Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 12: How Qatar gets a free pass for Islamist radicalism, a conversation with Dr. Jonathan Schanzer

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Qatar has just 330,000 citizens but controls vast wealth due to its plentiful natural gas. It has used that wealth to support radical and violent terrorist groups and regimes throughout the Middle East and to wield enormous influence in the West, including among American politicians and universities.In today's episode, I asked Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and host of its Morning Brief podcast, if Qatar really is as bad as Israelis think, and if so, what should be done about it.We discuss Doha's ideological commitments and central role in building Hamas into an organization capable of carrying out the October 7 massacre; how its immense donations to elite American universities helped drive radicalization on campus; and whether the Trump administration is able or willing to hold the Qataris to account.Today’s episode is sponsored by Sapir, the quarterly journal edited by Pulitzer-prize-winning commentator Bret Stephens. If you’re in the US, you can get this wonderful journal of ideas sent to you absolutely free by going to http://sapirjournal.org/AskHaviv. Please use the link. It helps the podcast.On May 15, Sapir are initiating the Sapir Debates, a series of live debates on issues facing the Jewish people. The first debate will take place at 92NY on May 15 at 7 pm. Former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel and former Trump special envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt will debate the topic: “Is Donald Trump good for the Jews?”To purchase tickets to the inaugural Sapir debate, go to http://sapirjournal.org/sapirdebate.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[e-mail]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 11 of Ask Chaviv Anything. Today I'm going to be doing the asking. I have with me Jonathan Shanzer, a friend and expert, a teacher over the years. And we're going to tackle a question that has come up many times from our Patreon subscribers, but also generally out there and from many audiences. And Jonathan is really an expert. We're going to talk about the many tentacles of Qatari financing. We're going to talk about terror financing generally. We're going to talk about Iran, not in the context of a nuclear program, will Trump strike, will he not strike, but in the context of money. The money is sloshing around. The money was an instrument of Qatari influence over Hamas. Money was something that we saw in American higher education that helped arguably, I would argue this, radicalize parts of American higher education. Money matters. Can that money be tracked? What can be done about it? Before we get into it, I just want to tell you our sponsor for this episode and to thank them. Many of you were able to catch our mini episode just before Pesach, which was sponsored by Sapir, the quarterly journal edited by the Pulitzer Prize winning Brett Stevens. I mentioned that

if you're in the U.S., you can get this excellent journal sent to you absolutely free by going to Sapil Journal forward slash Ask Chaviv, which you should still do. It helps us a lot. It tells them we sent you. But they're also initiating the Sapir debates, which we're a series of live debates on issues that face the Jewish people. The first debate is going to take place at the 92nd Street Y in New York on May 15th at 7 p.m. And it'll be on the very slightly sensitive topic of, is Donald Trump good for the Jews? They're going right for the throat this time, moderated by Brett Stevens, featuring former chief of staff for President Obama, Rahm Emanuel, who is also, of course, the mayor of Chicago, and Jason Greenblatt,

Trump's former envoy to the Middle East. I'll give you one guess who will be arguing which side. To purchase tickets to the inaugural SIPER debate, go to Sapir Journal, SAPI-R-Journal.org forward slash subpoir debate. Jonathan, it's good to have you. Hello. Hey, Haviv. How are you?

Let me tell viewers and listeners, you're the executive director of the foundation for the defense of democracies. And you host the FD-Mourning Brief. excellent resources on all things Iran, but specifically your expertise is in the stuff that isn't cool because you can't show a bunch of F-16s flying in formation, but probably is the most fundamental. You could not have had 9-11 without massive money going to various ideologies and various institutions of particular branches of radical Islam for many, many years, for decades, for generations. And now we're talking about that kind of a phenomenon of that Qatari money.

So let me start with, first of all, what is Qatar? And why is Qatar such a massive financial powerhouse when it's not even half a million citizens? Who are they? Sure. It's really a fascinating question that you ask, because, Look, you're right. This is a country of 330,000 citizens. There's two million people that live in Qatar, which is a territory smaller than Delaware. It's, as I like to say, it's a zit on the back of Saudi Arabia. It is, so 330,000 people that control somewhere around 10 to 12 percent of the world's energy. So they are basically minting money. that they have the to say they have deep pockets is is just a drastic understatement they can afford anything they want they continue to wipe out the debt of their own people

and you know it's it's actually not much of a country for anyone who's been to to Qatar it's sort of this gleaming city that's been built but no one really lives in it the weather is horrible no one actually wants to spend time there but they have immense amounts of money that they can spend. And they do. And so what they've done over the years is in some cases, they've bought influence in very legitimate ways. They bought Harrod's department store and they bought sports teams

and they bought a city block here in Washington, D.C. And, you know, the holdings are vast and significant. But then there's the illicit funds, which we've seen, right? They support the Taliban. They support Hamas. They are a safe haven for Al-Qaeda, for ISIS. They have funded, you know, some of the significant financial figures in these terror organizations. Like there's a European scandal that we've seen where European members of parliament were bribed by the Qataris. That's known as Qatar Gate, which, of course, is the same name that the Israelis have given it, where they're looking now at

possible Qatari money that's been sloshing around inside Israel with the ultimate benefit of having the Qataris cast in a nicer light in Israel. I think there's probably more to the story. You've seen actually the Qataris bribe an American senator. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey went down in a Qatari bribery scheme. So when you look at the amount of money that they have and the amount of money that they spend in both legitimate and illegitimate ways, you get worried. And then comes the other part, Habib, which is the soft money that is neither illegal nor legal. And this is like the money that they're spending on the university campuses.

America's Ivy League schools under the microscope. Elite universities are selling themselves. and look who's buying. These are governments that are hostile to the United States. And the numbers that I hear right now is that it's somewhere between 7 and 20 billion, which is a huge delta. But ask yourself, what is a country that is 330,000 people, they are autocratic, they are Islamist, they are pro-jihadists.

What do they want with our education system? Why do they keep putting money into our higher education institutions what do they get out of it in the end? I don't think that it's, they just get Qatari students to be able to go and that they're buying admission. I think it's much more than that, and it worries me. So let me suggest a scenario that makes it all kind of makes sense.

You have a country that's very small, and it's kind of positioned between these much larger and militarily powerful countries, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Any one of them could just drive over Qatar in about 10 minutes. And so this is a country that, you know, for reasons of geography and where various dinosaurs died, happens to sit on a ton of energy. And what it has done is double, tripled and quadrupled down on soft power, on all the different mechanisms of soft power.

They're a dictatorship. They're pretty corrupt. They don't even think of it as corruption. It's a monarchy. and a real monarchy, not a British monarchy, a liberal democracy pretending to be a monarchy, but an actual monarchy. And so buying off Bob Menendez is not to them, it's America's problem. It's not a Qadari problem, right?

And so they're just literally trying to sort. They have other strategies that they've adopted. For example, CENTCOM sits in Qatar. And Qatar paid for that base, right? They did. And so money just convinced the Americans to move in. So they make themselves useful to the Americans. They make themselves kind of neutral, kind of useful to the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, everybody all at once.

The Saudis really crack down on them. They kind of are opposed to them in the sort of grand war of ideas within Sunni Islam and the Arab world. But isn't it just a soft power mechanism for survival? In other words, do we need to find larger nefarious? I believe there are larger nefarious. But what about just the argument that how is a small, country with a lot of money going to survive other than this doubling down on soft power well i look there there is that argument and i think that you could you could you could you could posit that the that the

kataris have just acquired an immense amount of soft power but what they've done in the process though is they've pissed off a lot of people um and in other words soft power is great as long as you're wielding it in a way that redounds to your benefit i have to say that i think the the the the kataris by supporting groups like hamas and the taliban and you know getting on the wrong side of the saudis getting on the wrong side of the american um you know american congress on the wrong side of the european parliament all of these things have a high likelihood of blowing up on the catarys so so they're taking risks what's that so it's so they're taking risks it's not a soft power they are useful to everybody they're an action

that thinks it's powerful. Al Jazeera. We didn't talk about maybe its single greatest piece of leverage in the Arab world, right? Literally Al Jazeera. Yeah. Okay.

So what do they want? So here's where I think we need to start asking, you know, the tougher questions. Because you could make an argument that they're just a pragmatic, very wealthy country and all they want is soft power.

They want to be useful to everybody and at the end of the day be able to use their leverage, in whatever ways suit them in their national interests. That is, I think, the very charitable way of looking at the Qatari regime. The other way of looking at it is to begin to understand that dating back to, let's say, 2011, if not maybe even before then, Qatar maybe argue that 2009, we began to really see the beginnings of a policy.

They became the number one proponent for the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They became the number one financiers of political Islam worldwide. So we see Emir Hamid, the previous emir for the regime, goes to Gaza in 2009. It's the first head of state to go to Gaza after Hamas conquers the Gaza Strip by force in a civil war that toppled the Palestinian Authority. And here you have the Qatari saying we are now pledging $200 million a year or whatever I think the total amount was. And we're here for you. We're supporting you in your vision of constructing an Islamist state in Gaza. Now, fast forward two years after that, and the Arab Spring erupts all around the Arab world.

And the Qataris become the top sponsors, the top financiers of every one of the Islamist movements that emerge to challenge these corrupt and awesome. Arab regimes. Now, I got to say, I had no love for the Mubarak regime or the Ben Ali regime or any of the others, but I will say that looking at the potential rise of Islamist movements around the region made me nervous, and it should make everybody nervous. And this kind of stuff is still happening. And that's what I think people don't get. Is so, you know, the Qataris tried to support Muhammad Morsi in Egypt. And that obviously collapsed. But at the same time, you still see Islamists in Libya, for example, in a civil war that's raging there. Those Islamists are still backed by the Qataris. And in fact, you know, there was a moment where Qatari flags were flying over the capitals as some of these regimes were beginning to crumble. And, you know, it was an open acknowledgement that the Islamists in places like Libya or Syria, that they owed a debt. to the Qataris because the Qataris have been sponsoring them. They've been making sure that the weapons and the cash and the assistance has flowed to these places.

I'll just give you a recent example, the regime of HTS, the regime of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the new dictator in Syria. He was at one point the head of the Nusra front. Then they changed their name to become HTS. But the Qataris right now, this is an Islamist regime. that is yet to fully declare its Islamist tendencies. I think right now they're trying to keep a lid on all of this, at least for now. But the Qataris are making sure that salaries are paid for this Islamist government. They're trying to stabilize it and to prepare it for whatever phase comes next.

The Qataris, you just need to understand their goal is the promotion of political Islam around the region. It's why the other Arab states hate them. The monarchies in the Middle East do not want this admixture of politics and religion. They want to keep them separate and they want to control both streams. They don't want the Brotherhood to creep into the picture. But the Brotherhood is undeniably a project of the Qatari government and it is destabilizing the region, most recently in Jordan, by the way. So just to recap, we have a country that is not a Switzerland. It's not just, you know, small and looking for ways to remain neutral or to survive between larger countries.

We have a country with a message, with a policy, with an ideology that it wants to advance and that it's willing to sacrifice other people's lives, if not its own, to do so. And this country in a Middle East that essentially divides into these major religious axes, almost everything that happens in the Middle East. is along basically four axes. Either you're the Shia led by Iran. All over the Middle East, they fight together and support each other. You're the radical Sunni Islamist Muslim brothers, Turkey, Qatar, Hamas, the Muslim brothers of Egypt, etc. You are the conservative Sunnis. Those are the ones you mentioned who are very angry with Qatar.

Basically all the monarchies, right? I mean, other than Qatar, we're talking about Jordan and the Emirates and the Saudis and and the military in Egypt as opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. So you have these major alliances that basically align in Libya and in Syria and everywhere else along these religious lines. And the Qataris are the great champions and financiers of one of them. And it's a radicalized one that everywhere it goes it brings death and war. And I don't just mean in its desire to destroy Israel. So why the heck are they spending $7 to $20 billion?

on U.S. higher education by far the highest of any foreign donor? Yeah. And I think that's the question that we all need to start asking. And by the way, it goes beyond, let me just, I think we need to broaden out just a touch before we get back to education. Because it's bigger than education. I don't have exact numbers about what they spend in this country. But I will tell you that in Washington, they have, I don't know how many dozens of white shoe law firms and lobby firms on retainer. They've got public relations firms that they're also working for the Qataris.

They're putting a huge amount of money into VCs and to tech and to securities and bonds and hedge funds. They, I mean, amazingly, they sponsor the congressional baseball game here in Washington every year. You see them sponsoring parties at the White House Correspondence Dinner. When the Washington capitals were in the Stanley Cup finals, they paid money to keep the Metro open and sponsored that. The soft power is unbelievable in terms of what they spend here, the real estate, the acquisitions, the businesses. We're struggling right now at FDD to get our heads wrapped around the total number.

And I don't know if we're going to get there anytime soon. So you know, you look at the amount of money that they're spending in the United States. And by the way, I think it's matched in places like the UK and in France and in Germany and elsewhere around the world capitals where they want to have influence. So you understand that that's what they're doing. They're spending money to buy influence worldwide. I mean, I'll just tell you that the back of the envelope numbers that we have right now in the U.S. It's about $120 billion over the last eight to 10 years.

That's what we can count. And I think it's probably four or five times that. So I looked this up. I tried to look it up. I actually didn't find all that much coming into this conversation. There's a U.S. State Department report from a couple years back that talked about just the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, the official, not any owned investment fund, et cetera, that has hundreds of billion in assets and all that is $45 billion in the U.S. economy and companies in various sectors and industries. And that's just literally official. Qatar, right?

Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a massive world-spanning, Middle East spanning strategy of essentially taking that money and turning it into vast levers of influence. I don't know what to tell you, you know, what every anti-Semite thinks the Jews are doing, the Qataris are demonstrably doing. Yeah. Right?

So they're this incredibly vast tentacled thing serving a very specific ideology and an ideology that in their literal financial support for Hamas, for the Al-Qaeda branches in the Syrian Civil War, we're talking about arguably the enemies of the West, arguably the enemies of modernity and liberalism and democracy and all of those things. So when you are Harvard, you are Columbia, you are Cornell famously, there's a Wall Street Journal expose on that,

you are taking vast amounts of Qatari money. What are you taking it for? And I want to focus on this because there is the argument out there that this is what has helped radicalize. You know, there are these surveys of American professors, including the Middle Eastern studies, but not just throughout the humanities. And these surveys have revealed over the years that American academia is pretty much statistically a monoculture. They all agree. They all come from the same, you know, ideological. They're very worried about identity politics.

So they're going to make sure there are many different skin tones. in the room, but ideologically they're identical. And in some fundamental ideas where there are real debates and real serious debates, and yet academia manages to constantly replicate itself, you get into academia, you're going to train the elites. Academia is tremendously susceptible to money. Has Qatar radicalized American academia? Obviously, American academia radicalized itself. Has Qatar been one of the major drivers?

I say that because they're at the top of the foreign investment in it. And why? Why would they care? Right. So I, and I think you're asking all the right questions. I think the answers are still in somewhat short supply, but I think we can say a few things. Number one is that the money that is poured in to these universities has helped to expand their endowments significantly, you know, and, and, and there is influence there, right? It's going to basically help finance the, you know, the different chairs of the different departments, professors.

you know, there's this sort of, maybe it's a truism now that, you know, Jews spent a lot of money putting their names on the buildings of these various schools in the universities while, you know, countries like Qatar went about securing the professors who would actually do the teaching and endowed their chairs. Now, I don't know how to quantify all of that. Here's what I would actually look at is. what happened after 10-7 and the spike in anti-Semitism, you know, what you saw, we all saw it, right? The, you know, the presidents of these schools getting up and talking about their contexts and, you know, how they weren't ready to declare what was happening on these campuses to be anti-Semitism. In other words, they were kind of shrugging, and they were turning a blind eye to it, and they didn't seem to be particularly bothered by it. And I think, you know, I look at at countries like Qatar, not as the direct reason for this, but I do think that what they've done is they've softened the ground for it. So here's what I mean by that.

In the past, what you used to have was an alumni network in each one of these schools, right? And they gave $5,000 a year. Each, you know, each alumnus would give five or 10 or 15 or, you know, $50,000 a year, whatever it is. And the schools would go around and collect these checks and then they would hear from the alumni. And they would get a sense of what the priorities were, what the values were. And then what they would do is use those funds and direct them toward the things that the alumni wanted. Well, over time, these schools start collecting larger checks from sovereign wealth. and you find that it's much more transactional in nature.

Maybe you don't even know what it's for. You don't care. And what it does is it opens things up for the professors that maybe would embrace anti-Zionism or anti-Israel sentiment or anti-Semitism for that matter. And so when the alumni come and say, we're outraged by what has been happening on campus since October 7th, and you're the president of X school, you could just sort of shrug and say, look, we don't need your money. And we can do what our professors and our administrators are probably already inclined to do, given their anti-Israel sentiment, given this sort of monoculture that you've just already described. I see that as probably the greatest coup that the Qataris were able to pull off in the post-October 7th era.

it was just, you know, their money had made it so that these administrators and presidents and professors could be complacent and not care about the outrages that were taking place. But here I'll just want to add. The monoculture was free to be itself, in other words. Exactly. You could just exactly. You could be yourself. But here's the thing that I think people are missing right now.

We're obviously we're watching this culture blow up, right? The Trump administration is stalking a lot of these schools and they're looking to defund them. and they're looking to, you know, withhold funds and grants. And there could be a lot of damage done to these schools. But what I think is interesting is, you know, right now, if you're reading our sort of mainstream media in the United States, they're talking about how there's a backlash and how, you know, whether it's Harvard or other schools are standing up to Donald Trump and, you know, they're fighting this sort of brave fight.

What I think people are missing right now is the extent to which these universities are truly hated by the American people, that they have filled their coffers with foreign funds and corporate funds, right? The endowments have ballooned, right? Hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars over the last several decades. Meanwhile, as their coffers have increased, they have been gouging the students. We're watching the cost of tuition skyrocket. It's insane. right what people are now paying for these educations and look at what they're being taught these kids are are semi-literate when they're coming out of college they're not being taught any of the you know the sort of the classics any longer and so there is this sense right now of total disdain

for these universities in the united states and the hope right now is that we begin to expose what the catarris have been spending what the chinese have been spending maybe with the russians or other countries have been spending in higher ed, there will be no tears shed for the defunding of these schools once there is a fuller understanding of the sovereign actors and how they've influenced these schools. So I see the system beginning to unravel. And I think the Qatari piece of that picture will be clear to people soon enough.

Why do we know so little? You come from, you have a background at the Treasury Department. in the kind of special intelligence work that involves sort of chasing down terrorist financing. Why don't we have a clear picture? Because we've never stopped to ask. And that's what I think we may now be on the precipice of doing. And I think that's what's really important here. The Qataris, you got first you have to understand something. They're not an adversary. Right. So if you look at Confucius institutes, right, these are these Chinese sponsored institutions that have, you know, popped up all over campuses across the United States.

There was an effort led actually by my colleague Craig Singleton here at FD to purge some of those from campuses across the United States. And there was a lot of will on the part of the U.S. government because, well, the Chinese are our adversaries, right? These are great power competition. They're an enemy that's lurking and looming in the background. And we all understand that at some point we're going to have to address this and we have to purge America of Chinese Communist Party ideology.

And it was like a very clear mandate. Members of Congress cared deeply about this. Now, the Qataris, right, these guys have been identified. They were designated by the Biden administration as major non-NATO allies, right? They have the largest air base in the Middle East for the United States. It's called Al-U-Dade. It's the Combined Air Operations Center based in Doi. You mentioned that a few minutes ago.

they're spending money in the United States that has been welcomed, right? I think members of Congress and members of the administration look at it as a boost to the American economy. They're not looking at it the way they should, which is to say this is an adversary of the United States, an advocate for Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist ideology, an autocratic Islamist country that does not actually want to see. a liberal education being taught to Americans, right? What we need to be doing right now is we need to be vetting this.

Now, one of the things that I've started to ask about right now in Washington is, so we have something called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, Sipheus. We love our acronyms. Sipheus is a, it's a multi-agency entity. It's the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA, the executive, the state department. We, through Sipheus, the United States, is able to review big investments in the United

States by adversaries, right? So if the UAE, you may remember back in like the early 2000s, the UAE wanted to buy a port in the United States, if we blocked them, it was shortly after 9-11, and they said, no, that's not in the interest of the United States. You got the Chinese trying to buy up real estate next to American military bases, not allowed to do that. You got the Chinese trying to buy, you know, tech companies that are going bankrupt. Can't do that either, right?

We're not letting them acquire our intellectual property. Yet, no one seems to care about the fact that $7 or $20 billion, which, again, huge delta. We don't even know what the numbers are, but that this massive amount of money has been invested in our universities. Now, people say, well, they're not acquiring anything. Well, are we sure about that? Do we know that they're not acquiring anything by shoving all of this money into the coffers of these universities? This is the kind of stuff that needs to be answered.

Now, I will just say, you've probably heard a lot about Doge here in the U.S. and the defunding of different departments and the dismantling of the bureaucratic infrastructure. Some of that stuff I cheer. Some of it I jeer. I think it really, it all, the devil's in the details. I will just say that the Department of Education, they probably need a handful of people to stay there to conduct this research, to actually look into it and then to force the schools to divulge this information. They need to come clean. We need every one of our schools right now to share the information that they have about the Qatari sovereign investment that's been made in these schools so that we can get a fuller number.

And by the way, when that's done, we need to look at K through 12 because the Qataris are putting money. How do you invest in K through 12 in America? You can have different, you know, charities associated with Qatar. Unassociated with Qatar doesn't matter. But if people want to give 501 funds to a school district, what's to stop them? You'd think that this is all good, right? And the schools, by the way, they're probably thrilled with this because they don't want to have to make a choice between, you know, overhauling their chem lab or putting new sod down on their football field, right?

If it's a $50, or $100,000 expenditure, that's nothing for a sovereign actor, but it's massive for the schools. And then who knows what kinds of influence they may be able to achieve. Do you think the Trump administration, frankly, has the independence of Qatar to be able to do this? There's been a lot of talk in the Middle East, as Steve Whitkoff has gone about trying to hammer out new agreements between the Israelis and Hamas, that he is a close business partner of the Qataris, that he might be a little bit indebted to them, just in business terms.

And here he is with essentially Hamas' chief backers in the region. Does that extend beyond Whitkoff? Is that a valid concern? Is Trump really going to go after Qatar? Look, it's a concern. How valid it is, I mean, you know, it really all depends on the independence of the people that have had these relationships with the Qataris.

closing TikTok was a bipartisan idea. And then suddenly it was in the interest to the people in power, maybe to not close it so much, maybe to not force the closure if they don't sell to an American company so quickly. That was the Trump administration. Can we assume that it's the same kind of story with Qatar? In other words, if Qatar makes it in the Trump administration's interest not to look too closely, are you confident they will nevertheless?

I'm not confident about anything. I mean, let me just say, I think, you know, we're watching. all this play out in real time. What I can say is that, you know, Stephen Whitkoff is a partner with the Qataris for the Park Lane Hotel. It's a beautiful property. I've actually stayed there. Beautiful views of Central Park South. It's an astounding property. But, you know, so the question is how much leverage did the Qataris have over Stephen Whitkoff and whether that is at play at all as he engages in negotiations over the Israeli hostages, for example, or the work that he's doing with Iran or even Russia, for that matter.

I don't know what the Qatari interests would be there, but I would be concerned. It'd be worried at least to just make sure that all of this is disclosed. John, this is the fifth time or sixth time that you're telling me, that's a great question and we should look at it. How is that, I mean, never mind they're not an adversary. They're not categorized America as an adversary. Just why isn't this available?

Why isn't this public information? Why isn't this kind of... I mean, they bought it from him for $600 million or something like that, a property that had a lot of troubles. That's not influence? To me, this looks like a conflict of interest in that Stephen Wake-off should probably not be engaging with the Qataris who are saying that they're disinterested parties, by the way, as it relates to the hostage crisis.

that's going on in Israel. And remarkably, right, that Qataris have been spending $30 million a month to keep Hamas solvent, right? Right. We know that. And then on top of that, we're hearing that the Qataris have very likely meddled in Israeli politics and the Israeli media. You'd think that at this point, we would say, you know what, Qatar's off limits. Let's get these negotiations out of Doha. There's no reason for us to have them. And we're concerned that Stephen Whitkoff made. have a relationship with them. But by the way, just so we're clear, it's not just Stephen Whitkoff that has a relationship with the Qataris. Jared Kushner has a relationship with the Qataris. Lee Zeldin, our EPA chief here, has a relationship with the Qataris. Cash Patel, the new FBI

director has a relationship with the Gattaris. Pam Bondi, the head of the Department of Justice, our attorney general, also has a relationship with the Gattaris. Now, not every one of these relationships are necessarily nefarious. It doesn't mean that they're doing anything. wrong. But man, we need to clarify all of this. And again, you're asking me why we've not looked into this stuff. The reason why is that Qatar is not seen as an enemy actor. It's not seen as a malign actor in the United States. So it's the same as if Canada is investing in our university system or the Brits are investing in our university system or acquiring assets. And it's not the same, though. Nobody will spend billions on higher education. It could be half of the numbers you're

Nobody would spend that if they weren't getting some massive value for it, as they understand it. So we have this situation in which it looks as though Qatari influence in the Middle East is immense. The Al Jazeera on the Gaza War set the tone in the Arab world for the Gaza War everywhere. To the point where Gazans are so frustrated, we saw these protests that are now coming against Hamas in Gaza. The protesters often chant against Al Jazeera. We saw these hostage release ceremonies in Gaza in which Hamas' purpose was to humiliate the Israelis. And we know from watching them that there were Al Jazeera producers on the phone helping to produce. I mean, it was almost literally being produced in Doha in the Al Jazeera offices, the ceremony itself.

The only coverage that Hamas would trust in these ceremonies, for good reason, is Al Jazeera. And so you have these massive levers of influence. And when I see the Qatar PM sit with Tucker Carlson, I think to myself, Trump is, Trump is on, is there. Trump and other, this administration is not going to now go after these maligned influences in American public life. Look, that's the worry, right? And I do think that, you know, you point out something that's profoundly important here in Washington right now. There is a tug of war that is happening for the kind of center of gravity in the White House. right there are two schools of thought broadly speaking we can divide these these players into you know some

people call them neo isolationists or china firsters people that are really kind of prioritizing a looming clash with china the the current trade war that has been launched is kind of maybe an opening salvo to where we're possibly headed and that they really want to these people really want to focus only on the China challenge and they don't want to deal with any of these other issues. Then you have on the other side these sort of internationalists will call them. These are the people that want to handle the Iran nuclear threat now, for example, and to continue to support Ukraine in its war against Russia. And right now, I think you're right.

It does look like the internationalists maybe appear to be losing some ground. But here's the thing that concerns me. I'm not sure that even the internationalists, those that would take a more aggressive posture as it relates to Ukraine or Iran, whether they're even at all interested in getting to the bottom of this Qatar problem. Because when you look at the matrix of threats right now facing not just the United States, but kind of world security, the challenges that are out there, right? you look at, you know, what's going on with Israel, seven front war, possible, you know, war looming with Iran amidst all these negotiations. You've got the China threat, which continues to expand. You got Russia. You got North Korea, right? I mean, this is a complex landscape that we're looking at right now. I don't want to say it's World War III. I think people that have been saying that are a bit hyperbolic, but I will say that it's more complex than anything we've seen in a very long time. And so you ask yourself, where does cut

our fit in that priority list, right? And it's down. It's down toward the bottom. But here's, I think, the problem. We are potentially looking at a phenomenon that, I mean, the experts, the political scientists, they call it state capture, that the tools of various regimes and governments around the world are succumbing to the influence of countries like Qatar. They're spending so much money. They're seeding control over key levers of power. And this is something that you cannot allow to continue a pace if you want to maintain control over your government and the decisions that you make. And this is why I think the Katari thing needs to be more on the radar. And I don't know who is going to own this file, but somebody should.

Let me bring it quickly to Israel. Qatar Gate has been, we'll call it a debate between the head of the Shabakh, the Internal Security Service, and the Prime Minister Netanyahu. The Shabak is investigating some of the staffers, two specific people in Netanyahu's office for accepting funds or somehow helping to broker payments from Qatar in exchange for publicity, right? but these are people who, positive publicity on Qatar's role in the hostage deal, et cetera. But these are people who worked for Nizaniao in real time and also had access to high-level, very classified information, et cetera. Netanyahu has argued that the very investigation is a deep state attempt to topple him. It's a deep state attempt to hurt him.

He used that term deep state. He picked it up in America. He loves it. And so there's been this debate. Is this a real investigation, not a real investigation? The Qataris have not, by the way, denied it. but they've talked about it as an attempt to, another attempt to besmirch them on the world stage. Is Qatari money sloshing around Israel, as far as you know?

One of the interesting points with Qatar's relationship with Israel has been that there seems to have been a lot of cooperation between the Israelis and the Qataris about stabilizing Hamas in Gaza up until October 7. The Israelis didn't understand, et cetera, but that cooperation hasn't stopped. And in fact, when the Qataris have stepped away from the negotiations, Israeli officials have said things placating the Qataris to try and get them back. Is Israel, I'm coming with complaints to the Trump administration. Is Israel in Qatar's, it finds Qatar useful, put it that way, or so useful that it literally can't find another arbiter with Hamas, another go between?

What's going on with the Israeli-Katari relationship? I got to say, the Israeli policy as it relates to Qatar is absolutely maddening for someone like me. Because when you look at Hamas and its ability to fund itself and arm itself over the years and to prepare for the October 7th attack wouldn't have happened without the Qataris. The $30 million a month that was flowing from roughly 2018 until the war erupted five years later, that's Qatari cash that was going in and money's fungible. This is the one thing that you learn in the world that I came from, you know, in the treasury space, right? They said that it was money that was going for salaries, which, by the way, is exactly what they're saying right now about the regime in Syria, that it's just money that's going towards salaries, that it's just bureaucracy and it's, you know, it's not malign. Don't worry about it. You know, we're funding the good stuff.

But what you end up doing is you end up funding radical causes, however you want to do it. It's a back door. And so the Qataris were 100% part of this problem. They were one of three key patrons for Hamas. Iran, Turkey, and Qatar, or the three fathers of October 7th. And what's amazing is, you know, we blame the Iranians. And, of course, we're trying to hold them to account. And people are talking about a possible strike.

But no one talks about the Qataris or the Turks as the other fathers of this movement, the people that gave birth to the 10-7 war. The Qataris are absolutely responsible. Now, the interesting thing is, of course, that the Israelis agreed to that $30 million a month. That was Beebe agreeing to it. But the money was coming well before that as well, right? It was dating back to 2009 that Qataris had been giving money to Hamas. And that was not necessarily with Israeli acquiescence.

The Israelis were doing what they could to stop a lot of those funds from coming through. The Qataris took a lot of heat for that in the United States. You can look at WikiLeaks where Treasury officials and State Department officials talked about the terror finance problems that Qatar has. had. So eventually the Israelis gave into this. My understanding, by the way, is that some kind of an arrangement was reached between Israel and Qatar that if the money was going to flow and it was going to flow anyway, so the Israelis might as well just allow for it. But then the Israelis would be able to put intelligence assets on the ground in Qatar to be able to keep an eye on some of the bad actors.

I mean, it's like that saloon scene in Star Wars, the canteena scene. It's like every bad actor in the galaxy hangs out there. So the Israelis were able to get access to this Rokes Gallery, and they were able to track, at least this was my understanding, they were able to track some assets there in exchange for allowing this to happen. So now fast forward to Qatar Gate. And, you know, I've seen the reports about Spika Klein, the editor. of the Jerusalem Post. He's been adamant saying that he did nothing untoward that he just went to Doha

and he attended a conference and I guess that his conference was paid for, but it was not, he, you know, he didn't accept favors. Look, I think, you know, journalists probably shouldn't go if their tab is being covered by a sovereign actor. I think that's kind of a no-no, but I don't know if he's done anything wrong. The big question really right now is about these advisors to Beebe. And what's fascinating really to me, is how Israel is grappling with this, that maybe slowly but surely there's an understanding that Qatar is actually a bad actor, that it's actually an enemy, right? Because Qatar right now inhabits this weird space. Everybody knows that they are the funders of Hamas, but they're not

identified as enemies inside Israel. And it's this weird gray area that I think Qatar also inhabits here in the United States. Everybody knows they're not good guys, but no one wants to declare that they're bad guys either. So they live in the in-between. I mean, look, if the Saudis said, we're going to build a base and it's going to cost us $5 billion, $5 billion, we're going to do it to your specs, and we're going to create the runway, the hardened longer runway that you need for your aircraft.

And you're going to have secret facilities so that you can exchange classified information with folks back home or around the region. the Emirates could do it. The Saudis could do it. I don't know if I'd want the Kuwaitis to do it. I don't think the Bahraini could do it, right? But anybody could, right? And heck, I mean, why not, I mean, why not the Israelis?

Why not the Kurds? The Jordanians? I mean, anybody could host the base, right? And but really, I think this is, once you have the base and you have all the soft power and the money sloshing around Washington, and you've got all these lobbyists. that are working hard to make sure that the base stays there, right? Then it becomes more of an immovable object. And I think that's what we're watching right now.

I think there could be a world in which Al-U-Dade is moved, but there has to be political will for it. And how does that happen when the Qataris have this massive amount of influence in Washington? Such an interesting point about Jordan. Jordan is such a loyal ally to the United States, such a stabilizing ally for Israel, and actually was willing to shoot down Iranian drones, and to actually take a side,

was willing to host Syrian refugees, has single-handedly with almost no military, held back all of the great troubles. You know, the Emirates aren't close to the Syrian civil war. The Jordanians are next door and faced ISIS. So that would be an amazingly stabilizing and very pro-American step from an ally that's proven to be pro-American for generations. Yeah, and it would be quite a statement, too,

because, you know, if you've been watching, you know, it was, I guess, Wednesday morning in Jordan, they announced that they're going to ban the Muslim Brotherhood. They've declared it to be an illegal organization. This comes after we've just learned that there was a large ring of Muslim Brotherhood activists that were actually planning attacks across the kingdom. They had rockets and missiles that they were preparing to launch. Not necessarily at Israel, remarkably. it looked like for the distances and where they were placed that they were actually going to try to attack the Hashemite kingdom itself.

They were going to actually attack government installations. So if you're Jordan, right, and you're angry about the Muslim Brotherhood, what a statement it would be to the Qataris to say, by the way, we're now offering up our government. We're offering up our space. We're going to let the United States operate out of our country because you just messed with the wrong monarchy. right now I don't think the Jordanians do that I think you know they they they shy away from that kind of conflict but it would be exactly the right message right now coming out of the Hashemite kingdom okay um one major step and then you know one major development that I want to ask you about and then I want to talk really quickly about Iranian sanctions thank you very much for your time um that step is the Saudi

promise to President Trump to invest over four years exactly the amount of time he's going to be president, $1.3 trillion in the American economy. The Saudis really genuinely despise Qatar and actually try to face down Qatar and to embargo Qatar in various ways. Maybe it's an attempt to pull America out of the Qatarie orbit. And how do you see that developing? Is that doable? Can they spend $1.3 trillion in the U.S. economy? Trump tweeted on this that he really appreciates it and he's going to go visit them very soon. How do you see that development? Well, he's going to visit them. And Qatar. That is, I think, a signal of where we are. I think he still sees the Qataris as major players here from an economic perspective. Can the Saudi spend that money? Absolutely. They can. And I would argue that, you know, we're already down the road. They're talking about some kind of a nuclear understanding, civilian nuclear understanding. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm a little worried that, you know, this is all happening as the Iranians. are, you know, potentially weighing their own nuclear breakout and what that does for Saudi Arabia,

how they start to view their nuclear program, I think, will be an interesting and something somewhat scary to watch. But I would also just maybe throw a little bit of cold water on the question of normalization right now. I think we're probably a ways away from that. My sense is that really only a severe weakening of Iran and a changing of that world order in the Middle East is going to, that's the only thing that will really shake things loose. You know, people don't talk about this right now, but there was an agreement that was struck between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the spring of 2023. And we still don't know the contents of that agreement.

It's never been made public. It was brokered by China. And the Chinese swooped in and made sure, and it's held now for two years, that there have been no hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia. To get the Saudis to back out of that deal and to then engage in a deal with the Israel. Israelis will require nothing short of tectonic shifts in the politics of the Middle East. And so if the U.S. is truly planning on bringing the Saudis into the Abraham Accords, my sense is that it will only happen with the severe weakening of the Iranian regime,

the destruction of the Iranian nuclear facilities, or something equally jarring. I just don't see the Saudis pulling out of this agreement. It's allowed them, Haviv, to fence it for a year and a half. The entire region has been on fire. And the Saudis have sat back rather comfortably. They haven't had to respond to just about anything. No Houthi rockets, no attacks by Iran, none of this. The agreement has held.

And so ask yourself why they would want to leave it. That's the thing that doesn't make any sense to me. Okay, upropos Iran. We've discussed and debated, and there have been a lot of people talking about potential American strike, how much the Israelis need American bunker busters to take care of a few specific facilities that Israeli armaments arguably would not be able to destroy sufficiently to actually push back the Iranian nuclear program long enough to make the fallout of potential war worth it. All of those long sentences come to say that's kind of the general run of debate.

But I want to ask something different. I was struck last year when the Biden administration, I believe it's in November, either just before the election or just after the election, the Treasury Department of the Biden administration issued a press statement that came across my desk in which it announced sanctions on certain oil tankers that were shipping Iranian oil to China. We've known for a long time, China's buying Iranian oil. it's a way to, it's not very good oil, it's not useful oil, but apparently it's a way for China also to maintain its influence over Iran, to stabilize Iran as an anti-American force in the region. But also it's for the Iranians, and especially for the Revolutionary Guards, especially for this ideological military that has been the fundamental institution working on the destruction of Israel at a strategic level in this region. it has been their major source of foreign currency. And the Iranian real has collapsed. In other words, that's a very important source of their capabilities in the region.

And so it turned out that the Biden administration could issue these sanctions. These sanctions raised the cost of insurance on these tankers, apparently, and that raised the cost of the oil. And the Chinese stopped buying that oil for a while because it just got expensive. Now, this is the briefing that was explained to me. you tell us about that, and the larger question that it raised for me that I've been asking myself for a while and have wanted to bring to you, is America capable of bringing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the peace of Iran that is the genocidal ideological military building out this empire throughout the Middle East at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, mostly Yemen, Syria, places

like that. Is America able to bring that part of the Iranian regime to its knees with the push of a button in Washington? You know, the sustained pushing of buttons in Washington, these are sanctions that would have to move. There's Iranian gas that's going to go through Oman and sort of be laundered through Oman. There's some percentage of Iraqi oil exports that are actually Iranian oil exported through Iraq. These are all things that people talk about in the Middle East, that Iran is constantly skirting these sanctions. Can the Trump administration, without firing a shot, bring the revolutionary guards, bring the ideological part of the regime, the supreme leader, the revolution to its knees without actually going to. to any kind of sustained war? You know, I think the answer is maybe.

Look, what we had was maximum pressure. This is, we're looking for easy, simple, quotable answers on TikTok. I don't, all these maybe, all these complexities. Oh, yeah, let's go then, right? How's that? I have the quote. Right. What would prevent it?

Why, what are you not sure about in that regard? Well, here, here's the thing, right? you know, we watched the Trump administration put maximum pressure on the regime, and it did wonders, right? It really began to crush their economy. You began to see the regime have to make choices between guns and butter, right? And they were paying the pain onward to the people, and the people began to come out into the streets and protest. And you could see it was all, you know, it was a, it was all to the good in that respect. Then you have the Biden administration, come in, they take the foot off their neck, and they allow the Iranian economy to breathe again.

Now you have Trump coming back in, but it's an interesting thing, right? The decision to engage in negotiations has actually led to a boost in the value of the real. And, you know, without having the full diplomatic and political pressure on the regime, in addition to the sanctions and the ongoing process of identifying how they're skirting, right the the deep intelligence work that has to go into this it needs to all happen at once and so right now I think there is not a lot of political will to do this they're giving piece a chance they're letting these discussions happen and you know there it looks like they're making some at least on its face it looks like there's a concession being made to the regime just by having these

negotiations in the first place I do think that there's all hell of a lot more we can do in the Obama era of all things, we saw sanctions placed on Iran through the SWIFT system. This is the society for worldwide interbank financial transactions. It is the system that I would use, that you would use if you wanted to send money anywhere around the world. You have to use this messaging system to communicate with banks. We cut the Iranians off of SWIFT, and it's the nuclear sanctions. So you do that and you start to really crack down on the oil sales and you crack down on the non-oil sales. You do everything that you can to have a total campaign of isolation, of financial isolation. And yeah, you can get yourself closer to that brink that you describe.

But really right now, it doesn't look like that's where we are, at least not now. It doesn't mean that that's where we won't go if, you know, the Iranian regime refuses to play with the Trump administration, and the Trump administration decides, okay, it will not be a strike on Iran's nuclear program. Instead, what we're going to do is we're just going to impose maximum pressure. My problem is, is that maximum pressure has always been, or maybe not even maximum pressure, but sanctions have become the out for a lot of administrations. Really, you could say dating back to maybe, you know, Bill Clinton, certainly George W. Bush, you don't want to attack a country, you don't want to engage in overt hostilities, you have an out. Your out is imposed

sanctions. They look tough. They look great on paper. You're blocking the money, but are you really actually getting at what you need to do in the end? Your political objective or your military objective in the end may still be intact. Last question. I'm sorry to ask it very simply, maybe childishly. Trump tweeted, I talk to BB, we're on the same side because everyone has been wondering, right? Where's the administration going? What does it mean that there's this internal feud within the administration? Netanyahu seemed to walk out of the last meeting with very little on, you know, tariffs, et cetera,

but also on the existential stuff, Iran. How do you read that? You're in Washington, you know a lot of these people. You've been following it a long time. at the very simple level, is Trump on Israel's side in this regard? Trump's framed it in those terms. Is Trump on Israel's side? Should we be as comfortable as Netanyahu and Minister Ron Dürmer,

who does a lot of Nizthiaz negotiation in Washington, seem to be that the Trump administration is on board on Iran, that it's giving peace a chance only to justify taking the important step if Iran actually feels that it can delay forever with these negotiations as they tried to do with Obama, but in fact, the Trump administration at some point is going to cut it and go to much more serious measures against Iran.

Are they with us or are they not? So, I mean, if you're asking me, what does Trump think? You've got to be kidding me. I mean, I have no idea what Trump thinks. I don't know if Trump knows what he thinks. I mean, I think it changes day to day. And, you know, we sort of joked in the first Trump administration

that Trump was the first post-policy president of the United States. never actually had a Trump doctrine. Nothing was written out in a way that made it very clear what he was going to do next. He gives himself maximum flexibility. He gets to respond in real time. This is one of the things that we know about Donald Trump. If you're asking me right now, are we on the same page or the Israelis in the United States on the same page? I think, yes, in the broader picture, right, which is we don't want Iran to go nuclear.

We want Iran to stop supporting terrorist organizations, right? We want normalization to break out across the Middle East. These are the things, these are the big picture issues. Then I think that BB and Trump are 100% on the same page in terms of what they want out of the region. How you get there is where I think you're going to see some discrepancies, right? I think from what we understand, this is now thanks to Ronan Bergman, who apparently has, you know, access to, you know, all of Israel's plans, real and imagined, right? But, you know, you have people that were leaking this that, you know, the Israelis wanted to attack and Trump didn't want to attack. And now there are questions that are out there about whether the U.S. is even on board, despite the fact that Iran is weaker than it ever has been, that the air defenses are down, that they're susceptible and vulnerable to an attack that would probably end their nuclear program and maybe even topple the regime.

That's where I think, you know, so Trump agrees that he doesn't want them to go nuclear and he wants them to stop being a malign actor in the region. but whether he's willing to do what the Israelis would like him to do, that doesn't mean that they're not on the same side as it relates to the issues. It just means they may not be in total agreement about how to get there. That's how I read it right now. And I think that's been buttressed by the words of Marco Rubio or Secretary of State. Same thing. We don't want a war.

We'd like to solve this through peaceful means, through negotiations. I think what we're all asking ourselves, I'm sure yourself included, Haviv is what will be the terms of that agreement if they actually strike one. We're fearful that maybe, you know, Whitkoff and his team don't have the technical expertise or they're willing to be too flexible with the Islamic Republic. That's the concern that we have right now. Thank you, Jonathan Chanzer, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Thanks for coming on. Thank you.