BREAKING: Famous Trump Enemy is Arrested

BREAKING: Famous Trump Enemy is Arrested
November 5, 2017
https://www.conservativeinstitute.org/foreign-policy/trump-enemy-is-arrested.htm?
BREAKING: Famous Trump Enemy is Arrested
Gage Skidmore / CCL
As part of a sweeping anti-corruption probe, Saudi Arabia has arrested dozens of prominent princes, military commanders, businessmen, and government officials. The surprise arrests come from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after he promised to implement reform and root out systemic corruption from the royal family long accused of squandering public funds and misusing oil revenue.

Billionaire entrepreneur Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who criticized Donald Trump savagely during the presidential campaign, was among those detained by a newly organized state security agency.

Billionaire banter
Bin Talal helped Trump escape some financial hardship in the early 1990s, but in 2015, the Saudi prince called Trump “a disgrace” and demanded that he withdraw from the U.S. presidential race, prompting a brief Twitter feud between two of the world’s richest men:

The digital drama continued with Trump posting a photoshopped image of then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly standing next to Bin Talal, while the Saudi Prince responded by claiming that he helped bail Trump out of financial difficulties back in the 1990s.

Bin Talal ended up congratulating Trump after he won the 2016 election.

Saudis influence Middle Eastern policy
Bin Talal is the wealthiest and most outspoken member of a Saudi royal family that includes hundreds of powerful oil magnates. As an investor with a net worth valued at $18 billion, the prince administers Kingdom Holdings and controls large stakes in companies like Twitter, Lyft, and News Corp.
Educated in America, Bin Talal has also nurtured close relationships with many of the Western country’s most prominent elite, like former Citigroup chief executive Sanford “Sandy” Weill and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Bin Talal has also donated heavily to the collegiate study of the Middle East, Islam, and terrorism, including giving millions to American universities and eventually enticing Georgetown University to open up the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) is among a faction of lawmakers who question the prudence of allowing the Saudi Royal Family to influence U.S. policy. Frank worries that “Saudi-sourced finds have been used in the training, briefing, or education of those going into or currently employed by the U.S. government.”

In fact, Trump had found many of his foreign policy initiatives resisted by Obama-era career bureaucrats within the State Department who ignore the threat of Islamic extremism and the influence of Islamist thinking on terrorism. Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton decried the Obama holdovers in the State Department:

[U.S. Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson is following the policies of the Obama administration. They’ve been doing the same thing for eight years. If nobody is in those positions that reflects what Trump wants to do, nothing is going to change.
Power play
Freedom lovers and human rights activists should hold off on praising Riyadh for the arrests. The detentions may be more about removing opposition to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, since among those arrested were princes once considered legitimate successors to the Saudi throne.

In fact, the Crown Prince was placed in charge of the country’s anti-corruption committee on Saturday night, and it took him less than a day to start removing some of his fiercest critics and most bitter rivals. King Salman removed Prince Miteb bin Abdullah from his post as head of the National Guard, and the son of the late King Abdullah — once in line for the Crown — was among those arrested in the crackdown.

Three months earlier, Abdullah’s other son was removed from the line of succession and ousted from his government post, as well. With Abdullah’s sons out of the way, Bin Salman found himself the new Saudi Crown Prince.

In addition to the Crown intrigue, a September crackdown included contentious arrests of some of Bin Salman’s most vocal critics, including clerics, writers, minor princes, and social media stars who voiced opposition to the Crown Prince’s stranglehold on authority.

Transitioning monarchy
Senior royals who once ruled by consensus or heavily influenced the King’s decisions are finding themselves increasingly marginalized as their power is stripped away. Saudi Arabia’s council of state-backed Wahhabi clerics have applauded the arrests and loss of influence from the country’s ruling elite, arguing that “there is no place for political parties or ideologies” in a nation ruled by the Quran.

All of these developments spell a huge transition for the Gulf monarchy. Political risk consultancy Eurasia Group estimates that “in the near future,” the current King Salman could surrender the throne to his much younger son, giving the aging monarch time to publicly approve and legitimize Prince Bin Salman’s role as king while the current king still living.

In a Middle East that is held together by a sensitive balance between Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Shiites in Iran, instability in Riyadh could throw the entire region into disorder.

Whenever chaos and disorder reign in the Middle East, radical Islam becomes the answer. The Crown Prince’s counter-coup could be the beginning of a major disaster for the most violent region in the world — even if one of Trump’s most prominent Twitter enemies is now off the map.