What is Not for Sale?

President Donald Trump has returned from his whirlwind tour around the Middle East with a large bounty of deals for the United States, including a  $600 billion investment commitment from the Saudis, (the largest defense contract in American history); a $200 billion commercial deal from the United Arab Emirates; as well as a Qatari $400 million gift to President Donald Trump of a palatial plane to replace Air Force One, commitments for a Qatari luxury beachfront Trump hotel and golf course, as well as a sweet deal for the Qataris to buy $42 billion in US military hardware, including 210 Boeing 747’s.

 What is this doing to the balance of power within the Middle East?

 As Yaakov Katz wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “In 2008, the United States Congress codified into law America’s longstanding commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge, requiring the president to continually assess whether or not that superiority is being preserved.”

The legislation defines “qualitative military edge” as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity.”

While in Riyadh, the President spoke at the Saudi-US Investment Forum, heaping lavish praise upon King Mohammed bin Salman , and hinting at the possibility of helping that oil-rich nation build a nuclear reactor, “for peaceful purposes.”

Also while in Riyadh the President met with the former Al Qaeda and ISIS member, Ahmed al-Sharaa and lifted all US sanctions on Syria. Please note that up until December 2024, there had been a $10 million dollar bounty on Ahmed al-Sharaa’s head, whose nom de guerre is Mohammad al-Golani, and whose group Hyatt Tahrir al Sham is now the reigning force in Syria.  “I think he has got the potential”, the President said after a brief meeting with him.

Then it was off to a visit to Qasr Al Watan, the Emirati presidential palace, with a meeting with their president, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, where President Trump promised that Abu Dhabi would be the home for the greatest AI installations in the Middle East.

Then he flew to Qatar, a tiny country of about 100 miles from north to south, hosting a population of roughly 2.55 million people. Qatar has transferred more than $1.8 billion to the people of Gaza over the years, including over $30 million each month. Qatar was the first country to recognize and to visit Hamas as the controlling entity in Gaza.

It has also “gifted” the United States with the Al Udeid Air base, which hosts 11,000 US and US led anti-ISIS coalition forces and over 100 US aircraft.

Qatar has provided a luxurious home for Khaled Meshaal, former chief of Hamas’ political bureau, as well as for the late chief ideologue and Islamist theologian Yosef al-Qaradawi. The former Hamas chieftain Ismael Haniya was also given an opulent residence in Doha from 2016 until the IDF assassinated him on a trip to Tehran on July 31, 2024, after attending an inauguration ceremony for the new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian.

It has also been the home to the notoriously anti-Israel propaganda machine, Al Jazeera, and has pumped the most amount of money, more than 6 billion dollars, into American universities over the past 15 years. It has invested heavily in US educational systems, making it the highest foreign investor in the world.  The Qatari Investment Authority has also poured bountiful outlays into our US kindergarten through 12^th grade curriculum materials, leading US  Education Secretary Linda McMahon to single out Qatar  for pouring billions of dollars into our US educational system with little or no oversight , influencing how the US and Israel are taught about in our nation’s school systems.

Qatar has also invested heavily in US politicians and lobbying firms, which led to the resignation of retired US Marine General John Allen from the Brookings Institution, and the apprehension and arrest of US Senator Robert Menendez, (Democrat, New Jersey), and his sentencing to eleven years in US federal prison.

Why is Qatar so desperate for US recognition and acceptance?

 It is a minuscule country situated between its rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is afraid of being enveloped by them and swallowed up. It therefore wants to take every opportunity to seize onto power, and to position itself as a leader on the world’s stage.

Its leaders, the Al-Thani family have heaped praise on Hamas, as they have been our major negotiator for the release of our hostages. Its defense minister, Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, has said as recently as this past November, “We are all Hamas.”

According to MEMRI, the Qatari government had employed Khalid Sheik Mohammad, who had acknowledged that he had masterminded  the 9/11 attacks on the United States a planned assassination attack on former US President Bill Clinton, as well as  the brutal execution of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, as well as other humanitarian organizations have documented the widespread human rights abuses of the Gulf Cooperation Council against  migrant workers, women and ethnic minorities. In particular, Qatar has a lengthy record of severe abuse against migrant workers, particularly those that they hired to build the stadium for the World Cup of 2022. As well as for a lack of freedom of expression, particularly against those who speak out for individual freedoms and human rights.

We understand and appreciate that nations have interests, but they also have values. However, not everything is transactional. Not everything is about the bottom line.

The problem is that the United States has very little in common with these brutal, dictatorial theocracies with abysmal human rights records. We have had 77 years of sharing humanitarian and democratic values with the small nation and people of Israel, who are now fighting a war for its very survival. If our sense of decency, democracy and human rights is up for sale, we have to worry about the very soul of the American people.

Sarah N. Stern is Founder and President of the Endowment for Middle East Truth.