The Daily - Why Trump Can’t Quit Mohammed bin Salman

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

From the moment he was named the country’s day-to-day leader, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has disappointed the United States over and over again. Yet the Trump White House hasn’t let go of him. Guest: Mark Landler, who covers the White House for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, from the moment he was named the country's day-to-day leader, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has disappointed the United States over and over again. Why the Trump White House can't let go of Mohammed bin Salman. It's Tuesday, October 23rd. Mark, where does President Trump's relationship with Mohammed bin Salman begin? Well, the best date that one can probably point to is March of 2017.

It's a couple of months after President Trump has taken office. It's a snowy day in Washington. And Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, comes to the White House. And he's given something extraordinary for a person of his young age and his standing, he's 31 years old, which is lunch in the state dining room with President Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other senior officials. Mark Landler covers the White House for The Times. And they sit there for about 90 minutes as MBS, as he's known, he's known by his initials, explains to President Trump his vision for modernizing Saudi Arabia. And what's so unusual about a deputy crown prince getting an audience with the president of the United States? I think the notion here that the president would host a man of this age who's not even

the number two official in his country, because remember, there's the king. And at the time, there was a crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayyan, who might have been accorded that kind of reception. But for the number three guy to get a lunch in the state dining room was truly extraordinary. And it was an interesting insight into how much of a bet the White House was putting on this young man. Remember, King Salman, his father, is in his 80s. His health is fragile. And Muhammad bin Salman is the favorite son of his father, the king. And although Mohammed bin Nayyan, the crown prince, was still a powerful figure, his standing was eroding, and he was clearly at some risk of not being chosen as the heir apparent.

And so the Trump White House had an instinct that the younger man, Mohammed bin Salman, was the right horse to back. He was already at that point in charge of the defense ministry. But more importantly, he had begun laying out his own vision for the future of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has always been a country that has inched forward, has moved very slowly. The government is extremely cautious and careful.

This young man felt that he needed to modernize Saudi Arabia with bold strokes. He needed to make giant leaps into a more modern future, into a more progressive future. And I think the Trump administration saw great promise in this. And I think the key element for them was his position on Iran. He's extremely hawkish on Iran. And so his anti-Iran position dovetailed with the position of the Trump administration and President Trump's aides when they came into office. So after the president hosts MBS in this unusual way at the White House,

where does the relationship go from there? Well, the key thing that happens next is that... Hey, good morning, and let's get straight to the breaking news. Donald J. Trump arriving in Saudi Arabia for his first foreign trip as president. The president, urged on by his son-in-law, Jared, decides to make Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, his first stop as a president overseas. This is an American first. Never before has a president set foot on Saudi soil for his first trip abroad.

When Air Force One touched down, the Saudi king personally greeting the president and first lady. And the thinking is that the symbol that will be sent by him going there first will really lock in the alliance with Saudi Arabia, will really make Saudi Arabia the linchpin of Trump's Middle East strategy. I stand before you as a representative of the American people to deliver a message of friendship and hope and love. That is why I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world. He also extracts promises from Saudi Arabia to spend an enormous amount of money on military equipment, on weapons. Today's big highlight was the signing of a $110 billion arms deal between the two countries. The U.S. will give fighter jets, tanks, combat ships, and more to the Persian Gulf country, all of it getting made in America. So the government will have to hire more people to

make all those new vehicles. Remember, MBS runs the defense ministry. So he is able to deliver this very big promise to the president that Saudi Arabia will buy this many weapons. So that's the point of the visit. They're locking in Mohammed bin Salman as their primary interlocutor to the Saudis. So what happens after President Trump leaves Saudi Arabia, having strongly signaled that Mohammed bin Salman is his guy? Well, the first thing that happens is that MBS is officially designated as the crown prince. And do we think those two things are related, that in a sense, President Trump has handpicked the leader of Saudi Arabia?

I think President Trump's endorsement of MBS certainly helped him. This, after all, is Saudi Arabia's most important ally, its major economic partner, and the source of foreign investment. So getting the United States president to give his stamp of approval to a future leader is a big deal for the Saudis. There are big changes in Saudi Arabia. Women are joining the workforce in record numbers. And next year, they'll finally be allowed to drive after more than two decades of protests. And then, as crown prince, MBS begins to deliver on his progressive vision. By Saudi standards, the country's new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is a reformer.

And it's not just women who feel more liberated. Take a look at Saudi Arabia's stand-up comedy scene. Now, one company feeling the impact of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman's moves towards modernizing his country, AMC Entertainment announced it will open Saudi Arabia's first movie theater in more than 35 years. It catches the imagination of commentators in the West. It really makes it seem like this guy is the real deal. His nickname in the kingdom is Mr. Everything. He has purview of the economy, of our security, of our military, and obviously politics. And then he hosts this very high profile

investor conference in the fall where he brings in titans of Wall Street and high tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. And he brings them all to Riyadh and has a very splashy, opulent conference devoted to ways in which Saudi Arabia is going to modernize. So this is his brainchild. You've seen a lot of Western consulting firms get a piece of this. And he really wants to push Saudi Arabia into the modern era. And why exactly is it so appealing to the West, especially to leaders like President Trump and to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to global business leaders and intellectuals, to have someone leading Saudi Arabia who is seen as a social reformer? Well, I think part of the issue goes to the nature of the relationship the United States has had with Saudi Arabia for decades.

This has always been an alliance really more built on interest than values. We needed Saudi Arabia for oil. We needed Saudi Arabia as a base for our military in the region. We needed Saudi Arabia as an ally in our competition with Iran. But we never really viewed Saudi Arabia as a partner in human rights or a country that we could feel really good about being associated with.

There was always a bit of a subtext to the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that there was some hypocrisy at play. So by bringing in a new ruler with a kind of a progressive, moderate streak, it might enable us to feel good about our relationship with Saudi Arabia on more than just the crass, transactional,

national security and energy level. We might actually be friends with Saudi Arabia and take pride in that friendship. So from everything you're saying, Mark, this looks like a very early triumph for the Trump administration in the world of foreign policy. The president seems to have deeply influenced the choice of who will lead Saudi Arabia. And that leader, Mohammed bin Salman, is doing the kind of Western-style looking reforms that make the entire relationship

look and feel the way we want it to. Yes, for a new administration, it was actually kind of a masterstroke on the global stage. And then things started going wrong. Mohammed bin Salman picked a nasty squabble with his Persian Gulf neighbor, Qatar. Saudi Arabia has closed its border, imposing a de facto food blockade on its neighbor. The reason behind the blockade charges that Qatar is supporting terror organizations like so-called Islamic State and Egypt's former rulers, the Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar denies. He imprisoned dozens of wealthy Saudis.

Palace intrigued to the nth degree. We're seeing a truly historic upheaval unfold right now. Crown Prince MBS rolled out a huge and frankly bizarre crackdown where he rounded up hundreds of members of the royal family and other rich Saudis and basically jailed them, including torturing some of them in Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton Hotel until lots of them were forced to hand over tons of money to him. He called it an anti-corruption campaign. Other people merely called it a purge. Saudi Arabia considers Canada's comments on human rights in the kingdom to be an interference in its affairs that requires what it calls a sharp response.

He picked an absolutely needless diplomatic fight with the Canadians. It all began with a tweet from Canada's foreign affairs ministry stating concerns over Saudi Arabia's arrest of rights activists and demanding their immediate release. And then he kidnaps and detains the prime minister of Lebanon. Lebanon remains in a state of crisis more than a week after its prime minister, Saad al-Hadiri, unexpectedly resigned

while on a trip to Saudi Arabia. Lebanon's president, Michel Aoun, and others have accused Saudi Arabia of kidnapping Hadiri and forcing him to resign against his will. He engaged in a reckless war across the southern border in Yemen where Saudi-led airstrikes have killed an untold number of civilians, including many children. The Saudis enforced a blockade, shutting down ports and border crossings, preventing critical aid from getting to Yemen.

And lastly, he hasn't bought the $110 billion worth of weapons from the United States that were promised back during President Trump's visit to Riyadh. In fact, up till now, the Saudis have bought only about $14.5 billion of that $110 billion. So this huge upside that the Trump administration was promising has yet to materialize. So how is President Trump, who has bet on him as this Western-friendly reformer, responding to these disappointing turns in this relationship? President Trump, for the most part, has accepted, if not endorsed, some of these moves. He tweeted, I have great confidence in King Salman and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. They know exactly what they are doing. Some of those they are harshly treating have been milking their country for years. The White House put out a lengthy statement after the incident with the

wealthy Saudis being locked up in the Ritz-Carlton in which he effectively endorsed the prince and said he believed in what he was trying to do to clean up his kingdom. He has not publicly chided him for the war in Yemen. He did ask him to try to resolve the dispute with Qatar. But when the Saudis basically defied him and continued with the blockade of Qatar, President Trump went quiet. The Trump administration seems willing to let the prince have plenty of leeway. And why would that be, though? You said earlier that the reason President Trump has bet on MBS is that he provides the justification for the relationship. He is the best possible face for all the flaws and messiness of the Saudi Arabian-United States alliance. But in these

actions, he seems to be emerging as a figure that would embarrass the United States. So why would President Trump not attempt to exercise greater influence over his hand-picked leader of Saudi Arabia after this series of events? I think President Trump would argue that Mohammed bin Salman needs the opportunity to establish himself, to consolidate power. He's operating in a tough part of the world. But above all, I think the case he would make is that on the ultimate strategic issue of combating Iran, which is the centerpiece of President Trump's Middle East strategy, Mohammed bin Salman is a critical player. Remember, in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is fighting the Houthi rebels. The Houthis are backed by Iran. So it's important

in the fight against Iranian proxies in the region to have Saudi Arabia's support. And so to the extent that Iran is really the big prize for President Trump, Mohammed bin Salman is his wingman in that effort. So what's the message that this inaction by President Trump sends to Mohammed bin Salman if he knows that so long as Iran's being taken care of, everything else will more or less be forgiven? Well, the message is that he has a free hand to do whatever he wants.

And that is, above all, the message that MBS has taken for the last 12 months. And that brings us to October 2nd, when Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist, enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The 59-year-old journalist went to the consulate with his Turkish fiancée to get documents for their upcoming marriage. The fiancée waited outside for five hours until finally calling police. Jamal Khashoggi never comes out of the Saudi consulate.

And what we know now is that when he went inside… Khashoggi was murdered inside the consulate, allegedly by a 15-man Saudi team that arrived that day and left Turkey in the evening. He was met by 15 operatives who had been sent from Saudi Arabia with the purpose of interrogating him and perhaps renditioning back to Saudi Arabia, or perhaps simply to kill him and dismember him, which they did with a bone saw that one of the group had brought with them. And his body was taken out of the Saudi consulate in pieces in a crime that has riveted the entire world. The world is watching and waiting.

From everything you've told us so far, Mark, President Trump would seem very reluctant to intervene here against Saudi Arabia, even over an incident as grotesque and horrifying as this one. So how does the president respond in the immediate aftermath of this? So his immediate inclination is to give Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudis the benefit of the doubt. He says,

I just spoke with the king of Saudi Arabia. I just got off the phone with the king, with the prince. The king firmly denied any knowledge of it. He didn't really know. Maybe, I don't want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows? They tell me they had nothing to do with it. Later, he acknowledges, well,

it'll have to be very severe. I mean, it's bad, bad stuff. But we'll see what happens. If this is true, it would be serious. There might be serious consequences. And then he switches yet again and says, well, the intelligence I'm getting on this seems pretty persuasive.

And we now know that that intelligence makes a very strong, if circumstantial, case that very senior people in the Saudi royal court ordered this killing. So the president goes through this evolution of reactions right up until we see him, Maggie Haberman, Michael Schmidt, and myself, go in to see him in the Oval Office last Thursday,

and he's extremely circumspect on the case. He clearly knows a great deal now about what happened in that consulate, but he stopped short of saying that he thinks Mohammed bin Salman could have played a role in it. But he does also acknowledge this is a moment that has captured the imagination of the world, unfortunately. So in that last word, unfortunately, you sensed for him the personal stakes. And so I do think he recognizes it. He's puzzling through it. He

doesn't seem to have an easy answer. And he sees it as a situation replete with risk. You almost sense that the president wishes that the world wouldn't pay so much attention to this as they hadn't these past episodes relating to Saudi Arabia, that he would have preferred for everyone to have kind of swept this one under the rug and maintained the image of MBS as a reform-minded leader? I think that's right. I think that President Trump views this incident less as a human rights atrocity, less as something he needs to stand against

than as a public relations problem. He sees it as fundamentally something that is tarnishing the image of his ally. I think he would have gladly moved on and brushed it under the rug. He recognizes, however, that the circumstances of it make that impossible. Sadly, the victims of the airstrikes in Yemen are, for the most part, invisible to the West. I think everyone can visualize the idea of a man walking into a consulate and being cut up with a bone saw. There's something so visceral and dramatic and horrifying about that image that I think that has made it much harder for President Trump to simply wish it away.

This is not going to be wished away. It's simply too appalling for people that it can be dismissed that easily. Hmm. So the kind of cover story of MBS as a reformer was blown by the absolute horrificness of this particular act in a way that even a massive military intervention in Yemen couldn't achieve. I think the incredible drama of it had the effect, if you will, of ripping the mask off. Suddenly, Mohammed bin Salman, or at least Mohammed bin Salman's regime, is revealed to be murderous thugs. I wonder, Mark, if given the history that you outlined earlier of the role that the U.S. and President Trump in particular

played in recruiting Mohammed bin Salman to lead Saudi Arabia and finding ways to condone or ignore his behavior in places like Yemen and Lebanon. Are we complicit in the death of Jamal Khashoggi? Well, that's a question that's been asked of the administration in recent days. And typically, the answer officials give is to react with incredulity. How could you possibly suggest it? And yet, I think if we're going to be honest,

you'd have to say that if you look at the pattern of behavior over the past year, every single step of the way that Mohammed bin Salman has done something, President Trump has not stopped him, has not stood up to curb MBS's behavior. So in the case of eliminating a pesky journalist, it's plausible to ask, if you're MBS, why would you think that was going to be a problem either? Nothing else has proven to be a problem. Right. Why would that be the tripwire? Indeed. Mark, does it feel like Mohammed bin Salman and those around him have finally done something so egregious that the United States and President Trump cannot back him any longer?

I think that will partly depend on whether further evidence comes out, particularly if audio or video evidence of the crime itself is released by Turkey, that could make the situation untenable for Mohammed bin Salman. But I think it's important to note that there really isn't another good alternative right now in Saudi Arabia. MBS has simply amassed so much power.

It's not as though there's an obvious rival standing in the wings. There's not an easy substitution they could make at this point. MBS, to some extent, is someone they've gone all in on in Saudi Arabia, just as the United States has gone all in on MBS. And so to some extent, the lack of alternatives is a product of our own aggressive cultivation of MBS. So just so I'm clear, the United States has helped create the situation in which by helping to choose Mohammed bin Salman a year or so ago, we've left no real possibility for any rival power to emerge. And we now fear what would happen in a world in which MBS doesn't lead Saudi Arabia. So in a very real way, we've created this entire situation from start to finish. And now we're stuck with the man who may be behind this absolutely horrible assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. absolutely horrible assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.

And not just stuck with him for some period of time, stuck with him for decades. This is a young man who could be the king of Saudi Arabia for 40 years. So we have really locked in a very, very difficult situation. Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you very much, Mark. Thank you, Michael. We have to be able to work with our allies. And Saudi Arabia has been, I think, a very

strong ally in terms of pushing back against Iran's aggression, which is funding a lot of terror in the region, whether it's the Houthis in Yemen or it's Hezbollah or Hamas. On Monday, during a rare televised interview with CNN, Jared Kushner defended the Trump administration's alliance with Mohammed bin Salman. The Middle East is a rough place. It's been a rough place for a very long time. And we have to be able to pursue our strategic objectives. But we also have to deal with, obviously, what seems to be a terrible situation. Asked if bin Salman's government has tried to deceive the U.S.

about its role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Kushner declined to directly answer. I see things that are deceptive every day. I see them in the Middle East. I see them in Washington. And I think that we have our eyes wide open. I think that the president is focused on what's good for America.

What are our strategic interests? You know, where do we share interests with other countries? Let's work towards those. But yeah, every day. Let's work towards those. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that the Trump administration is exploring a new alternative

to separating migrant children from their parents as it seeks to deter Central American families from illegally crossing the U.S. border. The plan, still under consideration, would force parents to choose between voluntarily giving up their children to foster care or remaining imprisoned together as a family. The administration is determined to end the surge in family border crossings,

which has resulted in more than 100,000 arrests in the last year. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.