to have my own entourage.”21 King Salman’s insulting query underscores not just the slick venality behind what now passes for a peace process in Israel and the Occupied Territories, but a way of seeing fellow humans that stands as Trump’s clearest kinship with the world’s despots. Trump is, after all, a man who withheld billions in disaster relief from storm-torn Puerto Rico because he felt the Americans on that island had shown him insufficient gratitude.22
In Libya—originally intended as a Red Sea Conspiracy nation, until it became clear that MBS could determine the course of its future without much input from its people—Trump, according to the New York Times, in 2019 “abruptly reversed American policy” by “issuing a statement endors[ing] a militia leader [Khalifa Hifter] who [was] battling to control Tripoli and depose the United Nations–backed government.”23 In addition to putting American rhetoric on the opposite side of the United Nations in a key geopolitical and military conflict, Trump’s about-face once again saw him “publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman” whose “regional sponsors” were, unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.24 The Washington Post notes that the conflict in Libya is “yet another civil war” fueled by “Saudi Arabia’s reckless prince,” adding, in reference to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, that “these Arab governments and Russia have deliberately sabotaged an international effort that had the support of the European Union, the African Union and the United States.” The Post attaches Hifter’s recent resurgence to a visit to Saudi Arabia, “where he was promised [by MBS and King Salman] millions of dollars in aid to pay for the [new military] operation” he was then planning.25 Hifter, like MBS, has been credibly accused of war crimes by American and international media.26
In Iran, Trump continues his march toward war by ending the U.S. policy of offering sanctions waivers to countries that import Iranian oil—a decision sure to increase tensions in the Middle East and render an already economically devastated Iran even more isolated, desperate, and dangerous; more recently, Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was heard telling members of Congress that “the 2001 AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] might authorize [a] war on Iran.”27 Trump’s decision on the sanctions waivers, like his ultimate decision on whether or not to go to war with Iran, stands to greatly enrich his allies MBS and MBZ—a fact Trump even alluded to in his announcement of the administration’s decision on the waivers.28
Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia faces the prospect of a gradual decline in oil revenues in the coming decades, Trump is aiding its turn to nuclear energy instead of the more obvious solution: solar power. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists observes, “For sun-baked Saudi Arabia, the economical and obvious switch [from oil] is to solar energy, which also doesn’t result in carbon emissions and can be used to reduce domestic consumption of oil and gas. The limited efforts in installing solar power capacity on the part of the Saudi government suggest that climate action and economics may not be the driving motivations for its extensive nuclear energy plan. Indeed, members of the Saudi regime have, on other occasions, made it clear that their interests in nuclear energy derive from the idea that it would help them acquire the capability to make nuclear weapons and match Iran, whose regional status is seen to have risen as a result of its uranium enrichment program.”29
Trump’s coddling of Saudi Arabia’s foolish nuclear enterprise exponentially increases the odds of a cataclysmic nuclear war in the Middle East, as events in the late spring of 2019 have confirmed. In May, Iran declared it would pull out of parts of the nuclear deal it signed with the Obama administration in 2015—a deal the Trump administration had pulled out of in May 2018—including its uranium-enrichment restrictions, unless Europe moved quickly to counteract the devastating effects of Trump’s newly imposed sanctions.30 Days later, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia issued public allegations of Iranian sabotage of Saudi oil tankers; the allegations made reference to holes in tanker hulls, but there were no reports of casualties, no photographs of any damage, no details on the alleged weapon used to produce the holes, no claims of any oil spillage, and no claims of responsibility from Iran or a proxy authorized to speak for Iran.31 The Saudis’ and Emiratis’ report of Iranian sabotage came just days after the two nations had communicated to U.S. intelligence that an Iranian attack might be imminent, an