Meanwhile, Israeli business intelligence companies become involved with multiple GOP presidential campaigns. Trump’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, places itself at the center of a UAE-Israeli election-meddling scandal with Russian connections. The recently signed Iran nuclear deal and Trump’s secret negotiations with the Kremlin over a proposed Trump Tower Moscow lend urgency to the actions of key players in several countries.
As 2015—the year the Iran nuclear deal becomes fully effective—begins, America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are, with Israel, deeply concerned about whether the United States can be relied upon to help ensure security in the region as it once was. According to one senior Arab diplomat, “There is a determination among us now that if there are security issues, we have to take action [ourselves] and we will. We don’t have to ask America’s permission. We of course will collaborate with the U.S., but we won’t wait for America to tell us what to do.”1 This new ethos of radical independence—tinged as it is, at least in the American view, with the potential for recklessness by certain Sunni Arab states—will be a defining characteristic of 2015 in the Middle East. As CNN will note, the GCC (which in 2015 comprises Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman) is particularly emboldened by its divergence from the Obama administration’s view of the wisdom of engaging with Iran.2 Per CNN, “the Gulf states, along with Israel, worry that the deal with Tehran will pave the way for a nuclear bomb rather than prevent one, and unlock billions of dollars that Iran will use to wreak havoc in the region. That fear has forced the six [GCC] nations to overcome a host of internal differences, heal long-standing rifts and show a level of unity that has been lacking. It also has led the bloc to show less deference to the United States.”3 When representatives of the GCC nations travel to the White House and Camp David in May 2015 to meet with President Obama, their new unity will be on display; behind the scenes, the most powerful member of the bloc—Saudi Arabia—is ready to fundamentally change the composition of the GCC and significantly expand its already negative orientation toward engagement with Iran.
In January 2015, King Salman ascends to the throne of Saudi Arabia. Within sixty days, his twenty-nine-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman—a man with no military experience—is named minister of defense, deputy crown prince, and the head of Saudi Arabia’s oil company, Saudi Aramco.4 MBS immediately launches a war against Yemen to dislodge Houthi rebels, who have driven the Yemeni government into exile, from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital.5 To the great consternation of his older cousins, MBS’s war with Yemen is initiated without, as observed by the New York Times in October 2016, “full coordination across the security services”; indeed, as the kingdom’s first strikes in Yemen are being carried out in March 2015, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, the head of the Saudi National Guard, not only hasn’t been informed of the action but isn’t even in the country.6
Shortly thereafter, in April 2015, King Salman names his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef as the crown prince and his successor, though he has already taken actions suggesting that his ultimate successor will be MBS. According to the Times, beginning in January 2015 “new powers … flow[] to his [King Salman’s] son [MBS], some of them undermining the authority of the crown prince [bin Nayef]. King Salman collapse[s] the crown prince’s court into his own, giving Prince bin Salman control over access to the king. Prince bin Salman also hastily announce[s] the formation [in December 2015] of a military alliance of Islamic countries to fight terrorism,” a plan that effectively freezes bin Nayef’s Interior Ministry out of any meaningful role in the country’s new counterterrorism agenda.7 The Times notes that “Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, which means that Prince bin Salman was given all of his powers by a vote of one: his own father.”8
In its first year, MBS’s war in Yemen—one of his most “concrete initiatives,” notes the Times—“fail[s] to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital … drive[s] much of Yemen toward famine and kill[s] thousands of civilians while costing the Saudi government tens of billions of dollars.”9 Shortly after the hostilities begin in March 2015, bin Salman disappears for an unexpected “vacation” in the Maldives, during which period even Ashton B. Carter, the U.S. secretary of defense, is unable to reach