When Donald Trump launched the Iran war in February, he risked alienating the non-interventionist base he had spent a decade cultivating.
As he now tries to extract himself from the highly unpopular war, it looks increasingly like he might inflame the other side of his base — the foreign policy hawks with whom he suddenly found himself in-league.
While there are few hard details of what’s actually in the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, with Iran, those hawks are openly worrying that Trump gave away too much in the name of trying to end the war. They’ve made no secret that they fear Trump signing on to a nuclear agreement like the one struck by the Obama administration in 2015, which they (and Trump himself) derided as too weak for more than a decade.
The Gulf despots are obscenely rich and will happily pay protection money to Iran to keep their cities from being blown up. They’ve cut deals with Iran before. The Saudis and Qataris belong to a virulently anti-Shi’a Sunni sect (Wahhabism, though they don’t like it to be called that), but the Qataris are far less rabid than the Saudis, and even in Saudi Arabia, MBS has been clamping down hard on Wahhabi imams because they were a competing power center that the previous Saudi royals had lost control over. I’m convinced MBS’s vision for Saudi Arabia is for it to become a more secular totalitarian state, similar to Iraq under Saddam.