Qatar by air, land, and sea within eighteen months (see chapter 7).24 One sign that the Saudis’ proposed anti-terrorism alliance, nominally the brainchild of MBS, is from its start pretextual is that after the list of nations involved in the coalition is announced, several of those included declare that they had had no idea of its existence; indeed, only four countries—the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait—are able to immediately confirm that they have entered into a military alliance with the Saudis.25
As clandestine geopolitical conspiracies go, Nader’s—or, more properly, MBZ’s and MBS’s—seemed, on its face, fairly benign. If the ambitions of these Arab leaders had been public, who in America would have objected to a seismic political and military realignment in the Middle East, if the result were to be a coalition of Arab nations willing to work cooperatively with both the United States and Israel? And could Israel be blamed for wanting to see a new coalition of Arab countries in the Middle East more committed to the Jewish nation’s survival than any previous permutation of its neighbors had ever been? Indeed, in hindsight some part of the ambitious vision promoted by MBZ and MBS might have been admirable, broadly writ: along with Syria, Sudan, and North Korea, Iran has been a designated state sponsor of terrorism since 1984, so contending with its regional and occasionally global designs has long been a key element of American foreign policy.26 Even so, systematized corruption—let alone a direct assault on American democracy—in the name of plausibly benign middle- or long-term goals has never been something most Americans will accept, so it is little surprise that, whatever his or his patrons’ intentions may have been, by early 2018 Nader had become a “focus” of a federal investigation over “possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign.”27
While the Saudis’ and Emiratis’ broad and deep hostility toward Iran in 2015 was well in line with years of pre-Obama foreign policy in the United States, the two countries’ growing enmity toward both Qatar and Turkey was not. Qatar is home to the U.S. military’s largest base in the Middle East, and, as the Los Angeles Times notes, “Since the start of the Cold War, Turkey has been one of the United States’ top allies in a region [the Middle East] not known for pro-American sentiment.”28
Yet even those who cherish Turkey’s historical role as a U.S. ally would concede that, in recent years, the relationship between the two countries has become strained because of the other nation in the Middle East (besides Iran) the United States has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism: Syria.29 Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Turkey has been aggrieved at America’s support for Kurdish troops in and around the war-torn nation. In the early years of the civil war, the United States trained and equipped the Kurds while maintaining that it materially supported only those Kurdish forces “in areas east of the Euphrates River as well as Manbij [in northern Syria] against [the terrorist organization] Islamic State,” considering any Kurdish forces in Afrin, a district in northwest Syria near Turkey, “a separate entity.”30 This policy was narrowly sustainable so long as the Islamic State remained a common enemy of the United States, Turkey, and Kurdish forces; once the Islamic State had been largely defeated in Syria, however, Kurdish-led troops formed a “border security force”—and America’s and Turkey’s interests diverged.31
In 2018, Turkey launched what it called Operation Olive Branch, an effort by Turkish troops and allied Syrian Arab militia to drive the Kurds from Afrin. As the Times notes, “Turkey’s political leadership … touted the operation in Afrin as a war not just against Kurdish forces, but also against the United States.”32 Moreover, Turkish president Erdogan accused the United States of deliberately establishing a