What Does The Tom Barrack-Foreign Agent Revelation Mean Regarding Trump Foreign Policy Vis-A-Vis The United Arab Emirates?
“For no deity is held in such reverence amongst us as Wealth; though as yet, O baneful money, thou hast no temple of thine own…” -Juvenal
When the news broke that the wealthy Lebanese-American founder of Colony Capital, supporter and personal friend of Donald Trump, chairman of his inauguration celebration, and eventual political advisor Tom Barrack, was being accused and charged by the federal government with acting as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates between 2016 and 2018, alongside his assistant at the time, Matthew Grimes, the first thoughts that struck me were regarding the heavily blustered Israel-UAE “Peace Deal,” signed during the lone Trump term. That this deal would eventually grow to involve weapons sales from the United States to the UAE, of which Joe Biden’s administration did not truly attempt to prevent, only for it all to come out that a key figure who helped to broker improving relations with the UAE, and worked on still other deals as well, was actually “on the take” so to speak, is of course, both absolutely stunning as well as deeply ironic.
It appears, according to the information gathered to this point, as though Tom Barrack was indeed another foreign agent in the midst of the administration of Donald Trump, bringing that count to at least four by this author, including Barrack, Michael J Flynn, Paul Manafort, Elliot Broidy, potentially Rudy Giuliani and quite likely many additional figures as well. That these figures, with these deeply unethical motives, were within the White House, actively influencing the President by leading him and convincing him towards an idea, ideas, a notion, or direction, is beyond horrifying.
You might ask yourself at this point, which direction or directions was the President being led in during his time in office exactly? The answer, as far as can be judged, is in as many as Donald Trump could be personally incentivized to move towards by these individuals. Tom Barrack, like the other aforementioned individuals, excluding the former military intelligence officer Flynn, is not so naïve, but an oligarch of American politics and business, finance and the like across the last 40 years or so; he simply will not act unless there is an obvious benefit or benefits for him to do so. Why then, with all of this understood, would he act in such a capacity on behalf of the UAE?
Mr. Barrack is, after all, an older man, 74-years-old at the time of this piece, and worth slightly over a billion dollars already; unlike Manafort, another old Political guy, this time from the Nixon Era, whom records suggest was gotten his initial position with the Trump campaign thanks, in large part, to the badgering and suggestions of Tom Barrack, it doesn’t appear that there was any debt “....offering to be paid back” so to speak. What incentive or incentives then, might he have had, or have been given, to act as he did? Obviously, foreign powers who could (correctly) sense a moral weakness in the timbre of this new administration, as well as with the people surrounding this shock 45th American President, reached out to those they felt could be helpful regarding their own national interests once it was clear who was to be the 45th President of the United States. And so again I ask, what compels a man with such wealth and status, who has already served in political capacities during the Reagan Administration previously, to behave as he has allegedly chosen to?
A remarkable and deeply detailed Financial Times piece on the entire quagmire, and certainly the circumstances that have led up to this point, has helped to shed light upon the whole matter. It discusses how, amongst many, many things, Barrack was identified early on by numerous domestic and international figures and nations, including both the UAE intelligence and the nefarious Roger Stone, as an individual who could speak to the 45th President in ways and about topics that he would be receptive to; as Stone reportedly said to Barrack regarding the suggested appointment of Manafort via email, “...You are the only one who can do this. Donald looks at you as a peer - the rest of us are just vassals…”. And while this is certainly strange dialogue, and a small, rather remarkable window into both the backchannel dealings of these various actors, as well as, more humorously, the conservative limits and depths of imagination and conceptualization, it is only the beginning of the story and saga of Thomas Barrack that the FT piece goes through to wonderful effect.
“He who is greedy is always in want….” - Horace
No man of the wealth or stature of Tom Barrack, it seems, does anything without some type of, usually unspoken and previously settled upon, quid pro quo. He, in this circumstance at the very least, seems to be no exception to this rule; it appears and is alleged, with the wealth of information provided by FT in their piece, as well as from additional sources, including ProPublica, that Mr. Barrack had a plan to invest in civilian grade nuclear technology, reactors to be precise, possibly in tandem with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, (PiF) and the UAE itself eventually, that would then be exported to both Saudi Arabia and its longtime ally, the United Arab Emirates, after the “peace deal” that was actually agreed to was put in to play, assuming no one was any the wiser, in what would’ve been known as the “Saudi Nuclear Deal”; I have previously contrasted it with the Iranian Nuclear Deal in another piece available here.
Yet this latter part of the plan would begin only once the relations vis-a-vis the UAE and the United States, whom the Obama administration was none too pleased with during their eight years in the White House, were finally overcome; this would require work, and work that Mr. Barrack was allegedly putting in. That the intelligence community learned of these plans, became suspicious, and ultimately told congress, blowing the entire plan to bits for the domestic and international actors involved, however, should be telling in regards to the ethical nature of the endeavor.
The peace deal, as the Trump administration incessantly called it, in other words, appears to have been a front or facade for nefarious, internationally clandestine proceedings of which, to put it bluntly, ensure little peace for the region moving forward; it deeply frustrated Iran too, and had Tom Barrack’s plans worked, they would have felt even greater pressure and frustration. But while the entire plan was not able to be completed, of which would’ve eventually included what was being called a “Middle Eastern Marshall Plan” that would’ve, theoretically of course, provided cooperative nations in that region with funds for building up their own national and domestic hard and soft infrastructures, portions of the entire plan were completed, enacted or were unable to be canceled, and those portions must now be scrutinized with even greater voracity than previously. Essentially, the agreement worked and would’ve worked, based on subtle gains for each major player in peace deal while those that remain in dire circumstances, the people of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, as well as the Palestinians, who are living in an apartheid state, gain nothing much at all.
Had the entire scheme gone through unnoticed by the American intelligence community, it would’ve unfurled in such a way that Tom Barrack, likely alongside his allies, would’ve been permitted to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear reactors, designed for civilian use, from a company he had been attempting to purchase stake in, Westinghouse, which was eventually bought by Brookfield Asset Management Inc; these sales would only happen, however, after economic and diplomatic ties between the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates were normalized. Bahrain, meanwhile, simply wanted inclusion for the perceivable diplomatic and economic incentives themselves. The Trump administration, on the other hand, would have been able to give the appearance of, and more importantly, take credit for, fulfilling a campaign promise by creating an “historic peace agreement” where previous administrations had ostensibly failed, not that there was actually a war between any of the partner nations of course.
Israel at the same time as all of this, would gain greater legitimacy for itself amongst its Arab neighbors, appear internationally and diplomatically, add further legitimacy to Jerusalem as the location of international embassies in the nation and its illegal land holdings moving forward, all the while putting increasing pressure on the Palestinian people in their desperate, decades-long struggle for survival. Finally, the United Arab Emirates, who were to benefit from all of this in a myriad of ways, including an improved relationship with the United States and Israel, weapons to use against Yemen in their ongoing armed conflict, of which America is absolutely culpable regarding, and an enhanced international prestige and perception after many, many years of human rights issues, both domestically as well as abroad.
That all of these plans that were imagined did not come to fruition is obvious, and astutely detailed in the FT piece, yet Mr. Barrack was successful in accomplishing many of them while simultaneously pushing American relations with the United Arab Emirates forward in many different, mentioned, and unmentioned ways, despite their nations track record of consistent and continuous human rights abuses. Were his plans to have gone undetected, their development would have likely become more sophisticated, or at least more encompassing and brave in all likelihood.
The evidence for this hunch lies in the ambition to revive the concept for the aforementioned ambitious and nefarious “Middle Eastern Marshall Plan”; that this plan, as well as the Israeli-UAE Peace Deal, and the arms deal to the UAE were all being touted by an advisor to the President of the United States, who certainly looks to have had a plethora of ulterior and very personal motivations for enacting policies of these varying natures, turns sometimes plausible and thoughtful ideas into rather negative and dastardly ones, to be sure.
For while I am certainly in favor of moving past sanctions in the spirit of fixing human rights violations, as well as remedying squabbles within the international community of nations instead of attempting to suffocate disagreeable nations until they, as a government, entirely submit to the United States or whomever, this entire situation is highly corrupt and problematic; even this Marshall Plan parody gave Russia way too much while their own nation continues to be completely enveloped by human rights violations that they themselves suffer with and through instead of relenting in favor of innovation.
That Mr. Barrack was entirely compromised by foreign entities and illegally worked towards the aims of another nation at least, and very likely with the knowledge and consent of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family as well, does nothing to ensure that human rights innovations in either the UAE or Saudi Arabia are made in return for the further normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between the United States and the UAE. Instead of making concessions and agreements for the betterment of the people of the theocratic monarchy of the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Barrack and his handlers/contacts, which likely include major figures in the Emirates like Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and national security chief Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, looked to make deals that benefited only them and their friends, both within and without the government; ultimately it seems, as Epicurus so rightly declared centuries ago, that, “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little”.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” - Economist John Kenneth Galbraith
Why would a man with seemingly everything already put himself in such a dangerous and inevitable circumstance for the sake of at least one foreign monarchy, if not two, as well as their associated interests? It appears as though, as both Horace and Epicurs alluded to, perhaps only the greed of wealth, as well as the lust for both prestige and power by those who attain this wealth, can properly explain it all; yet it is also quite likely that no matter the actual reason, Mr. Barrack has, from the very start of everything, firmly convinced himself that his service to the United Arab Emirates, and consequently, the Saudis, was in fact, nothing more than explicitly intimate, personal service in the line of duty as a representative, in various capacities, of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, or of the United States itself as a deeply concerned and well connected public-private citizen. He will have reconciled his work, whatever it explicitly entailed, in his own mind as being that of a true American patriot in other words, and therefore, not as the highly criminal act that it definitely was and is; many crimes of this type are, generally speaking, done by those individuals who have been able to work similar mental gymnastics with their own egos, prerogatives, and loyalties.
Believing in your heart however, that the goals and positions of the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and potentially even Saudi Arabia are all so similar or compatible and therefore, simultaneously championable and representable, does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that any of that is actually true, or even reasonable to believe. As Tom Barrack worked in the advancement of innovations at the behest of his foreign contacts, it would follow that some of these innovations would’ve required Mr. Barrack to convince the President, as well as his other, eternally competing family members, advisors, and lackeys, of innovations that, in fact, would not create a better world for either American’s or of those neediest of citizens in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel or Bahrain. That he would have happily and coolly gone about this, beyond anything else, is simply, “...nothing short of a betrayal of...officials in the United States, including the former president...” as a US Department of Justice attorney stated. When we double back to questioning what in the world, on a deeper level than purely monetary ends, could’ve possibly tempted a man who can purchase basically anything he wants already, it feels like a combination of various types of greed, as well as overweening hubris.
In the mind of the American Oligarch, however, as I once again outlined just above, he was surely simply serving his country by every means he had at his disposal, which includes his own mind surely, his own personal wealth, and various ambitions; how altruistic of him, no? One is reminded of that detestable writer, the beloved and worshipped Ayn Rand, who said as coldly and cynically as was her temperament, that “Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear…”; my response of course, is that of Gore Vidal, who said himself that, “Ayn Rand's 'philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society...To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil…..”
The eventual financial gain that has been, even if only theoretically and not physically, tied to Mr. Barrack’s atomic power selling ambitions, remains the most obvious and blatantly superficial causation for his behavior; yet I also feel as though it is ultimately very possible that, alongside the aforementioned, he also behaved in these ways for the perceived commendations that come from being a part of the process by which some type of major, historical, diplomatic or humanistic agreement is reached. On top of his financial credentials, the record of Tom Barrack, were he to have received this credit without the charges and FBI suspicion, would be diverse and steeped in public and private accomplishments and accolades, as so many famous names before him were able to attain once upon a time.
In this way, were this to have played a part in his decision making, the financier was absolutely and entirely too naïve and diplomatically green, despite his relative experience, to fully understand or comprehend the nuances of the situations and discussions he found himself in in the first instants; when combined with the lies he told the FBI when they interviewed him in 2019, once red flags went up regarding the suggestion of civilian grade nuclear sales to Saudi Arabia, it appears that Tom Barrack had inadvertently shut himself into a corner that will likely be inescapable without at least some amount of time being spent in prison. As it turns out, as if any more proof between the likes of Herbert Hoover and Donald Trump was ever required, business people who have little to no political or diplomatic acumen generally make absolutely terrible politicians and diplomats; there should be little doubt of this by this time.
"Money to get power, power to protect money." - Slogan of the Medici family
Conservatives and reactionaries often love to talk about how excellent it would be if the government was simply run as a business was run, by a “highly competent” and legendarily affluent businessmen, like either Herbert Hoover or ironically Donald Trump, to even lesser-regarded businessmen, like either of the Bush Presidents. Yet in these pronunciations, these folks demonstrate a naiveté regarding government and society uniquely their own. Governments have rules and are structured in such ways as to not operate like any modern capitalist business functions in our current setup.
Businesses are almost always ultimately oligarchic, with a main leader and stratified leadership, as well as a board made of members, often even referred to as governors, that must agree enough amongst themselves to eventually replace the chosen leader, who they will have previously appointed as well; Republican government, in all of its infinite examples across history, does rarely function in this way, at least for very long or very well. The former Doges all across Italy, in their variously short and long-lived, eternally warring City-State Republics, are the examples that Monarchs for centuries mockingly used to deride Republican governments as prone to Despotic and mob-fueled behavior.
Returning to the larger point at hand, functioning governments of this broad umbrella term of representative government have, generally speaking, a varying number of checks, whether by people, groups of people, or even particular functionalities, sometimes referred to as branches, to offset the machinations of one bad-faith actor, actors or branch of governance. Furthermore, governments and businesses do not function the same way in regards to acquiring, accruing, and spending money, or in regards to the responsibilities to their constituents, who in the business world are simply employees and consumers.
While governments are functionaries of the people, and therefore responsible to them as families are for and to their members, businesses have not, in their minds at least, a civic responsibility, but oftentimes, only a fiduciary responsibility; as the Medici family slogan famously read, "Money to get power, power to protect money.” This is how Mr. Barrack, as well as the 45th President for that matter, have lived for their entire adult lives, yet like the real-estate-mogul-turned-President, the lawyer-turned-Saudi-Employee-turned-Reagan-Stan-turned-financier-turned-diplomat was not wise enough to understand that which he did not know. Behavior and agreements forged in this environment, under these circumstances, cannot go on in this way moving forward in the United States, and that means the nation must punish this actor so that something similar not only does not, but cannot ever happen again in the future.
To this point, in regards to the deals Thomas Barrack brokered that can still be expunged, no matter how big or small, there can absolutely be no question. These deals, no matter how many there are or how sensitive the information within them is, must simply be brought to congress for revocation or termination if possible, even as the Department of Justice tries Mr. Barrack and his young protégé for Mr. Barrack’s crimes, on the grounds that none of the negotiating vis-a-vis the UAE was done in good faith by all of the associated parties. This is obvious and should be endeavored upon as soon as the Biden Administration can find the time to do it, if it can be legally and reasonably done. It is simply unreasonable to expect a government to maintain in place diplomatic entreaties in which there exists bountiful evidence that one major side had been compromised by another or multiple others, through the subversion of an American citizen through ostensibly economic incentivization.
If the UAE wishes to be on good terms with the United States, it should simply stop abusing its own people and its neighbors. Pursuing clandestine diplomacy will never have positive, long-term consequences, as historical American maneuvers themselves should be evidence of.
There can be going forward, if there was any before, no doubt regarding the greed that purveyed the administration of the 45th President of the United States, yet unless the future Presidents, most hopefully the current, 46th one, remedy America’s corrupted parts and sections now, there can truly be little trust put in the altruism or mutuality of any treaty that the United States wishes to sign in the future.
Should he fail to do so, the next corrupt Presidents entourage will have no problem taking advantage of their positions within the American government, as well as the greater world at large. More important perhaps even than that, the crucial role of diplomacy itself will be further diminished, leading to greater friction between any and every country. When America behaves in this underhanded and selfish manner, it completely undercuts any positive innovation we might be trying to endeavor upon across the world; if you don’t believe me, simply ask Iran.