{"id":28111,"date":"2017-11-17T19:52:25","date_gmt":"2017-11-18T00:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28111"},"modified":"2017-11-17T19:52:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-18T00:52:26","slug":"trumps-saudi-scheme-unravels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28111","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Saudi Scheme Unravels"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trump\u2019s Saudi Scheme Unravels<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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President Trump and his son-in-law bet that the young Saudi crown prince could execute a plan to reshape the Mideast, but the scheme quickly unraveled revealing a dangerous amateur hour, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.<\/p>\n

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Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky, writing in Foreign Policy<\/em>, suggest<\/a><\/em> \u201cthat Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s most notable success abroad may well be the wooing and capture of President Donald Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.\u201d Indeed, it is possible that this \u201csuccess\u201d may prove to be MbS\u2019 only success.<\/p>\n

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President Trump shakes the hand of Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammad bin Salman on May 20, 2017. (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t take much convincing\u201d, Miller and Sokolski wrote: \u201cAbove all, the new bromance reflected a timely coincidence of strategic imperatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump, as ever, was eager to distance himself from President Obama and all his works; the Saudis, meanwhile, were determined to exploit Trump\u2019s visceral antipathy for Iran \u2013 in order to reverse the string of recent defeats suffered by the kingdom.<\/p>\n

So compelling seemed the prize (that MbS seemed to promise) of killing three<\/em> birds with one stone (striking at Iran; \u201cnormalizing\u201d Israel in the Arab world, and a Palestinian accord), that the U.S. President restricted the details to family channels<\/a>alone.\u00a0He thus was delivering a deliberate slight to the U.S. foreign policy and defense establishments by leaving official channels in the dark, and guessing.\u00a0Trump bet heavily on MbS, and on Jared Kushner as his intermediary.\u00a0But MbS\u2019 grand plan fell apart at its first hurdle: the attempt to instigate a provocation<\/a> against Hezbollah in Lebanon, to which the latter would overreact and give Israel and the \u201cSunni Alliance\u201d the expected pretext to act forcefully against Hezbollah and Iran.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump\u2019s Saudi Scheme Unravels President Trump and his son-in-law bet that the young Saudi crown prince could execute a plan to reshape the Mideast, but the scheme quickly unraveled revealing a dangerous amateur hour, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke. Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky, writing in Foreign Policy, suggest \u201cthat Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s most notable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[17096,15722,6963,7844,326,16915,11708,17097,701,827],"class_list":["post-28111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-aaron-miller","tag-alastair-cooke","tag-consortium-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-foreign-policy","tag-jared-kushner","tag-mohammed-bin-salman","tag-richard-sokolsky","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28112,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28111\/revisions\/28112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}