Why Mohammed bin Salman loves Donald Trump: an interview with Dexter Filkins.

In a big new feature story in the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins looks at the swift, disorienting, and brutal rise of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler of the kingdom. Filkins’ story charts MBS’s domestic moves (a purge of potential rivals, a “modernization” drive that will supposedly wean the country off of oil and give women enhanced rights) and foreign affairs (a horrific war in Yemen, a blockade of Qatar, pressure on Lebanon’s government—all of them indirectly about countering Iran). All the while, Filkins details how MBS has developed a tight relationship with Jared Kushner and the White House. And he simultaneously examines the machinations—from Washington to the Middle East—of MBS’s most important regional ally, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the most important player in the United Arab Emirates. (These two things are not unrelated: Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly looking into how Emirati money may have been funneled to people close to the Trump campaign.)

I recently spoke by phone with Filkins, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker staff writer, and the author of The Forever War. (Full disclosure: I know Filkins socially.) During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the similarities and differences between MBS and Jared Kushner, the role that Kushner’s family business might have had in the blockade of Qatar, and why the Mueller investigation might turn its sights on the Middle East.

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Isaac Chotiner: The paradox of your piece was that MBS is ostensibly this modernizer who wants to change everything about Saudi Arabia, and yet he is obsessed with this ancient-seeming Iran grievance, which seems to drive everything he does. How do you understand that tension?

Dexter Filkins: They are obsessed with Iran. I mean, Iran is the main enemy. When they look out at the map of the Middle East, they see Iran everywhere where there’s trouble. I think the domestic reforms are real. I think he’s sincere. I think he wants cultural reform. He certainly wants economic reform. But I think political reform is absolutely not on the table. It’s all designed to keep the House of Saud in power, and in terms of the conflict with Iran, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.

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If you look at what he’s done around the Middle East, he tried to overthrow the government of Qatar. He tried to overthrow the government of Lebanon. He‘s conducting a brutal and inexact bombing campaign in Yemen, and he’s jumped into the middle of the oldest conflict of our time: the Palestinian–Israeli one. I think by any measure, he’s been pretty rash in how he’s conducted himself.

Now, who but a 32-year-old could think that you could just remove the prime minister of Lebanon because you felt like it, and who would think you could do that in Qatar? That’s just something that a person of more experience would think a little harder about before doing. Right out of the box, he’s shown himself to be an impulsive leader.

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When you talk to Saudi officials about it, they say that Iran has been able to run the table, and Saudi Arabia for the last 20 years has done absolutely nothing about it. Over the last 10 years or eight years, they’ve been restrained from doing anything about it in part by President Obama, but now they’re ready to push hard, which is what they’ve been doing.

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One of the comparisons you draw in the piece is between Jared Kushner and MBS, who are both young, who both think they can make major change, who have both found themselves in over their heads. One of the things that occurred to me is when you see Jared up close, in a way that we don’t see MBS up close because we live in America and we consume American news, is that Jared may appear to people from far away as like this young smart guy, but then you get close and you realize, oh, maybe he’s not that smart. Do you think MBS is smarter or more competent, or does he just seem that way from far away?

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I think they kind of found each other, and whether that’s because they’re roughly the same age and they come from wealthy families, it’s hard to say. I think I find they have a lot in common, and I think they have a common vision for the region or one that’s pretty close. Jared said somewhere publicly when asked about the Middle East and all of its historical problems, he said, “I don’t care about the past.” In the Middle East the history is everywhere, all the time. So I would think that that would be a very fundamental difference between them, the kind of natural respect and reverence for the past that somebody like MBS would have to have, and contrast it with Jared’s kind of, you know, “The world began yesterday” view.

And yet he wants to remake the Middle East.

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I think they both do. I think they have different motivations, clearly, but Jared I think has certainly two goals. One is to solve the Israeli–Palestine conflict, and the other one is to contain Iran. I think he wants to do the first one in order to get everybody on board for the second one, so let’s solve the Palestinian problem very quickly, and then we’ll have the entire Arab world and Israel forming a kind of united front against Iran, and I think that’s kind of how he sees the region.

I think that MBS’s views and his motivations are different. His priorities are slightly different, but when MBS looks out, he sees Iran and he sees a huge threat, an existential threat, to Saudi Arabia. I mean, he compared them to the Nazis, and so I think he’s probably less concerned about the Palestinians and the Israelis, but was really sort of carrying water for Jared.

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You say that Jared’s two concerns are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Iran, but reading your story, it seems like his main concern may have been him and his family’s financial interests. You detail that Charles Kushner, his father, met with the Qataris about funding their property, and that was turned down, which came right before the blockade of Qatar, which the White House may have approved even if many of our diplomats did not. When you were talking to people for the story, were they convinced that Jared may be making Middle East policy simply based on who’s funding his family business?

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When I spoke to people in Qatar for this story, they certainly believe that. In the Middle East, business and politics are mixed up together in a way that at least historically they’ve been kept somewhat separate in the United States. One former official that I spoke to told me, “You know, if the Qataris would have lent a billion dollars to Charles Kushner,” which is what he asked for, “would there has been a blockade? I don’t think so.” I think they’re convinced of that, and so I think that the view in the Middle East of the Trump administration is that it’s a much more aggressive policy, but at the same time they’re open for business.

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Right, you could say our whole alliance with Saudi Arabia is based on business. You could say American presidents have wanted to make deals with people in the Middle East for the American economy or for other rich Americans for a long time, but to kind of have it be based just on your own family business seems like a whole new leap.

Yes. I think that Charles Kushner had said that the Qataris came to him and were seeking to lend him money. That doesn’t sound very plausible, but that’s kind of his explanation, and then he said he turned them down. But yeah. I mean, I think that’s where we are. I think that the Trump companies have pretty deep financial interests in the Middle East, and those are mixed up together in all of this.

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You mention in the story that Robert Mueller’s investigators are looking into Emirati money potentially going to people close to the Trump campaign. When you were reporting, did you get the sense that this was going to be a large part of the continuing Mueller investigation, and that this may be in some way connected to Trump’s seeming fondness for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?

It’s hard to know exactly what Mueller’s looking at because it’s hard to know what happened, but it is clear that the Emiratis definitely, and to a certain extent the Saudis, were looking past Obama. You know, they were sick of Obama, and they were very happy about Trump’s election.
They very much wanted to kind of ingratiate themselves to him.

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That I think explains the kind of flurry of activity that happened between the election and the inauguration, where you have MBZ essentially trying to come and meet Trump secretly in the United States, which is a bizarre story in itself, and then the kind of still-mysterious meeting that took place in the Seychelles between Erik Prince and some Russians that was arranged by MBZ. It’s really mysterious, and I just don’t know. It’s hard to know how big it is and how deep it goes.

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Why the rush, right? I mean, Trump was going to be in office.

I think they wanted to get in good with him, and I think they did. I mean, the White House officials that I spoke to, they love the Emiratis. They love MBS. I have to say, I didn’t know this when I started my piece, but the Emiratis in particular, MBZ in particular, he is one of the most popular people in Washington. Part of that is because he’s this unabashedly pro-American leader in the Middle East, which doesn’t have many of those, but the other reason is money. They’ve all got a lot of money and they buy a lot of stuff from the United States, including a lot of weapons, and they hire a lot of people, so they loom very large.

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Were you surprised at the level of connections that both governments have developed in Washington?

Somebody said to me, actually, that American policy in the Middle East is made in Riyadh. I wouldn’t go that far, but in reporting this piece I was really stunned. I had no idea how influential Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are in Washington. They are everywhere. They are really influential. They pay a lot of people. They have a lot of people on their payroll, and so they get what they want.

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I talked to a number of people, senior people in the Obama administration, and they had a very strange relationship with particularly the Emiratis. They said, “You know, we’d meet with them and everything was fine, and then they’d leave and then we’d hear that they’d been trashing us all over town.” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, said that the Saudis and the Emiratis are more responsible for the image of Obama as a softie in the Middle East than anyone else, and I think that’s true. I had no idea how deep and wide their connections go, but they are among the most influential players in Washington.

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Reporting on this story, you talked to a ton of people in the Middle East. And you talked to a lot of people in the Middle East who like Trump. Did those people have anything to say about the fact that Trump ran his campaign on a Muslim ban, and has spoken out really negatively about Saudi Arabia and about Muslims in the Middle East for years? I mean, we tend to forget this because now he’s sort of so close to these ruling elites, but it was sort of astonishing, the campaign he ran, and I was just wondering if there’s any kind of residue of that. If there’s not, that in itself is fascinating.

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Yeah, it is. I think it all went away with the Riyadh summit, which was shortly after the inauguration, the summit in Saudi Arabia. It was kind of hard to believe what a lovefest it became with Trump. There’s a video you can watch of these sword dancers kind of dancing around President Trump. It’s kind of hard to believe that they were willing to set all of that aside, but they were.

It was all forgotten, and I think to the contrary, the Saudi and the Emirati leaders believe that Trump is the guy they’ve been waiting for and was sort of a godsend after Obama, who restrained them from doing many of the things that we’re now seeing play out. It’s all forgotten, all forgiven.

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• Donald Trump
• Foreign Policy
• Middle East
• Jared Kushner

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