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Tag: middle east politics

  • Donald Trump’s Pantomime United Nations

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    The current membership of the board is a motley mix. It includes prominent countries already invested in bringing stability to Gaza—Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies. The White House has also roped in governments involved in other alleged Trump-led peace initiatives, such as those of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Kosovo. Governments of participating countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia may see membership as a low-stakes way to boost their geopolitical clout. And then there are Trump’s fellow-travellers who have no obvious skin in the game beyond a desire to gratify the President, such as Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, a libertarian firebrand, and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent illiberal nationalist.

    Trump dispatched invitations to dozens of countries to join the Board of Peace, but he has been mostly rebuffed or kept at arm’s length by the U.S.’s traditional allies. European skepticism only deepened after Trump sought to include Russia and Belarus in the project. (Russia has yet to announce its decision, whereas Belarus agreed, though Belarusian officials said they did not receive visas from the U.S. to attend the meeting on Thursday.) In January, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued a joint call for the defense and strengthening of the U.N. in the face of Trump’s enterprise. Pope Leo XIV made a similar pitch for the U.N. in declining Trump’s invitation.

    Sitting in the room during the meeting on Thursday, a European official in attendance was bemused by the succession of leaders voicing their admiration for Trump, especially after a number of top European politicians have been mocked for their own attempts to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. President over the past year. “One cannot only blame Europeans flattering you-know-who,” the official told me. “We’re not even the worst ones.”

    Board-membership terms last three years (conveniently running out just as Trump’s term does). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but it’s unclear to most diplomats whether this experiment will exist or matter beyond Trump’s time in office. Two Presidents I spoke to in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectation of financial contributions or commitments. The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, instead cast her small nation’s participation as an act of historical redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia. “It was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,” she told me. “Now, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and we are helping carry that peace forward.”

    The Armenian President, Vahagn Khachaturyan, told me that he hoped that the board could help “enhance confidence” in the U.N. system by boosting peacemaking efforts. He lamented that “principles of coexistence are very often violated, and the United Nations is not often able to prevent those violations,” gesturing to the perennial problem of the Security Council, where one of the five veto-wielding powers—in recent history, chiefly Russia and the U.S.—can block significant resolutions to address conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza.

    But Trump and his lieutenants rarely speak of principles and seem far more interested in establishing an arena where only the U.S.’s veto counts. You could hear their ideological animus this past weekend, at a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy, scoffed at the “hosannas and shibboleths” that constitute talk of shared values and paeans to the rules-based order. Rubio poured scorn on the U.N., saying that “on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

    Thant Myint-U, a Burmese-British historian whose grandfather U Thant was the U.N.’s third Secretary-General, said that, “despite all of its failings,” the U.N. “has been a big part of eighty years of unparalleled peace and prosperity in human history.” He warned that if the Board of Peace picks up momentum, it may “set the stage for a much broader collapse of the whole U.N. architecture that we’ve had since 1945.”

    There’s plenty of reason to believe that the board may not be much more than a Trump vanity project of dissonant parts and vague goals that will fade from view amid the rolling dramas of his Presidency. But, as the U.S. plays spoiler within an international system in which it was once the linchpin, no other world power seems especially eager to pick up the slack. Thant Myint-U said, “At a time when Washington is challenging the very fundamentals of the U.N., both through the Board of Peace but also through aid cuts and funding cuts and everything else, no other country is saying, We’re either going to make up financially for the missing U.S. contributions, or we’re going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the U.N.”

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    Ishaan Tharoor

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  • How M.B.S. Won Back Washington

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    The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Biden Administration, Michael Ratney, made the argument in the Wall Street Journal recently that the investments in sports weren’t really about improving M.B.S.’s image in the West, but instead about making Saudi Arabia more of a normal country. This struck me as a little far-fetched. But you seem to be saying that, regardless of what the motives were, paying comedians to come to Riyadh or spending on American sports leagues has failed as an image-improvement strategy, and is somewhat separate from Saudi Arabia’s improved relationship with Washington.

    The sports spending can be more than one thing. I think that the crown prince is a sports nut and very interested in global sport, both e-sport and normal sport. And he thought that these were good investments. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I think LIV Golf might not be a great investment, but it was more than just a P.R. effort. He thought of it as a way to both make money in the long term and to make Saudi Arabia a more normal place. Some of the sports investments have been better than others. The investments in Newcastle FC in the Premier League seem to be pretty good. The Formula One stuff that they’re doing locally, I assume, brings in some amount of tourism, although I haven’t seen figures on that. So the whole sports campaign can be more than one thing. But if it was primarily aimed at improving Saudi Arabia’s public-opinion profile in the United States, then it was wasted money. I don’t think it has made a dent in the generally negative opinion most Americans have about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

    It seems like you’re describing the Biden relationship with Saudi Arabia as being more about these large economic factors. Dare I say that the Trump Administration’s embrace of M.B.S. might have to do with more personal economic matters, that Trump didn’t care about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the first place, and was annoyed by all the talk of punishing Saudi Arabia in his first term? And how do you understand the Trump relationship with M.B.S. now?

    I don’t think it’s any different than President Trump’s policy in the first term. It’s the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. It’s because that’s where the money is. I think President Trump, even more baldly in his second term, sees the difference between his own economic interest and the country’s economic interest as, in effect, inseparable. And that’s troublesome to me as an American citizen, but it’s certainly something that the Saudis understand because all those monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have been a combination of business interests and political interests forever, whether it’s oil or, in the pre-oil period, money from pearl diving. All of these ruling families have been part of the business environment in their countries. And so, in many ways, Saudi Arabia sees the Trump Administration as the first American government that it really understands because it’s not dissimilar to the way they view the intersection of politics and business. When Trump sent Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to be his primary go-between with Saudi Arabia in the first term, I’m sure the Saudis understood.

    It has been commonly assumed that M.B.S. wants to turn the country from a sort of strange religious dictatorship into a more banal, repressive dictatorship. Do you think that’s the way that we should understand what he’s been trying to do? I keep thinking that this is best evoked by the fact that he has been relaxing some laws that restricted women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, while at the same time throwing women’s-rights advocates in jail because he’s a dictator who wants to have political control.

    The word that best describes what he wants is one that he’s used, which is that he wants Saudi Arabia to be a normal country. In the sense of the political system, he wants it to be a normal authoritarian country, i.e., a place where people can enjoy some amount of social freedom. And, on that score, he has really changed the country dramatically. I mean, not just the women driving and the women’s rights, but the availability of public entertainment, the mixing of the genders in public places, and the access women have to job opportunities in the public sphere. He thinks of that as a more normal country, and I think most Americans would probably think of that as a more normal country, but he has absolutely no desire to change the political system. In fact, he wants to recentralize power not just in the ruling family but in him personally within the family.

    That’s been a big change. For decades, Saudi Arabia was basically run as a committee system, a committee of senior princes that had to sign on to anything important that was happening, and it had all the defects of committees. It was stodgy, it didn’t seize opportunities. But it had the virtue of committees, too, which is to say that they didn’t do anything spectacularly dumb. He has changed that committee system to an individual system, so sometimes they do dumb things, and he did a number of dumb things early on in the period in which he was the main decision-maker, including the war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar, which was meant to end its support for Islamist groups, and the kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister. This was a misbegotten effort to create a crisis in Lebanon, which M.B.S. thought would harm Hezbollah, but actually harmed Hezbollah’s opponents, such as the Lebanese Prime Minister himself, Saad Hariri. And the Jamal Khashoggi killing, as well. There’s been some learning from that. He’s been much more cautious on the foreign-policy scene, and I think that, with his consolidation of power, he’s not about to give that up for some kind of democratic reform.

    It’s a nice time for him in that sense because he isn’t going to get many lectures about democratic reform.

    From this Administration, no. He’s certainly not going to get any lectures. I think this trip is kind of a personal triumph for him. If he had come five years ago, nobody would have been talking to him.

    You mentioned his foreign policy, and it seemed in the early years that he was meddling in Lebanon and Yemen and Qatar, and there was also a very aggressive posture toward the Iranians. How do you see the posture in the region now, and what have you made of the way he’s dealt with Gaza? My sense is that it seems like he’d probably love to have some sort of deal with Israel, but knows that he can’t get too far ahead of the Saudi population, which I imagine is not pleased about Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

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    Isaac Chotiner

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