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00:00Donald Trump on the final leg of his tour of the Middle East in the United Arab Emirates.
00:07These are live images that you're seeing.
00:10Trump, who earlier was in Qatar, where he hailed a $10 billion pledge from Doha for an American facility there.
00:21In the UAE, Trump hoping to seal deals, particularly when it comes to the Emiratis' investment in artificial intelligence in the United States.
00:35Well, for more, we're joined by Greg Carlson, Middle East correspondent for The Economist magazine.
00:41Thank you for being with us here on France 24.
00:44Thanks for having me.
00:45The bookend of this trip by Donald Trump, which began in Saudi Arabia as we watched those live images, everybody's been a bit taken aback by how this transactional diplomacy seems to have at least captured the narrative.
01:06It's Trump in his element, right?
01:09He is here mixing family business with state business.
01:13His sons have been in the Gulf the past few weeks pitching real estate deals, cryptocurrency ventures, all sorts of things, even before Trump got here.
01:22And then for the White House, the focus of this visit, as you say, it was meant to be transactional.
01:27He came here looking for quick wins, for good economic headlines after six weeks of bad economic news at home.
01:36And so all of these Gulf states committing $600 billion, $1.4 trillion, implausible sums of money.
01:42A lot of that is probably never going to materialize.
01:46But they're making these big pledges, and that's exactly what Donald Trump wanted.
01:50And your reaction as we look at those live images of Donald Trump alongside Mohammed bin Zayed Almayan, MBZ?
01:59First of all, it's striking to see the Emirati president doing this sort of reception for anyone, putting on a state dinner like this.
02:07It's not something that the Emiratis do very often.
02:11He hasn't been to Washington in a long time.
02:14And so seeing him do this, I think, is quite striking.
02:17And, you know, all of the Gulf states have been trying to put out the most lavish welcome they can for Trump.
02:23To some extent, that's because they're competing with each other.
02:26These countries are neighbors, but these countries are also rivals.
02:29And so they're competing for Trump's affection, if you will.
02:34But, you know, you look at what happened in Saudi Arabia, F-15 fighter jets escorting Air Force One, the crown prince going to the airport to greet Trump when he arrived.
02:44I think everyone in the Gulf wants to send a message to the administration that this is a warmer era in bilateral relations.
02:52It's not the very frosty sort of relationship that characterized America and the Gulf when Joe Biden was president.
02:59Well, you mentioned family ties.
03:02The president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, he has a fund.
03:10It's gotten huge influx of cash, both from Qatar's Sovereign Wealth Fund, where Trump began the day, and from the Abu Dhabi-based Lunate.
03:22And it looked very much like a quid pro quo when that happened.
03:27It was shortly after the previous administration left office, when Trump's previous term ended in 2021.
03:34Kushner started to get these big infusions of cash.
03:37Obviously, he had built very close relations with Gulf leaders over the previous four years,
03:43when he served as Trump's unofficial Middle East envoy, brokered the Abraham Accords.
03:48And so he developed these personal relationships.
03:51But not only him.
03:52Steve Mnuchin, Trump's Treasury Secretary in his first term, has also been in the Gulf a lot since then,
03:59raising money from the Saudis and from other governments.
04:02Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, in his prior life as a real estate developer,
04:07one of the big projects that he did in New York, was initially funded by the UAE.
04:12And then later, the Qatari government stepped in and essentially bought out his share.
04:17So many, many people around Trump, many of his closest advisers and cabinet officials,
04:22have these sorts of deep financial ties with governments in the Gulf.
04:26Now, Greg Karlstrom, not all Gulf monarchies are the same.
04:31And recently, The Economist wrote about the UAE's support for, quote,
04:36an array of militias elsewhere beyond the region who either want to seize states by force or divide them.
04:45The list includes, I'll put them down here, Yemen, where the Emiratis are not on the same page as the Saudis.
04:51Syria, where Abu Dhabi backed the wrong horse by being first to normalize ties with Bashar al-Assad before he was ousted.
04:57Somalia, with the UAE's support for the breakaway regions of Somaliland and Puntland.
05:04Libya and General Haftar in the east.
05:07And, of course, Sudan, where the RSFs accused of massacring the Masalit population in Darfur.
05:14It even came up at The Hague.
05:17Why is Abu Dhabi in this sort of rogue position?
05:21When you ask Emirati officials why they're doing this, they usually start by denying that they're doing it at all.
05:29They continue to insist that they're not sending weapons to the RSF in Sudan, even though there is ample satellite imagery, photographic evidence.
05:38There's documentation showing that they have done that.
05:41I remember a few years back meeting with an Emirati official, asking him about Libya.
05:46And he said, you know, our policy in Libya is fully coordinated with NATO and we're working with our NATO allies in Libya.
05:52What the UAE was doing was backing Haftar in the east was, in fact, contrary to what many members of NATO were pursuing in Libya.
06:00So their strategy is just to deny that they're doing many of these things.
06:04But I think it comes back to ideology.
06:07The ruling family in Abu Dhabi is deeply hostile to Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
06:14That is a deeply held animosity that they have.
06:18Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the UAE, likes to tell a story when he meets with people about how he had a teacher when he was younger who had Islamist beliefs and tried to convince him to go join the Mujahideen.
06:30And in Afghanistan and his father, Sheikh Zayed, stepped in and prevented him from doing that.
06:34But ever since then, he has had this very jaded view of Islamism.
06:39And what we've seen is you look at Libya, you look at Sudan, you look at Yemen.
06:43The UAE is taking the opposite side of Islamist groups.
06:47They're backing the RSF in Sudan, for example, because there are officers in the Sudanese army, the other warring party in this civil war.
06:55There are officers in the Sudanese army that are Islamists, that have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, to the Islamist regime of Amr al-Bashir, who was overthrown a few years ago.
07:04And so that is why the UAE puts itself on the opposite sides of these conflicts.
07:09And does the Trump administration care?
07:11I suspect not. I mean, Trump himself, we know he's not a policy guy at this point.
07:18I can't imagine he is sitting up at night, you know, reading intelligence briefings on Emirati's support for the RSF or its other policies in the region.
07:27Again, he came here wanting economic headlines and he's getting that in Abu Dhabi.
07:32And I don't think he's that concerned about some of these foreign policy issues.
07:36And more broadly in Washington, unfortunately, these things just aren't that important.
07:41You compare the way the UAE is viewed in Washington to the way Qatar is viewed, especially since October 7th.
07:48Qatar's relations in Washington are very strained right now because of its financial support to Hamas before October 7th, because it hosts the leadership of Hamas.
07:59That's controversial in Washington because it affects Israel.
08:03The UAE sending weapons to militias in Sudan or Yemen or Libya, places like that.
08:08It just doesn't have the same impact in the American political system.
08:12It doesn't have the same impact, but there is a spillover effect.
08:17I mean, we're seeing it right now, especially in Sudan, where the death tolls are higher than what we're seeing in Gaza.
08:24And that is the one that I think is finally starting to get through and change views in Washington.
08:33I was there in March and when I met with officials on Capitol Hill in Congress, both Democrats and Republicans,
08:40I was surprised at the level of criticism I heard of the UAE.
08:44This is a country that has always had a stellar reputation in Washington.
08:49It got a lot of credit for signing the Abraham Accords in 2020, recognizing Israel, puts a lot of money into lobbying, into think tanks, into polishing its image in D.C.
09:00But nonetheless, I heard, again, from both sides of the aisle in Congress, people starting to talk about the possibility of sanctions on the UAE because it is sending weapons to the RSF, which has been accused of genocide and various other atrocities.
09:16That's not something you would have heard in Washington until quite recently.
09:20So I think Sudan is starting to do real damage to the UAE's reputation.
09:25Greg Carlston, many thanks for being with us from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.