May 14: Trump’s Welcome Embrace of “Jihad”
Boeing makes out like bandits in Doha; China courts the Gulf; Wang buys $TRUMP
The Big Story
Here’s some moderately good news: President Donald Trump met with Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sheraa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday, prior to leaving for his state visit to Qatar. According to a readout from the White House, confirmed by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on X, Trump “urged” Sheraa to sign on to the Abraham Accords with Israel, expel foreign terrorists from Syria, deport Palestinian terrorists, cooperate with the United States on fighting ISIS, and “assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in northeast Syria.”
Yes, Sheraa may have had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head until December, but Trump appeared charmed by the man, commenting that Sheraa was “tough” and “handsome.” And in his Tuesday speech in Riyadh, the president made clear exactly who his Syria moves were supposed to be a favor for. “Oh, what I do for the crown prince!,” Trump said after announcing his intention to lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria. The crown prince, of course, being Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.
So, why is that a good thing? Sheraa is a former jihadist after all, and we’ve seen plenty of outraged commentary in pro-Israel circles connecting Trump’s Syria policy to his acceptance earlier this week of a $400 million jet from Qatar, or to the presence of pro-Qatari elements in his inner circle. Others have framed the move as a disappointing sop to the Turkish menace, given that Sheraa is heavily backed by Turkey. But we think that’s too pessimistic by far, for two main reasons.
The first is that it’s simply good policy. Yes, the Qataris wanted the move, but so did every other one of Washington’s major Sunni allies, with multiple analysts we spoke to pointing to the significance of the announcement being made in Riyadh, not in Doha. “It’s one of the first moves that he’s done that’s in keeping with his first-term foreign policy,” Tablet News Editor Tony Badran told The Scroll. “Already in December, while everyone was freaking out, Trump was like, Yeah, man. Turkey’s our ally, and they took over Syria, and that’s smart. There was no outrage, or mention of jihad or minorities; that stuff’s just not in his vocabulary. Which actually makes him super ‘realist,’ because he’s dealing with nation-states. He folded Syria into his Turkey and Saudi policy, which is exactly what you’re supposed to do.”
Trump also saved the Israelis from their ill-conceived plans to “ally” with Syria’s minorities—which, as Middle East analyst Phillip Smyth told The Scroll, “never actually work out.” As Badran put it, “Trump told the Israelis, We’re going to figure out some sort of modus vivendi between you and the Turks. It’s a perfect Trump move because it drives everybody crazy.” Smyth added, “I just don’t see how this is a net loss for the United States. The Chinese have been reaching out [to Syria] hardcore, despite the fact that they were kissing [former Syrian dictator Bashar al-]Assad’s ass for ages. This opens the door for us to block them out—and to block out the Iranians.”
Second, as we noted yesterday, the embrace of Sheraa is a decisive rebuke of the Tucker Carlson-Tulsi Gabbard info op that we’ve been chronicling since December, which has painted Sheraa as an al-Qaeda asset of Barack Obama’s “neocon” CIA and flooded conservative media with fake stories about the “jihadists” massacring Christians in Syria. For instance, here was Gabbard in her confirmation hearing in January:
I have no love for Assad or Gaddafi or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that we have leaders who cozy up to Islamist extremists, minimizing them to so-called rebels. As Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” Well, Syria is now controlled by an al-Qaeda offshoot, HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham], led by an Islamist jihadist [Sheraa] who danced in the streets on 9/11 and who is responsible for the killing of many American service members.
Gabbard went on to explain that Sheraa had been trained by “the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program” to help “overthrow” the Assad regime and start “yet another regime change war in the Middle East.” He had also—why not?—“already begun to persecute and kill and arrest religious minorities like Christians in Syria.”
All of that was, of course, fake, and part of a messaging campaign to (a) target pro-Israeli American evangelicals and (b) box the Trump administration into a structurally pro-Iran policy in the Levant. Trump has now confirmed what we wrote at the time, which is that the Gabbard-Carlson line about the “neocons” and “jihadists” in Syria has nothing to do with Trump’s policy. Which suggests that some of that faction’s other messaging—about Iran, Israel, Russia, etc.—might be on similarly shaky ground.
—Park MacDougald
The Rest
→During Trump’s Wednesday visit to Doha, the White House announced that it had secured $243 billion worth of “deals” with Qatar, including a $96 billion deal for the emirate to buy more than 200 commercial jets from Boeing. That’s less than the $600 billion promised by the Saudis yesterday, but Bloomberg reports, citing White House messaging, that today’s announcements were “laying the groundwork for a bigger $1.2 trillion economic pledge” with Doha; however, given that the latter figure represents more than five times Qatar’s annual GDP, we’re a bit skeptical. But given the recent tendency of Boeing planes to come off the assembly line over-budget and behind schedule—and at times to fall apart in midair or crash themselves—maybe the way to read today’s announcement is that Trump has convinced the Qataris to buy our lemons.
→Or maybe it’s about competition with China? Writing in Defense One, Tye Graham and Pete Singer note that Trump’s Gulf diplomacy comes amid a wave of major Chinese investment projects in the Gulf Arab states, including these in just the past few months:
Graham and Singer write that the Persian Gulf, which began strengthening ties with Beijing as a hedge against the pro-Iranian tilt of U.S. policy under President Joe Biden, is “quickly turning into China’s favorite testbed for the next-generation of digital infrastructure.” That’s led to a situation in which, in many Gulf states, Chinese-made 5G digital infrastructure exists side by side, literally, with U.S. military installations, raising concerns about electronic spying. In Bahrain, for instance, Chinese 5G provider Huawei operates the mobile telecommunications infrastructure used by the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
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→Trump said Wednesday, after speaking with Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, that he has “a feeling it’s going to work out with Iran.” Whatever that means, it comesone day after Trump delivered a moderately bellicose speech in Riyadh in which he called on Iran to not only drop its nuclear program but also cease its “bloody proxy wars,” while promising that the days of the United States “empowering Iran” are “over.” We’ll have to wait and see, but on the bright side, congressional Republicans are expressing their preference for playing hardball with the mullahs. On Wednesday, 52 Republican senators—all of them except for Kentucky’s Rand Paul—wrote a letter to Trump praising his first-term Iran policy and calling for him to ensure that Iran’s “ability to enrich uranium is permanently eliminated.”
→Quote of the Day:
At that point [November 2024], 1789 [Capital] was a microscopic player in the world of venture capital. It had raised less than $200 million, and it hadn't made many investments beyond leading a group that put $15 million into Tucker Carlson's new media company.
That’s from a Business Insider report on Donald Trump Jr.’s business dealings, which offers some additional confirmation of our speculation last week concerning the, uh, limited personal financial resources of Don Jr.’s business partner in 1789 Capital, Omeed Malik, who was making a salary of about $500,000 when he was fired from Bank of America in 2018. Though we’re sure he’s doing fine now. As the report goes on to detail, 1789 has since invested $50 million in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI—via “coveted” private stock offerings that most investors have to pay to get access to, per BI—and undisclosed sums in several other defense contractors, including Anduril.
→A struggling tech company with ties to China announced earlier this week that it would buy as much as $300 million worth of $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency token owned by subsidiaries of the Trump Organization, The New York Times reports. The company in question, GD Culture Group, runs an e-commerce operation on TikTok—which recorded $0 in revenue last year—and employs eight people. Yet it announced Monday that it would spend $300 million to buy Bitcoin and $TRUMP, using “proceeds from a stock sale to an unnamed entity in the British Islands,” for the purpose of “enhancing its balance sheet with high-performance, scalable digital assets,” according to the Times’ review of the company’s disclosures. Sounds legit! The extent of GD Culture Group’s “ties” to China aren’t exactly clear, but the tiny, unprofitable, yet apparently flush-with-cash firm has a subsidiary in Shanghai and is led by a man named Xiaojian Wang, which sounds, well, pretty Chinese.
→A judge in Virginia has ordered American Muslims for Palestine, a Muslim Brotherhood front group and sponsor of Students for Justice in Palestine (another Brotherhood front), to turn over its financial documents as part of a terror-financing investigation by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, Jewish Insider reports. The Virginia investigation is one of several congressional investigations and lawsuits faced by AMP, which, as we’ve explained before, is a successor group of the Islamic Association of Palestine, which was shuttered in the 2000s over its ties to Hamas. The judge’s ruling, issued Friday, means that AMP “has now exhausted all of the available legal delay tactics it has used to resist the attorney general’s efforts to procure documents as part of a winding investigation launched weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks,” according to JI.
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