FYI: Today’s news featured Qatar gifting Trump a luxury 747. That gift has a long backstory … one that I wrote about some years ago. At the end of this set-up I’ve EXCERPTED some of the key elements of that story. - jp
THE SET-UP: Trump is openly selling access to the White House as part of a scheme to enrich the Trump family with a Trump-branded crypto product. That right-out-there-in-the-openness of it all began back in 2015 when he turned his portfolio of properties into a laundromat for political donations. The “donations” poured into a number of Citizens United-style financial instruments. That money was, in turn, lavished on a parade of political events held at his resorts, hotels and golf courses. He even managed to time the opening of his then-brand new hotel in DC with the coming of his administration. It was one-stop shopping for a parade of foreign influence-seekers who could pay the rack room rate in the morning before heading down the street to make their “ask” over lunch.
And ask they did … particularly the “theys” who hailed from the Middle East. The Gulf Arab states were among Trump’s most reliable customers and they bought his loyalty … along with that of his de facto Prince-in-law Jared Kushner. The entanglement of Trump and Kushner with the Gulf’s MBs—Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and the UAE’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ)—is, IMHO, one of the most overlooked stories, if not the most overlooked story, of his first four years. Back in 2019, I took a deep dive into the state of denial surrounding Trump’s oily presidency.
While Putin trolled the US Intelligence Community, his close partners in the UAE and new OPEC-Plus partners in Riyadh managed a geopolitical move to derail Obama’s strategic rebalancing of the Middle East … and stop the damage he’d done to the oil market with fracking. Fracking drove down the price of oil and crippled Russia and Saudi Arabia, but the looming possibility of Iran’s oil and massive gas reserves fully hitting the market would be Armageddon. That’s what Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran portended … and that’s what I believe Trump was primarily “hired” to do—end the nuke deal (JCPOA) and keep Iran’s oil and gas off the market.
Interestingly enough, the Qataris found themselves on the Iran side of that equation because they shared ownership of a massive gas field where their territorial waters met in the Persian Gulf. Qatar and Iran agreed to develop the gas field cooperatively and that, among other things, put them at odds with the Saudis and Emiratis. You might recall the blockade the Saudis and Emiratis organized in a bid to crush Qatar. That involved Kushner, who’s dad was using it to shake-down the Qataris in a bid to bail out Jared’s 666 Fifth Avenue boondoggle. And it gets weirder from there … but in the end, Kushner got a couple billion for an investment fund … and the Saudis partially paid Trump through LIV Golf tournaments at his properties. The real payoff, though, was the hit the PGA took after they cancelled a Trump-hosted event in the wake of January 6th. LIV Golf displacing the PGA was the gift …the money was probably more like a sweetener on top of the revenge.
And that’s just part of the backstory to the Qataris gifting Trump a luxury 747 on the eve of his much-anticipated trip to the Gulf States. It’s no coincidence that his time he’s negotiating his own deal with Iran or that he’d like the OPEC-Plus alliance to lower the price of oil below the artificially high levels they’d maintained during the Biden years by capping production well below capacity. Trump is also reportedly working on his legacy. The oft-heard scuttlebutt is that Trump craves a Peace Prize … which tracks with his Obama fixation. Even today he was promising to replace Obamacare with something better. Maybe he’s going is to top Obama’s Iran nuke deal?For the Iran-adjacent Qataris, a luxury 747 is a small price to pay for some of the influence they didn’t have the first time—when Trump kicked-off his Presidency by dancing with Saudis and their swords. It ain’t LIV Golf … but, like Sam Snead, Trump will happily take the putt and mark one down for the Qataris on his scorecard.
EXCERPTS from The Deep State Of Denial About Trump’s Oily Presidency (2019):
Trump is a master of the reality show cliffhanger. He produced two episodes of “Will he/won’t he attack Syria?” (the second time, oil spiked to a four-year high, btw). He pulled the same cliffhanger shtick with the 90-day re-certification cycle of the Iran Nuke Deal. And he’s directed an ongoing, multi-part series called “Trump’s Trade War” that, given his history as a phony corporate raider who manipulated stock prices with bogus bids, might just be a trumped-up market play for Trump insiders. But there is yet another often-overlooked episode of financially-stained instability … one with even bigger implications for the future. That’s the strange, Jared Kushner-tinged effort by the MBS-led Saudis and the MBZ-led UAE to crush their neighbor Qatar.
Ostensibly, it had to do with the Saudis’ and Emiratis’ objection to Qatar’s financial support for terrorism (irony alert!) and to the broadcasting power of Doha-based Aljazeera, which relentlessly covers the brutal Saudi-Emirati war on hapless Yemen. So, on June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates announced a quarantine of Qatar … recalling diplomats, suspending flights, banning Qatari-flagged vessels from their ports and generally setting off a huge regional crisis.
The next day, Kushner’s Father-in-Law backed the isolation of Qatar … something that lifelong oilman and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson opposed. Tillerson said the quarantine was bad for the US and worked to diffuse the crisis. But before the crisis even began, Kushner’s actual father actively sought financial help to bail out Jared’s $1.8 billion boondoggle … the infamous 666 Fifth Avenue. You heard that right … weeks before the blockade, “Jared Kushner’s father Charles, who runs Kushner Companies, and Qatari Finance Minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi discussed financing for the Kushners’ debt-addled 666 Fifth Avenue property in New York City, ” according to a report in The Intercept.
But wait, there more.
With a $1.4 billion balloon payment looming in 2019, Jared also sought out Chinese financiers in an attempt to wiggle out of his costly mistake. Shortly after Trump won (thanks, apparently, to Jared’s much-touted social media strategy) his Son-in-Law met with executives and the chairman of Anbang Insurance at the Waldorf Astoria. They shared a lavish meal and Jared nearly scored a sweetheart deal to rid himself of the property, according to The New York Times.
Now, a cynic might question whether Kushner was leveraging his proximity to power and, more importantly, to his Father-in-Law’s well-known position on trade, to score himself a “get out of debt free” card from Anbang (which was later nationalized by the Chinese government). Perhaps in exchange for future influence on key issues? And maybe that’s kinda like greasing future or current trade negotiations or sanctions relief for patents for Ivanka?
Perish the thought.
Can the same can be said of convicted felon Charles Kushner’s OTHER contact with the Qataris … which the elder Kushner does not deny? Yup, there was yet another report in The Intercept showing that “throughout 2015 and 2016” both Kushners “negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue.”
Alas, yet another coincidence.
Although that deal and the other aforementioned deals fell through, The Independent reported in February of this year that the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) “unwittingly” helped Kushner when “Brookfield, a global property investor in which the Qatari government has placed investments, struck a deal last year that rescued the Kushner Companies’ 666 Fifth Avenue tower in Manhattan from financial straits.”
They were supposedly not happy about it, either.
The unanswered question is whether Jared was leveraging a geopolitical game being run by his Saudi buddy … for filthy lucre? And what impact did his repeatedly obscured, security clearance-precluding foreign entanglements have on the official diplomatic efforts of the actual Secretary of State? And did Tillerson’s efforts to quell a manufactured crisis cost him his job?
HIT THE GAS
According to a startling report (again) in The Intercept, Tillerson was canned in no small part because he wanted to negotiate an end to the blockade of Qatar, which hosts U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and its Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC). Moreover, Tillerson also reportedly scuttled a planned Saudi invasion of the tiny, natural gas-rich nation … which, along with other transgressions, put him on the Saudis’ sometimes deadly shit list.
Predictably, the UAE also applied pressure on Trump to jettison Tillerson, which is an ironic outcome for someone who ran Exxon and who’d been promoted for the job by oil-infused doyens James Baker and Condi Rice, both whom had held the position before him. They’d each worked with the Saudis during key points in the Empire of Oil’s history (Baker during an Iraq War under a Bush, and then Rice during another Iraq War under another Bush). But that was then and this is now. And now the stakes are higher than ever for the petroleum-rich, but natural gas-poor Saudis and Emiratis … too high, in fact, to have allowed Tillerson to find a way out of a crisis they intentional created.
But why?
No doubt you’ll be “shocked” (not shocked) to learn that the conflict with Qatar wasn’t about terrorism … although Aljazeera is a perpetual pain in the Saudis’ ass. Nope, the Saudis’ and the Emiratis’ full-court press against Qatar was … wait for it … about Iran. Yes, this time it’s Iran’s natural gas. But it’s also about natural gas generally, and the dire future potentially facing petroleum-dependent states in a rapidly changing energy landscape. As journalist James M. Dorsey keenly wrote in the Fair Observer:
Saudi Arabia’s problem is that Iran and Qatar have the gas reserves it does not. That is one reason why renewables figure prominently in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s Vision 2030 reform program. His aim is to not only prepare Saudi Arabia economically for a post-oil future, but also to secure its continued geopolitical significance.
Prince Mohammed, like his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, hopes that the kingdom will have an advantage in the generation of solar energy, given that the sun hovers higher over Saudi Arabia than over Europe and other parts of the world, and that it has less interference from clouds.
Add to that the fact that it is likely to be gas supplies from Iran and Turkmenistan, two Caspian Sea states, rather than Saudi oil that will determine which way the future Eurasian energy architecture tilts: China, the world’s third largest LNG importer, or Europe.
SHIFTING SANDS
The problem now is that gas … both natural gas and liquid natural gas … is a plentiful, cost-competitive and supposedly cleaner-burning challenger to the petroleum-based players in this not-so-great game of energy chicken. And that’s where Qatar comes in. It is the world’s biggest exporter of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and it sits on the world’s third largest proven gas reserves (25.47 billion cubic meters = 13.5 percent of the world’s total). Qatar also sits directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran, which is home to the second largest gas reserves (30 billion cubic meters = 15.57 percent of proven reserves). So, on top of sitting on the world’s fourth largest oil reserves (the Saudis are second on the list, the UAE is seventh) … oil that the Trump Administration has been working so hard to keep in the ground … it turns out that Iran also has a natural gas trump card up its sleeve.
The monomaniacal fixation on Iran is starting to make a little more sense, no?
But it gets better (or worse if you’re the Saudis and Emiratis) because, in addition to the problem of Iran’s Nuke Deal with the Obama Administration, the Iranians have an agreement with the Qataris to exploit a shared gas field in the Persian Gulf where their territorial waters meet … and it’s the world’s largest such field. The North Dome/South Pars field, the former being Qatar’s side and the latter Iran’s side, is basically a geopolitical bomb. And Qatar lit the fuse shortly after Trump was elected for the expressly stated purpose of nixing the Iran Nuke Deal and, in the process, restoring the Saudis’ grip on the market. That’s when … even as Kushner’s dad was trying to shake down the Qataris for a bailout … Qatar announced “it was boosting output” in the massive, conjoined field in April 2017. The blockade followed in June of that year … after the Kushner deal failed to materialize.
IRAN INTO A BRICK WALL
So, here’s Qatar. It’s far-more Shia-accepting than its neighbors. In fact, the Saudis are known to behead their own “troublesome” Shiites. Juxtapose that with the Qataris, who are extracting gas from a joint field with Shia Iran … which, in turn, is also sitting on the world’s fourth largest oil reserves and who has extended its influence over the last oil-rich neighbor that ran afoul of the Empire of Oil. In fact, the National Iranian Oil Company recently opened an office in Iraq. Additionally, Iran’s natural gas reserves are geographically poised to feed China’s growing appetite for gas … an appetite that Qatar is already set to feed for the next two decades.
It’s easy to see why the petroleum-dependent Saudis and Emiratis organized their sycophants (including Trump and the bailout-hungry Kushners) into a blockade of Qatar. Now just imagine the implications of China’s Belt and Road initiative someday building a pipeline from the North Dome/South Pars field and/or the gas-rich Caspian Sea region … across Afghanistan and into the manufacturing machine of Asia. Even without the looming doom of some future pipeline, the Saudis and Emiratis found themselves staring straight into a dark, gaseous abyss. So they decided to try to break Qatar’s new partnership with Iran.
However, the unbowed Qataris responded by opening the tap on LNG production, quickly reassuring one of its biggest LNG customers in Japan that the crisis would not affect its ability to deliver its much-needed gas. By the way, Japan was one of five nations that had their import waivers for sanctioned Iranian oil pulled by the Trump Administration (which sent the price of oil “surging,” btw).
Then, in August of 2017, Qatar doubled-down by restoring full diplomatic relations with Iran … and has since set its sights on expanded exports in Asia and Europe. Qatar even threatened to quit OPEC and thereby forever free themselves of Saudi-led restrictions. Basically, the Saudis were being trumped by their own Trumped-up game. The striking audacity of the Qatari power-play led OilPrice.com to recently ask: “Can Any Country Dethrone Qatar As Top LNG Exporter?”
Well, guess what? The world’s largest gas reserves are held by Russia (47.57 billion cubic meters = over 25 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves). That’s right, Russia only comes in 8th on top ten list of petroleum reserves (right behind the UAE), but it is undisputed champion of gas. That’s nearly five times US gas reserves.
In many ways, Russia is in the catbird’s seat. Putin can play both sides of the Iran issue. Frankly, he is artfully threading the needle between his relationship with Iran and his OPEC + partnership, perhaps because they all need him more than he needs them. At the same time, the OPEC+ alliance helps the Kremlin’s bottom line. Even better, President Obama’s decidedly unfriendly version of the Oil Presidency has been replaced with a Trumped-up foreign policy that fruitfully destabilizes oil markets (instead of over-supplying it like Obama’s fracking-palooza). Trump has pulled out of the Paris Agreement and isolated climate-focused allies … allies that also happen to comprise Russia’s biggest gas market. Trump’s foreign policy is also agitating the US relationship with China … a nation that just so happens to be slated to become the world’s leading natural gas importer in 2019. And Trump has reinforced Russia’s position in Tehran, where their market-shaping gas reserves remain an important long-term factor in Russia’s energy future.