“terror corridor” in northern Syria by permitting Syrian Kurdish militia to operate there freely; the United States, for its part, considered these militiamen to be an “on-the-ground vanguard against [a resurgence of] the militant group Islamic State.”33
America’s relationship with Turkey was therefore, by 2018, at a “nadir,” according to the Times, with Turkey “gripped by a patriotic frenzy” over the presence of armed Syrian Kurds in northwestern Syria and Erdogan calling “anyone in Turkey questioning the operation [to dislodge the Kurdish fighters] … a traitor.”34 Erdogan has said, of the prospect of protests in Turkey against Operation Olive Branch, “This is a national struggle. We would crush anybody who opposes this. There will be no compromises or tolerance on this issue.”35
Meanwhile, another point of contention has arisen between Turkey and the United States: America’s unwillingness to extradite to Turkey a Pennsylvania-dwelling cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan claims was partially responsible for the failed mid-2016 military coup against his government. The question of Gulen’s legal status became a flash point during the 2016 presidential election—and led to a federal criminal investigation against then candidate Donald Trump’s top national security advisor, Michael Flynn.36
* * *
In January 2016, at the beginning of the Republican primary season, Donald Trump tells a crowd in Des Moines, “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.”37 The Iowans in the crowd pay close attention to the New York City businessman’s words; so too, from afar, do royal observers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have known and taken advantage of Trump’s greed for a long time—and who just a few months earlier had begun plotting, on a yacht in the Red Sea, how to turn Trump’s greed into acquiescence to their geopolitical designs. MBS and MBZ know Trump will be of no mind to disclose any association they might covertly establish with him, any more than he would disclose his past financial ties to wealthy nationals from their respective countries. Indeed, in 2018 Trump will tweet—falsely—“For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia … any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS.”38
According to an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “If you’re the Saudis, the nice thing about Trump is that he lacks any subtlety whatsoever, so you don’t have to wonder how to approach him. He has said explicitly that the way to win his favor is to give him money. He has established means for you to do so—buying Trump properties and staying in Trump hotels.”39 Of course, once Trump becomes president any such publicly solicited largesse violates both his oath of office and the United States Constitution, a document that prohibits any president from accepting, as the Post observes, “‘any present [or] Emolument … [from any] foreign State.’ If a foreign country is putting money in the president’s pocket on an ongoing basis, how in the world can we trust that the decisions he makes will be based on the best interests of the United States and not on his bank account?”40
The short answer is that in such a situation we would not be able to trust that U.S. foreign policy was in fact the product of American rather than foreign interests. The long answer—in Trump’s case—is that if we trace the New York businessman’s financial ties to the very nations that, in late 2015, decided to engage him in a clandestine conspiracy to fundamentally transform U.S. foreign policy, we quickly discover the difference between a president who works first and foremost for American interests and one who is, by his own confession, “greedy, greedy, greedy.”
Trump’s financial history with the nations of the Red Sea Conspiracy, as well as the two nations the conspirators seek to improve relations with, Israel and Russia, is long and illustrious. Trump has properties or other assets in two former Soviet republics, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, and Egypt; he therefore maintains financial ties to three of the four nations involved in the conspiracy and one that stands to directly benefit from its successes.41 While Trump’s ongoing refusal to release his tax returns—despite promising to do so during the 2016 presidential campaign, then hiding behind the false excuse of an audit—makes it impossible to know the current status of his businesses in Israel or Egypt, Trump’s ties to the other nations are clear.42
According to the Washington Post, “Trump’s business relationships with the Saudi government—and rich Saudi business executives—go back to at