during the 1990s involves Israel and another nation with whom Nader’s professional career as a dealmaker will come to be entwined, the United Arab Emirates. A major thaw in relations between the UAE and Israel leads to Israel’s agreement not to block an American sale of F-16 fighter jets to the Emiratis; that decision, in turn, leads the tiny Gulf nation to decide to engage with the Israelis directly (if discreetly) over the two countries’ shared apprehension of what both perceive to be a growing Iranian threat.91 Meanwhile, despite a long-standing Saudi-Emirati alliance, the Saudi-Israeli relationship remains virtually nonexistent. It will require a new ruler to arise in the kingdom for Riyadh to see, as the Emiratis increasingly do, the value in a semipublic military détente with the Israelis.92 Whereas, toward the end of the Clinton administration, a senior Emirati official is heard by an American official conceding, “I can envision us being in the trenches with Israel fighting against Iran,” as late as the first year of the Obama administration, Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud tells President Obama, “We’ll be the last ones [in the Middle East] to make peace with [Israel].”93 Both Emirati and U.S. officials must have seen, in 2008, that any Saudi-Israeli rapprochement would have to wait until the old guard within the House of Saud was gone. And by 2015, it would be.
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Just like the word “collusion,” “conspiracy” can be understood in both a lay sense and a legal sense. If your friends secretly agree to keep information from you about your spouse’s marital infidelity, that’s a conspiracy, but it’s not illegal; by the same token, if six nations secretly agree to vote in a bloc on a given United Nations resolution, we might call that a conspiracy without also calling it a violation of international law. There is, of course, a U.S. criminal statute governing the legal—or, rather, illegal—sort of conspiracy, and it says, broadly, that if there’s a meeting of the minds between two or more people to achieve an illegal purpose, and if a given member within that group of people executes an act in furtherance of that illegal purpose, that person is guilty of conspiracy whether or not the illegal purpose is ever achieved.94 But as is evident from this broad legal definition, “conspiracy,” even in the statutory sense, is a catchall term: there can be a conspiracy to bribe someone, or a conspiracy to commit fraud, or a conspiracy to commit computer crimes, or a conspiracy to solicit or receive illegal campaign contributions—essentially, anything one can do that is illegal can also be done in an inchoate form as part of a conspiracy to achieve that end alongside other people.
In this respect, “conspiracy” comes up in the context of the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal in the same way that the nonlegal term “collusion” does: both are things one can do without committing a crime, but also things that one can do while committing a crime. The main difference is that an illegal conspiracy is likely to be charged as a conspiracy, whereas non-conspiracy-related collusive behavior, when and where it is illegal, will be charged as something else—for instance, aiding and abetting, bribery, money laundering, or even, depending upon the underlying facts, obstruction of justice or witness tampering.
Broadly speaking, one engages in collusion when one acts purposefully in response to or in concert with the actions of another party, whether or not there is an underlying crime involved and whether or not there is an explicit agreement to work toward a common goal. Thus, if President Trump obstructs an investigation into Russian election interference in a way he knows will protect the Russian Federation from any repercussions for its illegal acts, and if the Kremlin responds by acting in a manner favorable to the Trump administration but contrary to U.S. law, both parties can see and appreciate the reactions their past, present, and future behaviors are provoking in the other party, and can see that those maneuvers are mutually beneficial, even if there is no unambiguous public agreement to proceed in that fashion. Collusive conduct at the level of the U.S. and foreign governments is a grave national security threat if one or more of the foreign nationals with whom U.S. government actors are colluding do not have America’s best interests at heart—which, in the zero-sum game of global geopolitics, is often how the matter stands. To collude with a foreign nation is, definitionally, to act under its