Jared Kushner: recommendation

Transcript context

…I would love to ask about leadership, especially on the side of the United States. What has the current administration, the Biden administration, done different than the Trump administration, as you understand, that may have contributed to the events we saw this week. All I can talk about are where we left them. We left them a place where they had tremendous momentum in the Middle East. I met with them during the transition and said, “Look, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done, which was a big… No peace between Israel and Saudi would’ve been possible without that so we even got that done in our lame duck period. They came in and they said, “Look, we want to focus on the three Cs, which is Covid, climate change, and China.” I said, “That’s great, but the Middle East we have in an amazing place right now. It’s stable, there’s momentum. Iran is basically broke.” We put such crippling sanctions on Iran that they went from about, I think it was 2.6 million barrels a day of oil they were selling to about 100,000 under Trump. Their foreign currency reserves were basically depleted and they were broke. Same with the Palestinians. We stopped the funding to UNRWA, the UN agency, which is totally corrupt. We’ve put $10 billion in there over time. I did a poll in the Middle East, in Gaza to say, “Okay, we’ve invested $10 billion here as a country. Are we popular?” The US had a 7% approval rating. USAID has 70% approval rating, but it just felt like a waste of our taxpayer dollars. Again, we wanted to make it conditions based. The Biden administration came in. Number one, they started insulting Saudi and Russia. Oil prices went up at the same time. What they did was they stopped domestic production of oil. They disincentivized a lot of oil and shale production with regulations. They stopped pipelines. Oil prices went up. They stopped enforcing the sanctions against Iran probably to get the oil prices lower to make up for what they were doing. They ran to Iran to try to make a deal. They started funding the Palestinians again right away. I even said if you’re going to fund them, if that’s your policy, I respect that. Again, elections have consequences and you can take a different policy. But what I would recommend is get some conditions, make them do some reforms, make them give property rights to people, make them do real economic investments for people. But they just went right away. They were funding the Palestinians, not enforcing the sanctions and then overall, just projecting a lot of weakness in the region. One of the most embarrassing examples is what happened in the United Arab Emirates. Again, an amazing, probably one of America’s best allies over the last 20, 30 years… lot of weakness in the region. One of the most embarrassing examples is what happened in the United Arab Emirates. Again, an amazing, probably one of America’s best allies over the last 20, 30 years… … of America’s best allies over the last 20, 30 years. They fought with us in Afghanistan. They were the first Muslim country to stand up and do that after 9/11 because they didn’t want it to be a war of the West against the Muslim religion. So they joined the fight, because they saw it as a fight between right and wrong. They have rocket shot into their country from the Houthis, and they basically don’t get a call from the US for 17 days. They need their equipment that they buy from the US, which creates job in the US. They need it restocked. We don’t call. So they’ve severely degraded the trust that we had to rebuild with our allies. I think they’ve been working now to get it back. They, after two years, started working with Saudi and Israel, which I think was good. I think that they realized, after a stint, that maybe the process that President Trump had created in the region was the right policy. And keep in mind, President Trump’s policy, that I was working on, was very strongly criticized during the first three years before we were able to achieve the results, because it was a departure from the failed policies of the past. So first, there was return to those policies, appease Iran, let’s criticize Saudi Arabia. Then they started embracing and working on the Israel-Saudi deal, which was really exciting. I think we were all very excited about it. But they did it in public, and I think that that also was something. Again, I didn’t have access to their intelligence, so I assumed that by doing it so publicly, they thought that they’d either had a deal with Iran because they were letting them get all this revenue where Iran wouldn’t be a problem. But one of the reasons with the Abraham Accords, we kept it so quiet during the whole time, was because we always felt like the troublemakers in the region, particularly Iran, who we thought would be disadvantaged by having UAE, Saudi, Israel altogether. Israel’s a nuclear power. You have other strong economies. Iran seeks instability. They seek looking to create a division in the region. And if you can create that economic sphere where you have security from Haifa to Muscat, from Israel to Oman all the way through with Saudi, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Egypt. That’s an incredibly powerful block. If you can make it secure and then get economic integration, that really could be a Middle East that thrives. So Iran, obviously, wanted nothing to do with that, and that’s why they’ve been working to disrupt. So I think the administration, they took an incredibly stable situation with momentum.…

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