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On C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | |
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| Joining us this morning is Paul Salem. | ||
| He's with the Middle East Institute, the Vice President for International Engagement. | ||
| He's also the author of Thinking Middle East, the Substack newsletter. | ||
| Let's begin with your analysis from the Middle East Institute website, the first two months of Trump 2.0 in the Middle East, hard push for elusive breakthroughs. | ||
| What are they? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, hi, Greta. | |
| It's great to be with you, and hello to everybody following along. | ||
| President Trump identified a number of goals in the Middle East. | ||
| One of them was to end the ongoing wars. | ||
| Before he took office, there was a ceasefire in Gaza and there was a ceasefire in Lebanon. | ||
| The ceasefire in Gaza has since unraveled. | ||
| Obviously, he also wanted to secure shipping in the Red Sea. | ||
| And towards that end, he has escalated military attacks against the Houthis in Yemen and gotten a ceasefire agreement from the Houthis, at least not to attack U.S. shipping. | ||
| The two big goals that he wants to achieve, one of them is a historic U.S.-Saudi-Israeli agreement, which would include Saudi-Israeli normalization and would be a continuation of the Abraham Accords that he achieved, that President Trump achieved in his first term. | ||
| That is not yet advanced. | ||
| The second big goal he wants to achieve is a breakthrough between the U.S. and Iran to stop its nuclear weaponization program and perhaps turn a new page. | ||
| Negotiations have started there, but they have not reached an end point. | ||
| His visit starting tomorrow to the Middle East, hence, is being watched very closely in the region. | ||
| President Trump departing this morning for that first Middle East trip of his second term. | ||
| It was supposed to be his first foreign trip before an impromptu trip overseas for the Pope's funeral. | ||
| Paul Salem, the Washington Post front page, frames the trip this way. | ||
| Trump's Mideast focus is business. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, certainly. | |
| Yeah, certainly a big focus of the Trump administration and President Trump himself in all matters has been about economics and largely reviving the U.S. economy as best he can. | ||
| Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries are extremely wealthy countries. | ||
| They have a lot of capital to invest. | ||
| They have a lot of energy resources. | ||
| And certainly a big part of prioritizing a trip to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf is to increase and multiply the economic deals between those countries and the U.S. Saudi Arabia has already pledged close to a trillion dollars. | ||
| The United Arab Emirates has also pledged something close to that amount of investments in the U.S. | ||
| These will be over many years. | ||
| That includes weapons purchases as well as other things. | ||
| So certainly business is a big part of it. | ||
| And that definitely includes future sectors like artificial intelligence and emerging technology. | ||
| The U.S. needs Gulf energy, Gulf capital, in order to multiply its capacities in its tech and AI race with China. | ||
| So that's definitely a big part of it. | ||
| The president leaving today, as we said from the White House, he travels to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. | ||
| Paul Salem, why those three countries? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, those are the big, I would say, economic players in the Gulf countries. | |
| Those are the big three. | ||
| Saudi Arabia is the biggest of all of them. | ||
| That's both economically and politically. | ||
| It was Trump's first destination in his first term, and it is his first official destination in his second term as well. | ||
| Saudi Arabia is a big energy producer, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in various sectors. | ||
| Also, Saudi Arabia is effectively the leader of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which is a council including the six Gulf countries. | ||
| So Saudi Arabia is kind of the boss or the main country. | ||
| Saudi Arabia is also the host or the place where Mecca and Medina, the two holy sites of Islam, that's where the sites are. | ||
| So Saudi Arabia also carries a very large credibility and weight in the Muslim world, which is 1.5 billion people. | ||
| So if President Trump, beyond the business deals, wants to talk about peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel, certainly getting Saudi Arabia on board would be a great breakthrough. | ||
| Paul Salem, CNN was reporting earlier this morning that starting with President Obama, President Trump during his first term, then Joe Biden, and now in the second term of President Trump, those leaders all have told the Middle East leaders that to do business with the United States, they need to clean up their own backyard. | ||
| What efforts have been, what does that mean, and what efforts have been made? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I'm not sure that President Trump necessarily is carrying that message. | |
| In his early couple of years, President Biden had a lot of criticism of the Gulf countries, but that kind of faded away after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| President Trump, I don't think is carrying that message per se. | ||
| His main sort of mission is one, to conclude a lot of business deals, including the artificial intelligence and emerging technology deals and space exploration deals that I mentioned. | ||
| Second. | ||
| Good afternoon, everybody. | ||
| I'm here with the acting administrator of the FAA, Chris Rushlow. | ||
| I appreciate him being here with me. | ||
| We want to talk, and Frank from the FAA here is as well. | ||
| Listen, we've all been reporting and seeing what's happening at Newark Airport. |