Twenty-Five Years of Aggression against Yugoslavia: NATO Expansion and the Global Context

A quarter of a century ago, on March 24, 1999, a combined group of NATO countries launched a military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which at that time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro.

Over the years, quite a lot has been written about the consequences of this aggression—about the clear violation of the principles of international law, since the UN did not sanction any military action against a sovereign state; about the numerous human rights violations during the bombing; about the commissioned information campaigns against the Serbs, which had nothing to do with reality; and about the impact of the war on the civilian population—from post-traumatic stress syndrome to the increase in cancer because of the use of munitions with depleted uranium cores.

However, several important points should be emphasized. This campaign was NATO’s first offensive operation. The military-political bloc, which was conceived ostensibly for defense against a possible attack from the Soviet Union (a figment of the crazy imagination of Western, primarily Anglo-American, politicians) became an instrument of military expansion. From conditionally defensive, it became offensive. First in Europe and then in other parts of the world, in particular against Libya in 2011. The military campaign against Yugoslavia probably gave NATO strategists confidence in the need for further expansion and homogenization of the whole of Europe under the umbrella of Brussels. The next expansion of the alliance came in a whole bundle. In March 2004, seven states were admitted at once: Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. There is one interesting nuance here—all these countries signed the membership action plan in April 1999, that is, when the bombing of Serbia was in full swing. The connection between the aggression and the co-option of new members is obvious. It should be noted that actually on the eve of the aggression against Yugoslavia on March 12, 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which received an invitation to join in July 1997, joined the alliance. Now NATO’s tentacles are creeping into the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia, as the alliance has various agreements with a number of states in the regions mentioned.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s signing of an agreement to withdraw from the province of Kosovo and Metohija and hand it over to international forces did not mean total political defeat. He remained in power. Although already in May 1999, the Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia brought charges against Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo. To get him, it was necessary to lift the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by heads of state.

External tools such as sanctions helped to put pressure and increase social tensions. Agencies at the same time worked on the ground and pumped money into the opposition. The puppet movement Otpor, acting as if on behalf of Serbian citizens, adopted Gene Sharp’s methodology of non-violent (conditionally) resistance and continued to implement its plan step by step.

The moment of the election campaign was chosen to bring people out on the streets.

In October 2000, because of mass protests, Slobodan Milosevic resigned, without waiting for the second round of presidential elections. In fact, the first color revolution, called the “bulldozer revolution,” was successfully implemented in Serbia. What is striking is that many of its thought leaders, such as Professor Cedomir Čupić, are still living quietly in Belgrade and actively criticizing the current authorities. While the younger ones, such as Srdja Popovic, immediately defected to the West and continue their attempts to stage coups d’état in other countries.

A monument, in Tašmajdan Park, Belgrade, to the children killed by NATO bombing. The child represented is Milica Rakić.

Let us now look at the global context of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia.

It should be taken into account that earlier in Yugoslavia a civil war was raging, and NATO countries, including the United States, were actively involved in Bosnia. This gave them an opportunity not only to practice ethnic conflict technologies, as well as new theories of warfare, such as network-centric warfare, but also to use both private military companies and mercenaries (in particular, mujahideen who had previously fought in Afghanistan were brought in as part of the “jihad”). This whole machine was directed against the Serbs, not only to gain operational superiority on the front, but also with far-reaching strategic objectives, which included demonization of the Serbs, creating the image of barbarians who pose a threat to the “civilized world.” And this demonization was successful and was already consolidated in 1999. But if the West then openly blamed the Serbs, it also meant the Russians, who tried to help their brotherly people to withstand the pressure of the West. It is no coincidence that Slobodan Milosevic warned that what the West had done to the Serbs, it would try to do to Russia in the future.

However, a scenario similar to the Yugoslav one had already been conceived for Russia. In the spring of 1999, terrorist organizations intensified their activities in Russia’s North Caucasus. In April, when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, the self-proclaimed “emir of the Dagestan Jamaat” announced the creation of an “Islamic army of the Caucasus” to carry out jihad in southern Russia. Then began a whole wave of terrorist attacks organized by terrorists under the leadership of Shamil Basayev—seizure of settlements in Dagestan, bombings of houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk.

Therefore, when the question is raised whether Russia could have helped the Serbs more than it did, including the operation to block the Pristina airport, we must remember that the situation was quite difficult for us as well. The North Caucasus was in flames, emissaries of Western security services were working in the Volga region, and separatist projects were emerging in the regions.

It was an active phase of the unipolar moment, which the U.S. used to strengthen its hegemony all over the world, not shying away from any means, including terrorism. And its decline was still far away.

But were there positive outcomes of NATO’s military aggression against Yugoslavia? Let us try to summarize. First: the Yugoslav army seriously repulsed the enemy and as a result NATO had significant losses, which they did not expect initially. Various military tricks were used in different types of military forces and which may well now be adapted for the Special Military Operation (SMO), with appropriate adjustments. Second: the real face of NATO was seen by the whole world, which led to anti-war protests. In particular, Italy left the coalition because of this. Third, the dirty methods of information campaigns and the use of non-governmental organizations as a fifth column were documented and widely publicized. Finally, the international solidarity with the Serbs—Russian volunteers and humanitarian aid, the work of hackers from different countries against NATO, the circumvention of Western sanctions—is also an important experience of a complex nature, which will be useful for crushing the globalist military hydra of the North Atlantic Alliance.

Leonid Savin is Editor-in-Chief of the Geopolitika.ru Analytical Center, General Director of the Cultural and Territorial Spaces Monitoring and Forecasting Foundation and Head of the International Eurasia Movement Administration. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Featured: Milica Rakić, 3-years-old, killed on April 17, 1999, by a cluster munition during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Frontline Moscow

Moscow is also a frontline city, just like Donetsk, Sevastopol and Belgorod. A country at war cannot have peaceful cities. It is better to realize this now and fully. And, of course, special measures of behavior, special rules must be introduced in a warring country.

The territory of the home front is not the territory of peace. This is where victory is forged. The victims of Crocus fell on the battlefield. Because Russia today is a battlefield.

Ukraine is also Russia; it is the same continuous Russia from Lvov to Vladivostok, and it is at war.

Public consciousness must become the consciousness of a nation at war. And anyone who falls out of this must be considered an anomaly.

There must be a new code of behavior. The people of a nation at war may not come back when they leave home. Everyone must be prepared for that. After all, on the frontline, and in Donetsk and Belgorod, this is exactly the case. The EU is likely to supply long-range missiles to the war-losing Kiev regime, which in our eyes will finally lose legitimacy in less than two months. We will finally recognize them as a criminal terrorist entity, not a country. And this blatantly terrorist regime, as it falls, is also likely to strike as far as it can reach. What else it will do is hard to speculate—it is better to consider everything. This is not a cause for panic, but a call for responsibility.

We are truly becoming a nation now. We are beginning to realize ourselves as a nation.

And the people have a common pain. Common blood—that given by huge queues of concerned Muscovites to the victims of the monstrous terrorist attack. Common grief. The people have a common fare, when people take the victims in Crocus City Hall to hospital or home for free. It is like at the front—their own. Money, nothing! In a country at war there can be no capitalism, only solidarity. Everything that is collected for the front, for Victory, is permeated with soul.

And the state is no longer a mechanism, but an organism. The state also feels pain, prays in church, serves memorial services, lights candles. The state becomes alive, popular, Russian. Because the state is awakened by war.

And migrants today are called to become an organic part of the people at war with the enemy. To become their own—donating blood, providing free transportation when necessary, queuing at the military enlistment office to be the first to go to the front, weaving camouflage nets, working the third shift. If they are part of society, they too may at some point become a target of the enemy. To go out and not come back. One of the boys who saved people at Crocus Hall is called Islam. But this is the real Islam—Russian. There is another “Islam.”

When you live in Russia, you cannot be non-Russian. Especially when Russia is at war. Russia is a country for those who consider it their Mother.

And now our Mother is in pain.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Featured: Mother Russia, by Ilya Sergeevich Glazunov; painted in 1968.

How Donald Trump brought Misery to the Palestinians

Robert Inlakesh is a well-known documentary filmmaker, journalist and Middle East expert, who knows Palestine well, especially the endless crimes Israel is committing there.

In 2020, he filmed, Steal of the Century, a two-part documentary, which chronicled the devasting effects of Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, a supposed “peace deal,” aka, “the deal of the century,” in which Israel was given everything it needed to destroy more. The supposed author of the deal, Jared Kushner, simply put down everything that Benjamin Netanyahu dictated.

For various reasons, the documentary was banned from Youtube. Given the current, systematic genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel, we thought that it important to allow for this documentary to be seen in its entirety.

Please consider supporting the work of Robert Inlakesh.

Steal of the Century (2020), Part 1.

Steal of the Century (2020), Part 2.

And, here is a backup copy of Parts 1 and 2, just in case:

Game of Clones: Japanese Politics as Great Power Puppet Plays

Japan is now four months into a massive political scandal.

Although it had been reported in a communist newspaper and in other minor outlets since November of 2022, in December of 2023 the mainstream media here blew up with news that members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been getting kickbacks from the sales of tickets to supporter gatherings and other political schmoozing events. Much of this money went unreported. By law, cash received from ticket sales, as with all such income, must be catalogued, and taxes must be paid. But as anyone from any other country that has politicians could tell you, that is of course not what the LDP pols did. Many of them siphoned off some of the cash and used it for getting votes and God knows what else. Each week brings new revelations of dirty dealings and sordid cover-ups in Tokyo.

Pretty rich behavior for a political class that last year started cracking down on unreported income for the hoi polloi. A new invoice law came into effect in 2023 requiring us little people to create invoices and pay sales tax for even the most piddling of interpersonal cash transactions. The politicians seem to have had no intention of following the rules they impose on the rest of us, however. Many of them have used their clout and standing for quick personal enrichment while we have spent hours filling out additional tax paperwork. And so, we in Japan have been rather enjoying watching the criminals who run the country sweat and squirm under the glare of media scrutiny. Recently, I watched late-night NHK with no small degree of Schadenfreude as Takagi Tsuyoshi, member of the House of Representatives and former head of the LDP’s Committee on the Diet (Parliament), mopped his brow taking hard questions from opposition politicians. They were grilling him, and rightly so, about the more than ten million yen (some 67,000 US dollars) in unreported slush money he had received from the kickback scheme.

Takagi is far from the worst offender. Hagiuda Koichi, a big-name politician and former head of the LDP’s Policy Research Council, took at least twenty-seven million yen (nearly $180,000 US).

Matsuno Hirokazu, who once had the prime ministership in his sights as the powerful Chief Cabinet Secretary (kanbo chokan) under current prime minister Kishida Fumio, like Takagi took more than ten million yen. Matsuno fell much harder than either Takagi or Hagiuda. He was stripped of his position and roasted almost daily in the Diet and in the media for his inane non-answers to questions about how much he took and when he took it.

Nishimura Yasutoshi, who was once the very powerful Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, admits to having taken one million yen (some 6,500 US dollars) in under-the-table money, but is suspected of having gotten much more. Seko Hiroshige, who was also once Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, failed to report at least eight million yen (more than 55,000 US dollars) in slush money.

Ikeda Yoshitaka, House of Representatives member and former State Minister for the influential Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, may have taken forty-eight million yen (around 319,000 US dollars). Ono Yasutada, former Chairman of the House of Councilors Committee on the Cabinet, is suspected of having taken upwards of fifty million yen (more than 330,000 dollars). In January of 2024, Ono was charged by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office with violating the Political Funding Regulation Law (Seiji Shikin Kisei Ho). In the same month, Ikeda was arrested, along with a political secretary, for conspiring to break the same law, and was charged with such. More arrests may follow for others who have embezzled cash.

The scandal has produced the usual run of buffoonish sideshows. Tanaka Makiko, who was once Minister for Foreign Affairs and who has led a charmed political life as the daughter of postwar prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, came out of retirement to chastise the bumbling LDP politicians for their carelessness with money. This was ironic in the extreme. Tanaka Kakuei left the prime ministership in 1974 amid scandal, and then was hit headlong with a much bigger uproar, over bribes from Lockheed, two years later. Tanaka Kakuei’s political career ended in crookedness, and began in it, too. Tanaka made his way in politics through the support of the classic populist-kickback constituents group, the Niigata-based Etsuzankai. Tanaka got his start running with the Tokyo big boys under Kishi Nobusuke, who was a bought-and-paid-for Washington lapdog. To make the farce even thicker, Tanaka Makiko served in the cabinet of Koizumi Jun’ichiro, who was arguably even more of a Washington toady than Kishi was.

There is more to the hypocrisy than just Tanaka Makiko’s lack of familial self-awareness. The way the LDP kickback scandal has been portrayed in the media should be of note to Americans who follow what is going on in Japan. The reason is that the current screaming match in the Diet conceals a much deeper truth about who really runs Japan, and why.

On the surface, the scandal of the hour is about political discord. Everyone is fighting everyone else. Tune in to just about any Japanese television station or pick up just about any newspaper, and you will learn that the people who apparently misappropriated tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in unreported funds belonged to this or that ha, or “political faction.” Takagi, Hagiuda, Ikeda, Seko, Nishimura, Matsuno, and Ono were all part of the “Abe-ha,” that is, the faction of politicians who cluster under the policy aegis of the late Abe Shinzo, Kishi Nobusuke’s grandson. While Abe was alive, his Abe-ha minions declared themselves (whether sincerely or not) to be loyal to his political positions. The official name for the pro-Abe group is the Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyukai, or Seiwakai for short, and its members are known to be among the most conservative in the Diet. The way the story is sold in the Japanese media—and the way Tanaka Makiko and other opportunistic pols are framing it—is that the legacy of Abe Shinzo is coming undone (or coming home to roost, depending on which side of the aisle you cheer for). One side versus the other in the rough-and-tumble world of Tokyo politicking.

Indeed, faction as the ugly backstory to the kickback scandal has come to overshadow even the misappropriation of funds itself. For instance, the media reports that the Shikokai, the faction led by and supporting former prime minister Aso Taro, also apparently failed to report “party ticket” income. (Aso was personally and ideologically very close to the late Abe Shinzo.)

Others who took shady political cash include Nikai Toshihiro, a House of Representatives member and lifelong politician (he first entered the Diet in 1975). Nikai is said to have taken a staggering five billion yen (some 33 million US dollars) for “political activity” over five years as LDP Secretary-General from 2016 to 2021. Nikai is the head of the Shisuikai, the faction which supports his political views (largely sympathetic to China). More factionalism.

Also on the China-faction front, Kadota Ryusho, a journalist colleague in Japan, reported in December of 2023 that Chinese nationals once crowded into events for the Kochikai, the storied (and elitist) faction which now rallies behind Prime Minister Kishida. In January 2024, Kishida announced that he was dissolving the Kochikai after sixty-seven years in operation. Factionalism eating its own.

Even Yamaguchi Natsuo, head of the Buddhist Soka Gakkai-backed Komeito party which bills itself as the “clean government” alternative to crooked Tokyo politics, has gotten caught in the scandal. In late 2023, Yamaguchi publicly agreed to lower reporting requirements for “party ticket” sales and other such income from 200,000 yen (about 1,300 dollars) to 50,000 yen (about 300 dollars). This is a strong indication that Komeito members had not been reporting slush money. There is a China-angle to the Komeito news, as well, as it is often whispered in Tokyo politics that the Komeito is soft on China. The Komeito votes with the LDP in a bloc on most issues, so the media focus on the Komeito is another way of saying that factionalism is what is driving the dysfunction of the Japanese Diet.

It is true that the scandals are partly about factions, about which politician belongs to which stable and how the various groups collude behind the scenes to frustrate open parliamentary debate. That is all readily apparent, and the extent to which factions act against the interests of voters cannot be discounted. At the same time, though, there is something very misleading about how the media covers the “party ticket” slush money brouhaha. The fractious factionalism that helps decide who gets how much of what kind of kickback and who gets appointed to which coveted position is camouflage for the almost complete one-dimensionality of the political world here. Nikai Toshihiro and Yamaguchi Natsuo are piffled about in the media as being tools of the Chinese, yes. And LDP members Arimura Haruko and Nagashima Akihisa are rather notoriously slavish to Washington. So there is a kind of factionalism to how the political class in Tokyo is said to interact with foreign powers.

But the truth is that there is little daylight between any of the factions, even the ones which appear to be serving the Chinese Communists and the ones which appear to be pro-American. The much more salient truth in all of this is that the LDP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deep State. It was born that way—as a vehicle for American interests in Japan. No pro-China group, or pro-any-other-country-group, and certainly no faction centered around the fortunes of this or that LDP politician, comes remotely close to challenging the one faction that determines every major policy in Japan: namely, the faction which also controls Washington, DC. The entire postwar, in which unelected American bureaucrats run Tokyo, is structured around the docility of the LDP, its thralldom to Potomac logic and worldview.

Prime Minister Kishida, possibly the most LDP-like LDP politician in history, has consistently prioritized the interests of Washington, DC, over the people of Japan. This may explain why Kishida is hated by right-wingers. It certainly explains why I hold him in contempt. He is not the prime minister of Japan—he is Washington’s satrap, Vidkun Quisling in spectacles and a necktie. Many other conservatives here are growing angrier by the week over the extent to which politics-as-usual in the Tokyo political neighborhood of Nagatacho serves the American uniparty and the Japan handlers in the permanent government, over and against the people whose “blood taxes” (ketsuzei) the Japanese government sucks up and uses to buy big-ticket military hardware from American defense contractors. Or sends off to prop up Washington’s losing war of attrition in its other client state of Ukraine.

Ukraine is the perfect lens through which to view Japanese politics, to reveal how tightly the LDP’s lips are affixed to Washington’s behind. In February of 2024, Prime Minister Kishida and his cabinet hosted a “Japan-Ukraine Conference for Promotion of Economic Growth and Reconstruction,” which is a polite way of saying “an invitation to the rebuild-Ukraine pork barrel buffet.” The month before, in early January, Kishida’s foreign minister, Kamikawa Yoko, traveled to Ukraine, where she took the usual melodramatic tour of a bomb shelter and promised to send millions of dollars of Japanese tax money to NATO (of which Japan is not a member, but wants to be). Outside observers could be forgiven for thinking that Kamikawa, and Kishida, and the rest of the LDP were working for the Ukrainian government, and not for an archipelago off the eastern coast of Asia. Japan has already provided Ukraine with more than 1.2 trillion yen (nearly eight billion US dollars) since hostilities with Russia began in February of 2022. At the February 19 Ukraine-pork smorgasbord, Prime Minister Kishida promised the grifters visiting from Kiev that he would send billions of dollars more. There is no country on earth, not even Ukraine itself, that has been more desperate to please Washington since February of 2022 than Japan. And it has been that way since the second half of August, 1945. The LDP serves Washington. And no one else.

What has Japan’s client-state status done for the Japanese people? Ask the ones living in the Japan equivalent of Trump Country, the people about whom Tokyo politicians could not possibly care less. On January 1, 2024, a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the Noto peninsula, part of Ishikawa Prefecture on the Japan Sea-side of the main island of Honshu. As of this writing, electricity still has not been restored to much of the affected area. Municipal water is also out, as the earthquake buckled the ground and caused massive landslides and structural collapses, resulting in untold damage to water pipes and other infrastructure. People were crushed when their homes fell in on top of them in the violent shaking. There has been no Conference for Promotion of Economic Growth and Reconstruction in Noto. But then again, why would there be? Washington hasn’t ordered its eunuchs in Nagatacho to do such a thing yet, and so there the people of Ishikawa sit, forgotten. Money that could go to help rebuild Japan is sent off to rebuild Ukraine.

The abandoned people of the Noto Peninsula are resilient, and are not begging anyone for sympathy. The grit of the people living in the rough Japanese equivalent of East Palestine, Ohio, is inspiring. Those farmers and fishermen are the salt of the earth. On February 28, there was a concert in Suzu, a small city in Ishikawa Prefecture, at one of the elementary schools still being used as a shelter for people left homeless by the New Year’s Day disaster. Fifteen elementary school students stood in the unheated gym of their school and sang a beautiful song of hope for the people assembled on makeshift seats before them. The children’s breath was visible in the cold air as they sang. The audience members, many of them elderly and nearly all of them destitute, shed silent tears. The children’s song helped them, they said after the concert ended. They wanted to keep moving ahead, to hold out for a better tomorrow.

Nobody from the Kishida cabinet was there, of course. They have very important work to do evading taxes for slush payments and figuring out how to get more taxpayer money to Kiev.

On the other side of Honshu from Ishikawa, in the dimly-lit back halls of a Tokyo government controlled by the United States, Japanese leaders schemed how to line the pockets of politicians in Ukraine, arguably the most corrupt regime on earth. The only benefit for Japan in throwing tax yen into the black hole of an unwinnable war started by Washington is that it wins “sontaku” (kiss-up) points for Kishida, who apparently sees it as his life mission to please Joe Biden.

Tokyo’s prejudices are Washington’s, too. Even the most irrational ones. In late February, my colleague Kenji Yoshida and I interviewed Suzuki Muneo, a member of the House of Councilors who was lambasted by the media and left his former political party, the Nippon Ishin-no-Kai, over a visit to Russia in October of 2023. We spoke to Suzuki for more than an hour, and learned much about why he decided to visit the country which Washington, and its puppets in Japanese politics and in the Japanese media, portrays as the second coming of the Third Reich. Suzuki was passionate about how important it was for the people in his home district, on the northern island of Hokkaido, to maintain dialogue with Moscow. There are fishing rights at stake for Hokkaido fishermen, for instance. People in Hokkaido want to visit the graves of their ancestors in territory which the Soviet Union took at the end of World War II and which Russia continues to occupy. Russia is an important source of energy, Suzuki explained. And Russia has a point about Minsk II, he insisted. In any event, one must speak with one’s adversaries, Suzuki argued. In a time of war, especially, one must reach out to the other side. [The Postil has published this interview]

For his trouble, Suzuki was pilloried in the press. He was called a “traitor” (kokuzoku). He has long been maligned as a “Russian lackey” (Roshia no daibensha) by the Japanese media, and his October, 2023 visit to Russia helped confirm that there is still no love lost between the Hokkaido politician and the press corps. Yoshida and I wanted to bring some balance to the coverage of Suzuki. We tried running our interview with a so-called “conservative” outlet in Japan. The editor there slammed the virtual door in our face, saying that there was no need to listen to anything any Russian had to say, and, by extension, no need to listen to Suzuki Muneo. That is correct. The “conservatives” here are not just against Putin. They’re against all Russians. Sound familiar? As you might have guessed, the same “conservative” outlet in Japan pushes the pro-Ukraine line even more shamelessly than does the Pentagon.

Is Suzuki Muneo a traitor, a running dog of Russian imperialism? After talking to Suzuki, it struck Yoshida and me that, of all the politicians in the Diet, the one routinely insulted as a foreign dupe was the one most patriotically trying to help Japanese people outside of the political class. If only there was a Suzuki Muneo for the Noto Peninsula, then maybe there would be some accountability and people there wouldn’t be freezing, hungry, and crying. If only there had been more politicians like Suzuki these past eighty years while Washington has been running the show here. Suzuki Muneo went to prison some two decades ago when he wouldn’t kowtow to the neo-liberal Washington tool of the hour, then-prime minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro. Or at least, that’s how many see it. Suzuki also vaguely hints that refusing to bend the knee to Koizumi was what got him, Suzuki, sent up the river for a spell. But there is some truth to this interpretation, I believe. Who else in the Koizumi years was willing to go as far as Suzuki to stop Japan’s being Washington’s plaything?

The irony is thick, and depressing. Suzuki Muneo, a patriot to my mind, is said to be a cat’s paw of Putin. People inside the LDP say this. But it’s the LDP, with its fake factionalism and its shameless truckling to Washington—as a matter of policy, as a matter of existence from day one—that is the real sock puppet.

It’s a game of clones, this political business in Tokyo. The politicians here in Japan appear to be riven by faction, battling one another tooth and nail in the Diet. But the entire thing is a farce. Those who pretend to be warring in the parliament are, in fact, players in a sad puppet play, Japanese marionettes dancing around on Yankee strings.

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan

Jared Kushner’s Great Game

Recently, Jared Kushner, came to his alma mater (Harvard) and gave a lengthy interview to Professor Tarek Masoud, in which he laid out his views on the Middle East.

This interview has been largely derided and thus dismissed or defended. But such attitudes are deceptive. Kushner wields much power and influence and will wield a lot more should Donald Trump again become president in November 2024—he is being touted as Trump’s Secretary of State. We need only recall that Kushner put in place the Abraham Accords, which were devastating for Palestine, but great for Israel.

Therefore, his words should be seriously studied, because they form a blueprint of what a new Trump administration will seek to accomplish in the Middle East—which in a nuthell will be to ensure that Israel is the sole master of the region. To bring this about, American effort will be to destroy Iran, ravage Russia and lay waste to China. These three countries are said to support actors hostile to Israel and thus to America. This is made clear by Kushner. The expected, larger outcome is the usual one—the world run by the USA, with Israel in its habitual role of “enforcer,” and Saudi Arabia ever the loyal lackey, with the various lapdog Gulf States in tow.

Over the course of his commentary, Kushner affirms that Israel indeed has nuclear weapons. Of course, Israel is not supposed to have them, but it is also an open secret that they do.

As for the Palestinians, Kushner reasons that it is hard to tell who is a terrorist among them and who is not. Therefore, they need a strong master to manage them; they are too childish to look after themselves. (Here Kushner’s “role” as a father is key). Kushner understands perfectly what is best for the Palestinians, because “father knows best.”

As for a Palestinian state, Kushner calls it a “super bad idea”—because that would be “rewarding” “bad behavior” (something that Kushner would never do as a Dad). Irresponsible children cannot run countries; more crucially, he sees a Palestinian state as a threat to Israel. That can never be allowed. Besides, if given such a state, the Palestinians would just blow it all up anyway. Better that they stay under the sure hand of Israel and somehow make lots of money. Making lots of money is the moral compass that governs Kushner’s International Relations. Genocide? What genocide? Despite being a father, he has nothing to say about the slaughter of children now being carried out by Israel. To further the cause of “Israel über alles,” the suffering of the Palestinian people can never be acknowledged. Kushner’s best suggestion is that the whole lot of them be transported out and put into some place “bulldozed” into the Negev desert. Out of sight, out of mind.

Behind Kushner’s boyish phraseology hides a grim program, in which the cheery wheeling and dealing is meant to destroy all of Israel’s perceived enemies, no matter who has to suffer in the process (the Palestinians, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, etc.). In other words, yet more of the master-slave “paradigm” (a word much used by Kushner). The Middle East must belong to Israel, and thereby the USA. It cannot belong to the majority of the people who actually live there.

In the interview, there is no awareness at all of BRICS and multipolarity, let alone the full aspirations of peoples and of nations. There is only the drive for dominance, all packaged as breezy arrogance which demands that the world be run the American way—or else. This is Kushner’s “deal;” it will be the new Great Game of International Relations, should Trump become president.

Thus, we thought that it important to provide a transcript of this interview that it might be the more thoroughly studied, since the written word allows for deeper reflection rather than a video.

Middle East Dialogues. February 15, 2024

Tarek Masoud: All right. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great pleasure to welcome you this evening. My name is Tarek Masoud. I am a professor of public policy here at the Kennedy School, and I’m the faculty chair of our Middle East Initiative. It’s really my great pleasure to welcome you to this first in our spring series of what we are calling “Middle East Dialogues,” which are a series of conversations that I’m having with individuals whom I believe hold varied and vital perspectives, not just on the conflict in the region, but on the paths towards a more peaceful and prosperous future for the people of that part of the world.

Our guest this evening is one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t need an introduction, and that’s Mr. Jared Kushner. He was a senior advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021, where he handled a number of vital portfolios from prison reform to trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, to our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to the reason that we are here tonight, which is peacemaking in the Middle East.

When I put together this series, Jared Kushner’s name was the very first name on my list, and that’s because he was the architect of the Abraham Accords, which I personally believe to be one of the most significant developments in the Middle East in recent memory. And he’s just generally a deal-maker par excellence. And if there’s any part of the world that I think needs really excellent deal-makers right now, I think it’s the Middle East. So I’m honored that he accepted my invitation to return to Harvard, his old stomping grounds, to have an open and candid conversation about some of the toughest issues on the planet right now.

So, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk for about 45 minutes, and then we’ll take questions from my students who I will call on. Those of you who know me know that you should never put a middle-aged Egyptian male in charge of timekeeping. So, I’m going to try to keep everything on time so that we can end at the appointed hour. So, first, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Jared Kushner.

Humanitarian Toll in Gaza and Views on Immediate Ceasefire

Jared, thank you so much for being with us. So, I just want to dive right into the war on Gaza.

We all know of the gruesome terrorist attack that happened on October 7th: more than 1,200 innocent Israelis brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists, more than 200 people taken hostages. Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed a fearsome military response, which was designed or intended to make sure that this never happens again. Now, today, four months later, more than 25,000 Palestinians are dead. I can’t tell you what percentage of them are Hamas terrorists, but we know that half of them are women and children. We know that more than a million Gazans are trying to shelter in the south of the country. They’re amassing on the border with Egypt. Many reports indicate that Gazans are now enduring a famine, and Israel is poised to begin a ground operation in Rafah that we think will take many more civilian lives. We know Israel’s being accused of genocide in front of the International Court of Justice, and even President Biden says that the Israeli operation has been over the top. But I’m guessing you don’t support calls for a ceasefire, and I wanted to ask why.

Jared Kushner: Jump right into it, so it’s good. First of all, it’s really great to be here, and thank you for putting on this dialogue on the Middle East. I think it’s a topic that I spent a lot of time, I spent four years working on, when I was in the White House. It wasn’t an issue that I had a lot of experience with, so I really came into it with a blank slate. I wish I’d been in some classes like this and gone to lectures like this when I was at Harvard. Maybe it would’ve actually given me a worse outcome, but…

Tarek Masoud: Wait a minute.

Jared Kushner: But I hope today I’ll share with you some of my experience and perspectives. But I will say that, throughout my time, I was always, a lot of the things that I would say, a lot of the things I would do were fairly heavily complained about or criticized from, I would say, the consensus thinking.

So, I think that, number one, when looking at the current situation, I try to look at everything kind of first principles and I try to say, “What’s going on? What should it be? What are the right actions?” And what I find is that there’s a lot of emotion with this issue. Some of it justified, some of it unjustified for a whole host of it. What I would say is this: I think that, number one, I take a step back and say, “Why are we here?” You go back to 2021, and when I was able to go back to my normal life after leaving office
or four years in service, we basically left the Middle East where it was very calm, right? It was calm, it had momentum. You think about ISIS, they were basically, the caliphate was gone. Syria, the Civil War had mostly stabilized in the sense that you didn’t have to think 500,000 people were killed.

When we started, Yemen was destabilized, Libya was destabilized. ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio, and Iran was flushed with cash. They were basically using that money to fund Hamas, to fund Hezbollah, to fund the Houthis, and they run a glide path to a nuclear weapon.

So, we inherited a really, really bad hand. And then with the JCPOA agreement, which was probably one of the dumbest agreements I think ever negotiated, just as anyone who studies agreements and deals, that really left us in a bad situation. So, we worked hard. We tried to regain trust. We did a lot of work. And we could talk about that later.
But the way we left the region was basically, we had six peace deals in the last six months that we were there, less, I think in the last maybe four or five months that we were there.

So, we took a different approach to the Palestinians. We were able to make peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and then with Bahrain than Sudan, then Kosovo was able to recognize Morocco. And then finally, we resolved the GCC dispute, which put everything on a pretty good glide path. Iran was basically broke. They were out of a foreign currency reserves, which meant that no money was going to any of these terrorist organizations.

And then in addition to that, the Palestinians basically were out of money too. We’d stopped funding UNRWA. We saw that UNRWA was basically taking the money that we were giving them to the United Nations. It was taxpayer dollars that we were giving to United Nations. We thought it was going to fund terrorists, to give them energy, to give them resources.

We saw a lot of their schools, and their mosques were basically where they would hide the bombs and the missiles and their munitions. And we thought the education that they were giving was really a very, very poor education that was radicalizing the next generation. So, we said, “Okay, there we go.”

So, basically, we thought that the right thing to do basically was to stop funding that, and that was the way that we wanted to kind of advance. So, we went forward, we were able to create the peace deals.

Then you kind of move forward in the region, three years, we thought that Saudi had the ability to do a normalization deal, and we had worked with the Biden administration in order to help them get that pathway, to follow the pathway that we were in.

So, now you forward three years, you have the attack, which was awful. Through not enforcing the sanctions on Iran, they were able to get funding, which they were able to then give to all these different groups. You saw a lot more rise up in the extremism. And I think that America not standing with Israel in the way that they should be led to a lot of this occurring. So, you have a situation now where Israel has the right to defend itself, right? They’re in a position where they had a brutal attack. I mean, imagine America, somebody coming over the border, brutally raping, killing civilians, doing all these different things. I mean, that’s something that I think would be quite horrific for a lot of us. And then I think the sentiment was basically, how do we put this in a position where we attack back? So, I think that what Israel’s done is they’re saying, “How do we secure ourselves this doesn’t happen again?”

Obviously one death is too many deaths. You don’t want any deaths in Israel. You don’t want deaths of Palestinians. But I think right now, the situation is a complex one. But I do hope that with the right leadership, they’ll be able to find the right way to get it to a better place.

Ideas for Ending the Crisis

Tarek Masoud: This was great, because you definitely preempted one question that I was going to ask you, which was, President Trump has been saying that this would never have happened on his watch. But before we get to that, I just want to think about this problem for a minute. One thing I associate Jared Kushner with is creative deal-making, thinking outside the box. Do you have a proposal or an idea or a sketch for how we end this crisis?

Jared Kushner: Sure. So, I think that the dilemma that Israeli leadership has right now is, do you do a short-term deal that leaves you more vulnerable in the future? Or do you take this current situation and try to figure out a way where you can create a paradigm, where your citizens will be safe and this will not happen again? So, it’s a very, very tough dilemma to be faced with if you are the leader of a country.

So, what I would do right now if I was Israel is, I would try to say, number one, you want to get as many civilians out of Rafah as possible. I think that you want to try to clear that out. I know that with diplomacy, maybe you get them into Egypt. I know that that’s been refused. But with the right diplomacy, I think it would be possible.

But in addition to that, the thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev. I would try to move people in there. I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.

I think there was one decision point they had. Do we go into Gaza? Do we not go into Gaza? They had the hostages. There really was, I think, no choice but to do that. I think that they were smart to go slowly and deliberately. Gaza is a booby trapped like crazy; they have over 400 miles of underground tunnels.

So, I think that they’ve taken some of the right steps in order to go there but you have to, again, I think Israel’s gone way more out of their way than a lot of other countries would to try to protect civilians from casualties. But I do think right now, opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.

Ideas for Sheltering Palestinians from Gaza Bombardment

Tarek Masoud: Is that something that they’re talking about in Israel? I mean, that’s the first I’ve really heard of somebody, aside from President Sisi suggesting that the Gazans who are trying to flee the fighting could take refuge in the Negev. Are people in Israel seriously talking about that possibility, about hosting Gazan refugees
in what is considered “Israel proper?”

Jared Kushner: I don’t know. I mean…

Tarek Masoud: But that would be something you would try to work on?

Jared Kushner: I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now, and I’m looking at this situation and I’m just thinking, what would I do if I was there? Again, you look at, I mean, with Israel it’s a different thing. In Syria when there’s refugees, Turkey took them, Europe took them, Jordan took them.

For whatever reason here in Gaza, there’s refugees from the fighting from an offensive attack that was staged from Gaza, Israel’s going in to do a long-term deterrence mission, and it’s unfortunate that nobody’s taking the refugees. Again, I think that the American government should probably have done a little bit of a better job to find a solution to that. As a broker, I think that there would’ve been a way, but if that’s not a viable option, I think from Israel’s perspective, it’s just something that should be strongly considered.

Fears that Netanyahu will not allow fleeing Gazans to return

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously the reason they’re not, for example, the reason the Egyptians don’t want to take the refugees in addition to, of course, there being the domestic unrest that could result or the instability that could result, but also there are real fears on the part of Arabs, and I’m sure you talk to a lot of them who think once Gazans leave Gaza, Netanyahu’s never going to let them back in.

Jared Kushner: Maybe, but I’m not sure there’s much left of Gaza at this point. So, if you think about even the construct like Gaza, Gaza was not really a historical precedent. It was the result of a war. You had tribes that were in different places, but then Gaza became a thing. Egypt used to run it, and then over time you had different governments that came in different ways. So, you have another war. Usually when wars happen, borders are changed historically over time.

So, my sense is, is I would say, how do we deal with the terror threat that is there so that it cannot be a threat to Israel or to Egypt? I think that both sides are spending a fortune on military. I think neither side really wants to have a terrorist organization enclaved right between them.

Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable to, if people would focus on building up livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions. If that would’ve gone into education or innovation, what could have been done.

So, I think that it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.

But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.

Should the US Recognize a Palestinian State

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, yeah. I mean, okay, there’s a lot to talk about there. The last thing I wanted to just get your reaction to on this is the… you saw Tom Friedman’s column on Tuesday about where he put forward a plan to get out of this, and it’s called, “Only MBS and Biden can Redirect the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” He says, “Biden should recognize the Palestinian authority unilaterally as a state, and MBS should go to Jerusalem like Egyptian President Anwar Sadat did in 1977. He should say, I’ll normalize with Israel. I’ll recognize West Jerusalem as your capital, and I’ll even pay to rebuild Gaza if you recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.” What do you think? Good idea?

Jared Kushner: No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think that there’s certain elements of it that are correct. I think proactively recognizing a Palestinian state would essentially be rewarding an act of terror that was perpetrated to Israel. So, it’s a super bad idea in that regard.

The way that we did it was a little bit inverted from there. So, when we were working on the Palestinian issue, which we spent a lot of time on, and up until October 7th, the Biden administration really did not burn a lot of calories on it. They basically said, this is a lost effort, we shouldn’t spend time on it, but we spent a lot of time developing a plan.

You go online, go Google Peace to Prosperity, you’ll find the plan that we put out in the White House, about 180 pages, very detailed. We started out, I met with the Palestinian negotiators, the Israeli negotiators, and I asked them basically a form of simple questions.

First identify, what are these people actually fighting over for 70 years? It came down to a list of 11 issues, of which there were only really three of them. One was the land barrier. I looked down and I said, well, any outcome is arbitrary, to compromise between two positions. You have the religious sites where they threw in a lot of issues like sovereignty. Does sovereignty belong to God? Does it belong to this? You have basically two sites, one under the other that both religions think is very critical to them. But I said, well, what do we really want if we get all the technical people out of the room? What we want is people to have the ability to pray freely. If you think about Israel, Jerusalem was really controlled by Jordan until the 1967 war.

1967 War

Israel took over; it was a defensive war. Israel was attacked by Jordan. They basically came in, attacked by Egypt and Jordan.

Tarek Masoud: Preemptive.

Jared Kushner: Preemptive, but Egypt was amassing all of its planes on the border. Jordan had given over its military under the control of the Iraqis at the time. So, what they did is they did a preemptive attack, they knocked out the Egyptian Air Force. They sent message to the Jordanians saying, please do not attack us. The Jordanians started mortaring in.

They basically then went over; they took over Jerusalem. They were surprised they got so far, and they kept going and were able to go all the way to the sea. So, that was the history of where that was. But before then, no Jews were allowed to pray in Jerusalem.

Then you basically had a situation where a lot of the Jewish cemeteries, a lot of the religious sites were used as places to store animals. They were really desecrated in bad ways. Israel then wins the war. Israel’s a very, very poor country at the time. What did they do? The first thing they do is they pass something called the Protection of Holy Places Law, which basically took money that they really didn’t have at the time and said, we’re going to restore all of the religious sites. So, if you think about it, from 1967 until today, Israel’s been a fairly responsible steward of all these religious sites for Christians, Jews, Muslims.

Every now and then you have tussles when people try to take it. They’ve allowed King Abdullah to be the custodian of the mosque. If you think about that second issue, it’s really just about allowing people to live freely.

The third issue that I thought was critical was really just security. You think about it, I mean, we think about it with different countries, but imagine you’re the governor of New Jersey. Then there’s people in Pennsylvania who are trying to cross the border and kill your people. You have to make a deal where you’re making it less likely they’re going to be able to harm your people than more. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to win an election and it’s not a prudent thing to do. So, those are really only the three issues that mattered.

So, what we did is we basically went and we said, asked each side, if you were the other side, what would you accept?

I found we weren’t getting anywhere so I started giving them much more detailed plan to react to.

We started going back and forth. It ended up turning into a 50-page operational plan on how to run things. By the way, you’ll find most people in politics don’t want to put details out because details you get attacked, when I got attacked even for taking my job. So I, after the third day, stopped caring about being attacked.

So, I basically said, let me start putting things out and get people to react to it. So, that was the first part, which was the political part.

The second thing we put together was an economic plan because as I was progressing down that road, I said, okay, let’s say miraculously I get people to agree on borders. Let’s say I get them to agree on a security regime. Let’s say I get them to agree that we could all pray properly and respect each other. Then what happens the next day? A lot of the region, a lot of what Israel’s been used for has been a scapegoat, I believe, from leaders in the region to basically deflect from their own shortcomings at home. So, I felt like most human beings want the ability to live a better life, and if we can create an economic plan that would basically allow people to live a better life, then maybe that would give them an ability to actually start focusing on the future, how to make their kids’ lives better, instead of focusing on, how do we solve problems in the past? So, that was really what we put together, and so that was really a framework for how we thought we could make progress. So, what Tom’s talking about is basically saying, why don’t we recognize a Palestinian state?

When we were looking at a Palestinian state, the problem we saw there was basically that they didn’t have really institutions that can govern. I mean, the last person actually who did a good job governing there is actually here. It’s Salam Fayyad. He was doing such a good job, he wasn’t corrupt. People were making more money; the services were being delivered. He did such a good job that the leadership basically saw him as a threat and figured out how to run him out of town. I don’t know if I’m speaking for you, but it did.

Tarek Masoud: I think he might also say the Israelis didn’t help them either. But anyways, we’ll go.

Jared Kushner: These are also complicated. I mean, that’s true.

Tarek Masoud: That’s one word.

Jared Kushner: But what I would say here is that for a Palestinian state when we looked at it, you say, what are the prerequisites that people need to live a better life? Number one is you need a functioning judiciary. You need a business climate. You need property rights. You need reasons for people to invest capital in order to order to give people an opportunity to grow. So, those conditions really don’t exist. So, the Palestinian leadership really has not passed any of the tests over the last 30 years in order to, I think, qualify for it.

Now, I do think the notion of a Palestinian state that doesn’t have the ability to harm Israel from a security perspective is a worthy objective, but I think you need to figure out, how do you make them earn it? At least have a viable pathway towards creating the institutions that can make it thrive and viable, because if you call it a state and then people, their lives are less good in five years from now, people will be angry and that will lead to more violence and conflict.

How Did We Get to October 7th?

Tarek Masoud: Okay, so there’s a lot of threads to pull on here. So the first thread I just want to pull on is, you offered a diagnosis for how we got to October 7th, and your diagnosis is basically the Biden administration by allowing the Iranians to amass more wealth and spend it on their proxies, that’s how you get October 7th. If President Trump had been in charge, none of that would’ve happened; the Iranians would’ve continued to be starved of resources, et cetera. I’m correct on interpreting that hypothesis?

Jared Kushner: Yeah. I’ll add one more element, which is they squandered momentum. What I would say is whether it’s in business, whether it’s in politics, momentum is one of the most valuable things to try to seek. It’s funny, I was talking, I wrote about it in my book; actually, with Bibi, that I was with him after he lost an election, not a lost election, he was trying to form a coalition. Somebody put a knife in his back and he basically lost it.

I was with him the next day. We thought we were going to announce something and move forward, and he was pretty despondent. We met the next day, and he would basically, I figured, let me ask him questions about his history, his story. I mean, he’s a historic figure that’s been through so many different iterations, and he told me, “When I was a politician, I have bad patches. I would always try to get little wins because little wins lead to bigger wins and then bigger wins and momentum is a very hard thing to get.”

We left the region with momentum. Again, the last piece, so we got Bahrain to do the deal with Israel. Saudi was basically watching this all very closely. We got Saudi to allow us to put flights over Saudi Arabia between Israel and UAE.

Then in addition to that, they’ve said, we need you to solve the issue with us in Qatar. So, we went through, we got that negotiation done, which was very, very intense.

So, I finished that on January 5th and then flew back to the US, thinking I would have a very quiet last couple of weeks in office. That turned out to be the case. So, basically, everything was good. What they could have done was then said, let’s sit with Saudi. Let’s go finish the job. Let’s finish the momentum. So, they basically changed policy, and I think that led to a reversion of momentum. They waited two years to get started, and then get a stronger Iran, less trust, and I think that also contributed to it as well.

Was October 7th the Result of Neglect of the Palestinian Issue under Trump?

Tarek Masoud: Okay, so what would you say to the alternative hypothesis that says, actually, the reason we got October 7th is because the strategy that you had for peacemaking, which whose creativity I’m not going to question, it was quite creative, but by essentially neglecting the core of the issue, the Palestinians’ desire to determine their own fate, that you just created the circumstances where the rejectionists would have the upper hand. That this is basically not the result of Iran or whatever, it’s a result of the fact that the Trump administration spent four years completely ignoring, isolating, bypassing the Palestinians, handing them defeat after defeat after defeat. Then what do you expect? You’re surprised when they act out?

Jared Kushner: Right. So, what I would say to that is that whoever would say that, that we didn’t address the root cause of the situation, I don’t think truly understood what the root cause of the situation actually is. This is what was actually so intriguing to me and what made me very insecure about my job in the beginning was that I came into this with, like I said, no foreign policy experience.

Everyone who was criticizing was probably right, but I think my father-in-law, who’s the President, basically said, it can’t get any worse. He can’t do any worse than the last people who worked on it for 10 or 15 years and all failed, and then basically went and wrote books about how they didn’t fail.

It’s just that the problem was too hard, and then somehow, they move on and they are considered the experts on the situation, having had zero accomplishments on this file.

So, that’s the underlying function of what you’re talking about. I saw this very simple, and actually when I went to the United States, the UN Security Council, because always trying to condemn Israel on everything, it was very anti-Semitic, I think the way that they conduct their business there.

I basically made a PowerPoint presentation. I don’t know if anyone’s ever made them a PowerPoint presentation, but coming from the business world, I said, maybe I can try to explain to these people why this is a rational thing in a very realistic place. I actually put this slide in my book where I basically made a slide from Oslo Accords up until that day, where I showed two lines going this way. Then I had a dove for every time there was a peace talk that failed.

Then I had a tank for every time there was a war. The two lines represented the following things: One was the settlements; so, basically the land that Israel was taking. Then the other one represented money going to the Palestinians. So, what happened was, is every time a peace talk failed or a war occurred, the same two things occurred. The Palestinians got more money and the Israelis took more land. So, both sides essentially got what they wanted.

So, neither I thought had a really motivation to make the deal based on their own politics and their own interests. Then the second thing was, is I looked at it and I said, these issues actually are not that hard to solve. Which again, a lot of people laughed at me for saying that, but I basically said, we have to figure out how to just push this forward.

So, when I looked at the Palestinian leadership, I basically said it’s like… And there’s a lot of other situations of refugee groups; they just haven’t been able to internationalize their situation. The Palestinians were getting $3 or $4 billion a year in international aid. We had a meeting in Washington with Bibi Netanyahu. They have a $500 billion GDP economy; they’re a nuclear power, military superpower, a technology superpower.

He would fly in on an El-Al commercial plane with his team. We’d meet with the head of a refugee group, Mohammed Abbas, and he would fly into Washington on a $60 million Boeing business jet. I mean, the whole thing was strange. I went and I met with him one night.

We’re talking about different issues and he wants a cigarette. He puts a cigarette in his mouth. So, someone comes in and they light the cigarette for him. I’m saying to myself, is this guy run a refugee group or is he a king? So, the whole situation, I thought, was designed for them not to solve it.

Again, a lot of people were getting rich there, a lot of interests were being fed, and not a lot of people were doing it.

So, what we basically said is, we’re going to actually address the issue. We’re not going to deal with the systems of the issue, we’re going to try to address the issue. I think that was what we actually tried to do.

Why is Kushner’s Assessment of Mahmoud Abbas so Different from Trump’s?

Tarek Masoud: Okay, so there’s a lot to pull on here too, with respect to Mohammed Abbas. So, I’m going to just stipulate at the outset, some of my favorite bits of this book are your descriptions of conversations with Mohammed Abbas. I’m not on his list of fans, but let me quote somebody who is on his list of fans, your father-in-Law. So, he told Barak Ravid, “Abbas: I thought he was terrific. He was almost like a father. Couldn’t have been nicer. I thought he wanted to make a deal more than Netanyahu.”

What was your father-in-law getting wrong?

Jared Kushner: Well, I think he was saying relative.

Tarek Masoud: Okay, relative.

Jared Kushner: Relative, so.

Tarek Masoud: Okay, relative to Netanyahu though.

Jared Kushner: His view on Bibi was that Bibi was always working something. I think that he did not have faith that Bibi would come through, but I also think he was in his mind trying to challenge Bibi to say, you’re not going to come through, you’re not going to come through, to make Bibi prove to him that he was going to come through. That was the way we were setting the table. So, what we did is we did things that we wanted to do anyway.

President Trump campaigned that he was going to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. His view was, is Israel’s a sovereign nation, America’s a sovereign nation, they have the right to determine their capital and we have the right to recognize their capital. Move the embassy to Jerusalem, Golan Heights. I mean, who are you taking it from? Syria barely existed at the time and Israel had occupied it for a long time.

Recognizing Golan wasn’t that big of a deal. So, we did all these things that built a lot of trust for us with the Israeli public.

What happened was, is because of that, the Israeli public trusted President Trump, he got out of the JCPOA, he was strong on Iran. He felt that he had the ability to say this is a fair deal, and push Bibi to that place. A boss would come and in the meetings he would say, “We’re going to do a deal with you. We’re going to do a special deal. I’m going to do things for you like I’ve never done for anybody else. We’re going to make a deal.
We really want to do it.”

I’d be like, oh, that’s amazing. So, that was my first meeting. I walked away and be like, that was incredible. This guy is great.

Then I went from my second meeting, I go all the way to Ramallah. I go in, it’s, I’m thinking to myself, how is a Jewish kid from New Jersey here in Ramallah?

I got all the security guards. Then I meet with him again and I say, “Okay, well, I’m ready to talk borders. What are we going to do? What’s your proposal? I want you to tell me what would you do that you think the Israelis would accept?”

“Jared, we’re going to make a deal. We’re going to make the best deal. I’m going to make a special deal for you.”

I’m saying myself, I really want to get into the details here.

My father-in-Law’s not a very patient person. What I found was it was like a broken record. What I realized, if you go back, what I did at some point, I read actually Jimmy Carter’s book, which was interesting. I really wanted to get the full-

Tarek Masoud: Peace, not Apartheid [Palestine: Peace not Apartheid], or something like that.

Jared Kushner: Peace, not Apartheid. Yeah, I tried to get everywhere from Dory Gold to Jimmy Carter. I really tried to get the spectrum of perspectives. In the back of it, he had in the annex, the Camp David Peace Agreement.

I was reading through the agreement. I was like, I actually should go read all the different drafts of agreements and let me go read some peace agreements to see what they actually are.

Everyone’s there trying to negotiate, but I said, let me go read some.

So, then as I pulled up all of the different agreements that have been done, I saw the Arab Peace Initiative, and that’s what Abbas said, “I want to align with the Arab Peace Initiative.” So, I pulled up the Arab Peace Initiative and it was 10 lines and it had no detail, and it was a concept, and it was generated in a different place.

One of the tenets of it was, we want a capital in East Jerusalem. So, I had a guy on my team who was awesome, a guy Scott Lith, he was a military guy, and I said, he worked for John Kerry. His whole life has been working on this issue, but he was from the State Department, which was a much more, a different perspective than say a former business guy who’s more of a pragmatist would have.

East Jerusalem as Palestinian Capital

I asked him, I said, “Well, where does the Palestinian claim for East Jerusalem come from?”

Tarek Masoud: You mean East Jerusalem as a capital?

Jared Kushner: As a capital, yes.

Tarek Masoud: Not as belonging to them.

Jared Kushner: Sorry, as a capital. I said, “Where does that come from?” He says, “I actually don’t know.” I said, “Okay, well, go research and get back to me.”

Normally he’d be back in my office in two hours. He didn’t come back for two days. He basically came back and he says, “You know what, Jared? This is very interesting.” He said, “Before the Palestinians said that they were in charge of the West Bank,” which basically was the declaration, which I think was in the late ’80s?

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, late ’88.

Jared Kushner: Late ’80s, right?

Tarek Masoud: ’88, I think.

Jared Kushner: So, until then, the Palestinian lands were basically territory of Jordan. Jordan, the Palestinians were basically fighting with the Jordanians causing problems there, and the Jordanians basically said, we’ve had enough of these people, let’s get them out of here. They basically exiled Yasser Arafat to Lebanon, where he went there, caused a lot of trouble, they exiled him to Tunisia.

So, during that time when the Palestinians were in the West Bank, their capital was Amman.

So, he’s saying, actually, it was just through this declaration of the Palestinians when they said, this is how we’re forming our charter. This is what our rights are. They just said, and we’re taking East Jerusalem as our capital. So, it was just one of these things that came down.

Tarek Masoud: Declaring East Jerusalem as their capital.

Jared Kushner: Declare, yeah.

Tarek Masoud: In other words, East Jerusalem was always going to be part of what a Palestinian state was because they had never ceded it.

Jared Kushner: Yeah, part, but what I would say about that, and this is also another notion, is that, again, because a lot of, you’ll hear people throw around a lot of words like they’ll throw apartheid or East Jerusalem [inaudible]. My view is, these words are always up here.

Then again, somebody who wasn’t part of the club of foreign policy experts, I said, well, explain this to me. East Jerusalem, the boundaries of East Jerusalem have changed eight times over the course of history as well.

So, when they were saying that, I said, oh, well, there’s new, maybe we could expand East Jerusalem, give them a different part of it. So, it’s one of these things that if you’re pragmatic about it, there’s ways to solve a lot of these different issues, if you want to do it.

What we found with Abbas was that there wasn’t a great desire to engage because he was protecting the status quo, which was leading to lots of inflows of money.

Challenging Kushner’s Assessment of Abbas

Tarek Masoud: Okay, so I do not want to be the guy defending Abbas to just make this interesting. Let me-

Jared Kushner: I like him, personally.

Tarek Masoud: Let me offer you the alternative argument. First of all, there’s a really amazing negotiator who said you always let the other guy go first. Who was that? Oh, it was Jared Kushner, it’s in this book. Okay. So, you go to Abbas and you say, Hey, draw a map for me. A smart negotiator is going to say, Hey, the map is resolution 242, the entire West Bank. If you’ve got an offer you want to make, go ahead, but I’m certainly not going to negotiate against myself. Why didn’t you recognize that that’s what he was doing?

Jared Kushner: Yeah, so that’s what I saw was this kid’s situation. So, what I did was, since both parties were doing that, I just went and started drawing my own map. I basically said, okay, I don’t really care what happened before, because if you think about the Middle East, a lot of it’s just arbitrary lines drawn by foreigners anyway. You go back to Sykes-Picot, and you could argue that there’s a lot of lines.

Again, as I started unraveling this history, I was realizing that a lot of this was not as logical or as sacrosanct as everyone thought it was. So, what I basically said is I said, okay, let me come up with a 2017 version.

What I’m basically going to do is look at, say, if you go back to 2006, Israel unilaterally withdrew all of their settlers from Gaza, and it was a political disaster. What did they get for it? They left all these greenhouses; they left all this industry. It was all destroyed. They ended up with a group, with a terrorist group took over, and then since then they’ve
been firing rockets into Israel and Israel’s been less safe because of their withdrawal, and October 7th proved that.

But this was even before that. I said, there is no way Israel’s uprooting any of these settlers. So, I said, let me just say if I want to give the Palestinians a state, let me figure out how can I draw a line and just take all the places where they’re settlers and just make a new line here, and then figure out, how do you swap land here and there?

Then make whatever’s not continuous, continuous today. You got tunnels, you got bridges, all these different things. How do you make it connectable so that it could be a functioning state? Then go from there. So, I started drawing a line, and then I figured I’d let each party react to it one way or the other.

We ended up putting it out. Again, I fought a lot with Bibi and his team, through showing him the map. You can’t have this; you can’t have that.

I said, okay, let’s move the line here and there, but that was how I started. I was never able to get the Palestinians to engage off of that map to say, we want this, but.

Did Kushner make Abbas an Offer He could not Accept?

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, so this is interesting. I mean, obviously you’re a great negotiator. I’m a fat professor who’s never even negotiated his salary properly, but-

Jared Kushner: That’s usually what the people who are doing well say, by the way.

Tarek Masoud: But the way you present, I did think it was, you really deserve a lot of credit for getting Benjamin Netanyahu to put down on paper the borders of a Palestinian state that he would accept. Okay, you’re the first person to really get them to do that.

Jared Kushner: Not just him; we got the opposition during a heated election to agree to them as well.

Tarek Masoud: To agree to it, to agree to it.

Jared Kushner: A massive step forward.

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, massive step forward. One of the great things that you say in this book, by the way, which I actually think is exculpatory of the Palestinians, is you say, everybody says, Camp David 2000, the Palestinians walked away from a really detailed agreement. There wasn’t a detailed agreement. So, that’s actually a little bit exculpatory for the Palestinians, but in any case, you finally get Benjamin Netanyahu to put down on paper, what he will accept.

Jared Kushner: Just from my research, I was not able to find any text of a deal that was anywhere near close to a negotiation. I also thought the power dynamics were different, where is what I was told is that Arafat was basically not being supported by the Arabs. The Arabs wanted to keep this thing alive and they didn’t want him to make a deal.

Whereas today, when we got in, I recognized the different dynamic, where the Arabs I felt wanted him to finish this, which gave me a lot more ability to lean into things.

Tarek Masoud: Yeah, that’s interesting, but the point is, so you’ve got now Benjamin Netanyahu’s drawn the map. Why do you not take this to Abbas or why do you not announce this as the American plan to which the Israelis have signed on? You are the American; you’ve got this position as the broker between these two parties. Why didn’t you go back to Abbas and say, okay, here’s what the Israeli position? Then let Abbas say, okay, no, I don’t like this border, I don’t like that. Then why didn’t you do it that way?
Why did you present it in such a way where it looked like what you were trying to do was to give him an offer he couldn’t accept, so that you could then say to the other Arabs, ah, this guy’s a rejectionist, I did my best. Can we now conclude some peace deals directly between you and the Israelis and leave these Palestinians on the side?

Jared Kushner: I’ll try to do this answer as short as possible, but it’s going to be a little one. So, number one, what I tried to do is set up the situation. So, when we moved the embassy to Jerusalem, Abbas and his team said, we’re not talking to you guys anymore. After a couple months, they came back. We kept the security cooperation going, but he broke ties with us diplomatically. I remember at the time, Rex Tillerson, who was the Secretary of State, said, “We’ve got to go do something. Let’s give East Jerusalem. Let’s do this because these guys are going to run away and we’re not going to hear from them again for another decade.”

I said, “Rex, we’re not doing it.” He said, “Why?” I said, “They’ve trained American negotiators over time to say, jump, and we say, how high?”

When have American negotiators bowed to Palestinian demands?

Tarek Masoud: I read that in the book, and I thought that was an extraordinary. Give me an example of where we said to the Palestinians, you told us jump and we did it.

Jared Kushner: Everything with me was a threat. “We’re going to withdraw from the negotiation.” I said, “Who cares? We give you guys $700 million a year. I don’t care.” My view is, if you’re going to come and do it, great. If not, we’re going to stop funding you guys. But that’s how we’re going to set the dynamic. So, then the second thing I did was I said, “We’re not going to allow you to control whether we can negotiate this or not.” So, because they withdrew, I said, “Okay, I could stop.” Now, the good news is I had other files to work on.

I wasn’t a sole person, but the reason why the U.S were trained to chase them is usually it was an envoy whose sole job it was to deal with the Israelis and the Palestinians. And the Palestinians said, “We’re not negotiating.” He had nothing to do. For me, I said, “Okay, I’ll work on other things. That’s okay. I have other jobs here.”

And so, what we basically did was we went and we started pushing forward with the plan.

And my thinking was, as I was speaking to the Arabs, they said, “Get an honest plan on paper from Israel and we will try to push the Palestinians to take it.”

Because they basically said, we want this thing resolved. So, they said, if you can put a credible offer, and they did not believe that we can get Bibi or United Israel to put forward a credible plan, I said, “Good, let’s do it.” Again, I was always willing to chase the crazy things and I kind of liked it.

And again, I felt like this was very important. So going after and trying to settle things I thought was critical.

So, we worked hard with Israel. We kept negotiating with them to get them more and more. I didn’t take them all the way to where I thought we could have gone. Security wise, I was in full agreement with everything we put in our plan. Again, I really was very sympathetic to Israel.

You can’t make a peace deal and then be less safe the next day. You do a deal so that you’re more safe. So that was number one.

The borders, I felt like we should just be super pragmatic about it. And there was a couple of things in there that I knew we could swap around. So, I left some meat on the bone for Abbas. I’m going to get to the answer to your question. So, I kind of left some meat on the bone.

Then when we announced the plan; so first of all, we surprised everyone by getting Israel to put out a very detailed plan.

We had a unified Israeli government supporting it. We got very positive statements from the Arab country saying, we encourage both sides to negotiate on the base of this plan, which diplomatically, was actually a very big step forward in the diplomatic world.

Then what I did is I had the CIA deliver to Abbas a copy of the plan with a note from us right beforehand, basically saying, this is the plan we’re putting out. We have built a lot of goodwill with Israel. We are willing to use that goodwill to try to make a fair deal that we think can resolve this.

Tarek Masoud: That’s the question I’m asking. So, why that framing? Why didn’t you say, here’s what the Israelis are offering. Give me your counteroffer. Why didn’t you do that?

Jared Kushner: That’s essentially what the letter said, right? The letter basically from the president said, we’re happy to chat. And basically we said, look, we’re happy to chat. We’re moving forward with this. We had to set the dynamic where the train was moving forward with or without him, and this is what I do believe, too. They were very isolated. They were basically running out of cash. Iran was running out of cash, and we had the only thing on the table. The Abraham Accords were now starting to collapse the pocket around them.

And so basically what we were doing is we were trying to eliminate all of his escape paths and build him a golden bridge. And then basically, at some point we figured he’d go over the bridge.

Did Kushner Prove Hamas and Others Right?

Tarek Masoud: I feel like the natural response to that is very clever deal making. I certainly would not want to be on the opposite side of a real estate transaction with you. But what you weren’t recognizing is that Abbas has people to his right, he’s got Hamas that he’s got to contend with, and you were just making it absolutely impossible for him to make a deal with you. And all you were doing here is just proving the rejectionist point and making the average Palestinian think, yeah, absolutely. America has no intention of actually being an honest broker or getting us a good deal.
Look what they’re doing to Abbas, who is their ally. So then, maybe the only path is the path of this violent resistance.

Jared Kushner: So, I hope you’re saying that in the context of being provocative or devil’s advocate-

Tarek Masoud: Yes, yes.

Jared Kushner: Because my sense is that’s the total conventional way of thinking about this. And again, I’m saying this openly. I was criticized by all of the conventional players on this because I did not approach this-

Tarek Masoud: But October 7th happened.

Jared Kushner: Right. But let me go back to that point. So, the point there is that the other version of what was said is that if you move the MC to Jerusalem, the Middle East is going to have a war. That was the US intelligence assessment. That was what Abbas said. That’s what every leader in the region said. If you get out of the JCPOA, the world’s going to end. If you move the embassy, the world’s going to end.

Well, every time we did one of those things, we worked to mitigate the risk. And what happened the next day? The sun rose in the morning and it set in the evening, and nothing happened. We had little things, we managed them. It was no big deal. So, our thinking was is that if you’re going to say that Abbas can’t engage with us and try to make a compromise because Hamas is to his other side, we thought the best way to empower him over Hamas was to make him the guy who delivered investment, upside, compromise, better life for the people. And that’s how we read the situation back in 2019, 2020.

And I still believe at that moment our assessment was correct.

Why did Kushner not Try to Build Capital with the Palestinians?

Tarek Masoud: Yeah. I want to move on to other issues, but I just want to, when I look at the way you negotiated with Bibi, okay, so you mentioned, for example, to move the embassy to Jerusalem, for example. Every time you made one of these decisions and President Trump would say, Hey, what am I getting for this? You want me to move the embassy to Jerusalem, what’s Bibi going to give me? Oh, you want me to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan? I’ve already done enough for Bibi. Why am I going to do this? And every time you would say to the president, Hey, hey, hey, we’re building capital with the Israelis. We’re building capital with Bibi. Why weren’t you trying to build capital with the Palestinians?

Jared Kushner: First of all, Israel was the much stronger party. And so, at the end of the day, we felt like getting the right pragmatic compromises out of them would take the capital and we would have to convince them that the compromises we were going to ask them to take, we genuinely believed were in their interests.

Keep in mind, all of the things we did for Bibi were things that we thought were the right things to do. So, he was a political beneficiary of them. He would tout them for his domestic and international popularity. But the reality is, we were doing things that we thought were the right things to do.

Why didn’t Kushner get Netanyahu to Freeze Settlements?

Tarek Masoud: Why didn’t you at least get him to freeze settlements? Say like, Hey, I’m going to give you Jerusalem. I’m going to recognize the Golan.

Jared Kushner: If you notice with us, the settlements were basically contained to areas. He did pro forma stuff, but nothing that was that radical. He didn’t go too crazy with us in the settlements.

Tarek Masoud: Okay.

Jared Kushner: But again, our strategy was basically have the tough conversations quietly, figure out how to mitigate. Again, you could have disagreement, but let’s focus on the big things. I remember I got a call from David Friedman, who’s our ambassador to Israel and said, “Oh, Jared, we have to deal with this. Two Israelis were [inaudible].” I said, “David, stop chasing rabbits.” I said, “Our job is not to solve every single domestic Israeli issue. Our job is to focus on the elephants. The elephants are slower, they’re bigger. Let’s focus on the root cause of this. If we solve the root causes of the disease, the symptoms all go away. If you spend all of your time chasing the symptoms, you’re going to wear yourself out, you’re not going to get anywhere.” And that’s what a lot of people did before us. So, we stayed very laser-focused on how do we make both sides uncomfortable to try and create an outcome.

And I’ll just say this too, Middle East peace is like a butt of jokes for many years. We actually did get some peace agreements done, which is pretty incredible. But you’re basically saying, Jared, go work on probably one of the most impossible, complex, emotionally charged problem sets in the history of the world. And so my view was, it wasn’t like you could look at it on one of your homework sets.

Okay, this is the right answer, the wrong answer. You have a million different wrong answers and maybe one or two potential answers that could work out well. And so like I said, we inherited the hand we got and we just played the cards as hard as we could. And I do think by the time we left, we left it in a very, very strong place. And we had more time, again, I don’t want to sound like one of these guys who leaves government saying this, but I did have a lot of track, my track record of success in the Middle East I do think is second to none over the last many years.

And so I do firmly believe that we put the situation in a paradigm where it was much closer to being solved than it had ever been before.

Why Does Kushner not See Netanyahu as an Obstacle to Peace?

Tarek Masoud: I’m going to just do one last question on Bibi because I started this by saying you and your father-in-law disagree about Abbas. You also disagree about Bibi. And I guess what I’m trying to understand, because I read your book, I don’t know why you still have a soft spot for Bibi. Like this is a guy who, Trump says, I don’t think he ever wanted to make peace.

You tell a story where Netanyahu acts incredibly dishonorably, where when you’re rolling out the peace plan, he gets up and just starts thanking the United States for agreeing to Israeli annexation of these bits of the West Bank that Israel, in your plan, would only get after the deal is agreed to by the other side.

And you even say, when you first started talking to Netanyahu about a deal, he says, no, thanks.

And you even note, he says to you, look, I’ve survived as Prime Minister for 11 years by opposing a Palestinian state. So, this, to me, he’s a guy who just purely, in your book, seems pretty sneaky, kind of like an obstructionist, a rejectionist. And yet, you talk about him in the book, towards the end you say he could be a powerful catalyst for change. And I’m thinking to myself, yeah, it seems to me he was more an obstacle to the kind of change that you wanted and the U.S wanted, which was to see a solution to the Palestinian issue. So, what am I and your father-in-law getting wrong about this guy?

Jared Kushner: So first of all, I think that there definitely is brilliance to him, and I think he’s definitely committed himself to Israel for a very long time.

Some would argue maybe now too long, but I think he’s done a lot of good in his time. And my general view is, I was able to find ways to work things through with him. He didn’t always make my life easy, but that wasn’t his job.

My job wasn’t to make his life easy either. So again, I understood his complications, I understood his flaws, and I understood his brilliance, and I was able, and I just found it, and again, maybe I’m more malleable. I’m able to work with complicated people very well, that’s maybe one of the things throughout all my different careers I’ve been good at. But I found that I was able to get the best out of him in order to accomplish the things that I thought were in the best interests of America and the region.

Tarek Masoud: So, in other words, just bottom line on this, you are not one of the people who sees Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace?

Jared Kushner: I think that anyone who is a leader in the region can be both part of the problem and part of the solution. And I think that the job of those involved is to try to pull the best out of everyone to create the best possible outcome possible.

Tarek Masoud: I definitely…

Jared Kushner: I know I’m being a little evasive with that, but I think it really can depend on the day, and I think it depends on how you work with him to get the best out of him.

Tarek Masoud: No, I love that.

Jared Kushner: It’s in there. It’s in there. That is what I’m saying.

Tarek Masoud: I love that. I love that. It’s clear from the book you did that with Netanyahu, but you gave up on Abbas really quickly.

Jared Kushner: I didn’t give up. I was just taking a posture of, we’re not going to chase you. But I think, for him, I set a very delicious table where if he would’ve come and engaged, I had a couple goodies in my pocket that I could have done, and I think I set the table for him to make a deal, have some big victories in negotiation, have $50 billion of investment, create a million new jobs, double the GDP, reduce the poverty rate, create a real country. You know what I mean? So, I think I set him up to be a hero.

Look, there’s one book I read about him, which actually I had a different assessment of him than the CIA. And I actually bought this book and gave it to the CIA after I read it, which was called The Last Palestinian, which was really incredible. And throughout his life, again, this is my assessment as just somebody who ended up in this job, was that throughout his life, he actually was for peace. He was for nonviolence. He hung around a lot of bad characters and was always on that side. But I do think that after they lost Gaza to Hamas in 2006, you basically had two non-states with two non-governments. And I think after that, he just went inward and his whole focus moved to survival and staying in power and keeping the kleptocracy running. I think after that, it was more about how do I set this up to just survive. And he became afraid of making peace and taking the risks necessary. That was kind of my assessment, which made him a little bit of a harder character to deal with.

Why was Recognizing Israel’s Annexation of Golan the “Right Thing to Do?”

Tarek Masoud: We could probably talk about him for much longer, but we shouldn’t. You saw the Vanity Fair story that talks about you as a potential future Secretary of State. I don’t know if people saw the New York Sun story from January that proposed your name for president of Harvard. But so what I want to do is I kind of want to, I want to understand how you think about international relations. And the Golan story gives us a nice entry point into that.

So, March, 2019, you encouraged President Trump to recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. And basically you say, acknowledging the reality that the Golan Heights belonged to Israel was the right thing to do. And I remember I read that thing and I thought, wow, Jared Kushner is talking about the right thing to do. I’m a realist in international relations. I would’ve guessed that you were as well. It’s like there’s no right or wrong. It’s like interests. So, what was the moral principle that was being satisfied by recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan?

Jared Kushner: Sure. So even with all these jobs, my number one job that I’m focused on right now is being dad to my kids. That’s something after four years of very intense time in government. That’s the most important job I have now.

Tarek Masoud: That’s your way of saying you don’t want to be Secretary of State?

Jared Kushner: That’s my job. That’s my way of saying I’m really liking the job I have right now. It’s really important.

So, what I would say is that the way that I kind of approach foreign policy, and again, this came from not really having any experience in foreign policy, was basically saying every problem set I got almost, I think my disadvantage was that I didn’t have any context, and my advantage was that I didn’t have any context. So, I would always try to take a first principles result-oriented approach with the goal of being, how do you maximize human potential? And in order to maximize human potential, you need to figure out how you can reduce conflict, most of the time. And I always looked at everything and I say through that lens, what are the interests of different parties?

One thing I was also very good at, I think because I didn’t come in lecturing people. There’s a story I tell in the book where I went to meet with Mohammed bin Zayed, who’s now the president of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler. And I spent the first two hours basically asking him different forms of a question, which is, “The US has so much power, again, we are a massive global superpower. If you were me, what would you do?”

And it took him about an hour to basically understand the question I was doing because he was so not programmed to actually meet with somebody from the US who wanted his opinion.

And after an amazing conversation, because he’s a very, very wise and brilliant person, he basically said to me, “Jared, I think you’re going to make peace here in the region.”

And I said to him, I said, “Well, why do you say that?” He says, “Well, the US usually sends one of three kinds of people to see us. The first are somebody who comes and they fall asleep in meetings.” He says, “The second type of person they send is somebody who comes and they read me notes or a message and has no authority or power to interact and have a dialogue.” He said, “The third person they send are people with real authority, but they only really send them to come and try to convince me to do things that are not in my interests.” He says, “You’re the first person from the US at a senior level that’s ever come here and actually asked questions and listened.”

And I said to him, “Well, that’s because I really don’t know how to do this, and this is a really hard problem.” And so I said, “I appreciate all of the wisdom you can give me.”

So, it’s kind of a long way of saying that every problem I kind of looked at fresh. I was able to build trust with people, build real personal relationships. I always answered the phone. People had issues. I always believed successful people answer their phone and so I was always available. I didn’t always tell them, yes.

And I wasn’t keeping a score saying, I’m going to do this for you, but you have to do this for me. My general view was, I’m going to do all the things you need and you’re going to do all the things I need, and hopefully at the end of this relationship, we both feel like we’re way ahead. And so I was able to build a lot of trust.

I was able to kind of see things from another side’s perspective. I worked very hard to understand both side’s interests and say, where can we find common interests? And then the areas where we disagreed, instead of condemning people publicly, you’ll notice I didn’t do a lot of public talking. I didn’t think it was that helpful. I’m not very big on being negative towards people or being critical.

And so what I basically did was we would find ways when we disagreed to disagree respectfully and quietly, and then find ways to move forward.

Tarek Masoud: So, sorry, recognizing Golan’s annexation was the right thing to do because…

Jared Kushner: Well, it’s just obvious. I mean, number one, Israel had had it now for how many years? I guess they got in the ’73 War.

Tarek Masoud: Yes.

Jared Kushner: I believe so.

Tarek Masoud: [inaudible] I don’t remember it.

Jared Kushner: They had it for a long time. The ’67 War.

Tarek Masoud: Yeah.

Jared Kushner: The ’67 War. So, they basically had it since the ’67 War. Clearly, strategically, it was a big military, important. They had it, they weren’t giving … And then they’re saying, okay, who does it belong to? Syria. Syria, at the time, barely existed.

So, it was a big thing where it said, A, they’re never giving it up. B, Syria doesn’t exist. Let’s just recognize it. It moves things forward. And my view is the more of these what I would call stupid conflicts that we allowed to exist, the more it would be there. What I would say too is the Middle East has a lot of natural negative inertia to it. It’s been created over so many years. Maybe it’s the mixture of so many customs and traditions.

But I would say in 2017, what was new to the situation was really two things. One was President Trump and myself as a proxy and then MBS. And so with those two dynamics, we were able to disrupt the inertia and then really change the paradigm of what was there.

Tarek Masoud: You have this other line in the book where you say, “Recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan was a powerful opportunity for America to stand for the truth.” But that felt like very moral language. For example, I don’t imagine you would say, oh, let’s also stand for the truth of the fact that the One China policy doesn’t make any sense, and there actually should be an independent country called Taiwan. You wouldn’t stand for that truth.

Jared Kushner: Well, I think that that was a truth that didn’t conflict with one of our strategic interests.

Tarek Masoud: Okay, fair enough. Okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Jared Kushner: But I’ll tell you where we did do that. We did that in the Western Sahara. We recognized the Western Sahara as being part of Morocco because, again, we thought that was in our interests and it was true. And so it was just like one of these, and again, that has not been undone, too.

One thing I’m proud of with a lot of the work I did in government, people talk about how it was a divided time. Abraham Accords have been bipartisan praised, and now the Biden administration has followed our policy.

After two years, they’ve reversed course; they’re embracing Saudi Arabia. All the things we are doing, they’re now trying to do, which is I think a great affirmation of the policy. And it’s good. The prison reform, we did; 87 votes in the Senate. You look at the USMCA trade deal, [inaudible]. So, my view is if you pursue the things in the right way and you build consensus, you actually can move forward big things. So, Western Sahara, we did the right thing and we were able to then work hard to convince everyone to come on board.

Kushner’s Relationship with MBS

Tarek Masoud: We’re coming to the time where I have to take questions from the students, otherwise I will not make it out of here alive. But I wanted to ask you, just one last issue I wanted to describe. You talk about yourself as trying to move big things forward. Another person trying to move big things forward, who is a friend of yours is Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and I think you and I are in agreement that he’s probably one of the most consequential people in the world right now in terms of the magnitude of what he’s trying to do and in terms of how important it is for the world that he succeed.

But I think when I look at him and what he’s trying to do, there are some things that just kind of give me pause. And I’m asking you as a friend of his to help me understand why these things shouldn’t give me pause. So, I’m totally going to overlook the Jamal Khashoggi thing or the detention of the Lebanese Prime Minister or the Ritz-Carlton. Just looking at some of the developmental plans like The Line, which is this a hundred-mile-long linear city. And you are a real estate guy, does The Line make sense to you?
I look at this and I think this seems to me like a guy who’s got a lot of testosterone, and nobody who wants to tell him, no. What am I getting wrong?

Jared Kushner: Got it. So, he definitely has very high RPMs from the first time I met him. So, I’ll give a little bit of context. So, Mohammed bin Salman is now the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

When we were in the campaign in 2016, Trump was very tough on Saudi.
And then, I write in my book, if you want to go through and read, I was very, very rough with them when they came in trying to speak. And I said, look, we want nothing to do with you guys. You guys fund terrorism, you treat women terribly. You’re not ascribing to Western values. You got to pay for your own defense. You got to recognize Israel. We’re done. This is going to be a very rough, rough go. And they did not get along with Obama because Obama basically went to Persia and did the deal with Iran, which made all of our allies feel very alienated. So, they basically came back and said, no, no, no, we really, really value the U.S relationship. It’s been our strongest relationship forever. And we have this young Deputy Crown Prince who really wants to go forward and make a difference here, and he wants to change things.

And so then basically, we had a big debate internally, and he sent me a whole proposal through his guys, [inaudible] and Dr. Mosaad Al-Aiban. And they basically brought a proposal that basically said, we’re going to do all these modernizations. We’re going to get rid of the custodianship laws. We’re going to start allowing women to drive. And by the way, we’re not doing this for you. We’re doing this because we want to do it. We’re going to be eliminating the role of the religious police. At the time we had the Pulse nightclub shooting, we had the San Bernardino shooting. The biggest problem in 2016, a big issue in the campaign was really radicalization. ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio.

And the whole talking point was we needed to defeat the territorial caliphate of ISIS, and then we need to win the long-term battle against extremism. There was a real fear that these extremists were basically using online mechanisms to radicalize people all over the world. We needed to stop the flow of funds to terrorists. So, they came with a proposal saying, Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the two holy mosques is going to lean into this and help you create a whole center where we’re going to now single-handedly lead the fight with you, to fight online extremism and radicalization. And by the way, they never called it modernizing Islam. He would always say, I want to restore Islam. He says, these people who were the terrorists, the ISIS, they don’t represent Islam. They are basically doing awful things in the name of Islam, and they are giving us Muslims a bad name, and we are just as aligned with you.

Again, we don’t think Trump is against Muslims. We think he’s against Islamic extremists who pervert our religion. So, they came with this whole proposal; look, we’re going to do hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the US. We’re going to start paying for a lot more of our defense.

And it was like a dream come true from everything I thought Trump would like. They bring the proposal. Again, me knowing absolutely nothing about Saudi Arabia, nothing about foreign policy. I bring it to the national security team and I say, well, this is a proposal we got from Saudi. Is this interesting? This is, Jared. One of these things would be revolutionary. I say, well, they’re saying they’re going to do all of it if we kind of lean into the relationship.

So, then we go into the situation room to kind of assess what do we do with this? And I’m sitting with Secretary of Defense Mattis, Tillerson, John Kelly, Homeland Security. And, and Tillerson’s saying, “I’ve dealt with the Saudis all my life. I ran ExxonMobil. I know the Saudis. They never keep their word and they never come through. Jared, it’s a nice thing, but you’re a young, naive guy and it’s not going to go anywhere.”

I said, “Look, they’re putting it all in writing.” I said, “Why should we predetermine them to a future where nothing happens? If they’re saying they want to make these changes, let’s give them a little bit of rope.” So, we take it to the president and he’s doing a call with King Salman, and before the call, we’re having this debate. They say, “You’re going to deal with King Salman. We deal with his brother Mohammed bin Nayef, who’s the intelligence chief, and he’s a great ally for the U.S.”

And I said, “Well, if he’s such a good ally to the U.S, why do we have all these terrorist concerns with Saudi that you guys keep complaining about?”

And I said, “Look, I just want you to know I have a proposal from another guy there who’s the deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and he’s saying he wants to do all these things to really change, really big things, that will really make a difference.”

The call gets on the line. President Trump takes the call, speaks to King Salman. It was a pretty rough call because Trump, as you know, it can be very blunt. He basically says, “We want to see changes and we want to see them fast.”

And what King Salman basically says to him is, “We’re ready to lean in. We want to really strengthen the relationship with America. We did not like how it went before and we’re ready to do it.”

And so President Trump says, “Who should my team deal with?” And he says, “Deal with my son, the Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman.”

So, then he says, “Let him deal with Jared.” And the reason why he chose me for is because he knew the other guys weren’t believers, and they’d probably sabotage.

So, I get back to my desk and I have a note from him. We worked basically for 90 days straight to set up this trip. He sent his top guys to Washington. I got every single thing in writing. I couldn’t get people in the White House to come to the meetings to plan on the trip because they basically said, “This is going to be a disaster. We are all going to be embarrassed, and we want Jared to take the blame.”

We’re taking off for the trip. And I’m thinking to myself, why do I always do this to myself? We could have just gone to Mexico and cut a ribbon. What do I have to do this for? So, we go there, and I actually would encourage you to read or watch President Trump’s speech from Riyadh because he basically said, you’ll excuse my French. He says, “Look, I’m not going there to kiss ass.” He says, “I’m going there to kind of lay down markers and say, this is what needs to change and this is what we need to do.” He went there with a very tough, realistic speech, and he basically said, “This is not your problem. This is not our problem. This is all of our problems. We want to get these terrorists out of our homes. Get them out of our mosques. Let’s get them out of this world.” And it was very, very rough. And the king of Saudi Arabia gets up there and says, “There is no glory in death”, which also was a big statement.

So, I’m giving a long lead up to say, this is where we are. Over that visit, I had dinner with the Crown Prince, then the Deputy Crown Prince. I remember he said something to me, which was amazing, which he said, “My father’s generation, they were kind of in the desert. They really didn’t have a lot. And they look at the city of Riyadh today with airports and military, and they got so much further than they ever dreamed they could.” Or it’s in military and they got so much further than they ever dreamed they could. He says, “My generation, we look at all of the potential that our country has that’s not being sought after, and we see it as a big wasted opportunity. We want go to much, much higher heights. We believe in Saudi. I always say, there’s a reason why Saudi is such a big territory. They were amazing warriors back in the day. So, it’s an incredible people that have been very repressed through bad leadership for a long time. So, again, people were very surprised, the first reform, the second reform.

And keep in mind you had the religious police. People thought if he tried this stuff, they would kill him. And he was able to move so quickly on so many reforms that he’s freed that next generation.

When we did our conference in Bahrain in 2019, one of the challenges we had was finding role models for young Middle Eastern kids, young Palestinian kids, say, who are the new tech entrepreneurs? Who’s the Mark Zuckerberg or the Elon Musk that these kids should look up to? Now, I was in Saudi Arabia probably five months ago and I had a meeting with 30 tech entrepreneurs and this guy’s building the X of Saudi, the Y of Saudi, they’re building all these great startups and he’s unleashed a whole new generation of that.

He once said to me as well, something which was amazing where he said, because I was saying to him, “You’ve got all these ambitious projects.” I said, “Are you sure it’s a good thing to be doing all this?” Again, we’re friends and we’re able to have honest discussions with each other. We’ve had some tough discussions; we’ve had some fun discussions. But he basically looked at me and he said, “Jared,” he said, “Look, the way I view this is we have a country with amazing potential. As a leader, most leaders will say, let me do two or three things, and then you set low expectations and you achieve it and you declare success.” And he says, “That’s not my approach.” He says, “My approach is I want to take on a hundred things, and if I fail at 50 things, instead of looking back in five years and saying I accomplished three things, I’ll say I accomplished 50 things.”

And so I think he’s going forward in that way. So, if you want to look at the significance of him, and I’ll say this, the Khashoggi thing was an absolutely terrible situation, but I think the American media got very fixated on it. And it’s funny, I had a journalist, somebody who’s an editor of a magazine calls me because she was moderating a panel with some Saudi ministers and said, “Can you give me some advice on what I should ask him about?” And I said, “Well, let’s go away from the conventional stuff. Why don’t you talk about what it’s like to run a KPI driven government?” I said, “That would be a very interesting conversation.” It was a business conference.

Tarek Masoud: Key performance indicator [KPI].

Jared Kushner: Yeah. So, I said, “Look, you should go there and see what’s happening. It is one of the most exciting places now in the world.” And she says, “Oh, I can’t go there. My colleagues will kill me.” And so I’m saying to myself, well, that’s not curiosity and journalism. So, one of the biggest misperceptions I believe right now in America is the American journalists are not paying attention to what’s happening there, and it’s one of the most exciting transformations in the world.

And if you think about why I am a believer that in Gaza or in the West Bank, there’s hope to transform those societies and take the people who right now, people say, oh, they’re all radicalized. How can we transform them? Look what’s happened in Saudi Arabia over five years.

So, if you think about him in the context of the 21st century and how we’ll look at it, I think that I put half of it in the context of the amount of extremism and radicalization that we are not having to deal with because of the way that he’s taken Saudi Arabia in a different direction.

It’s funny, in politics, again, I look at some of the things we’re talking about saying, oh, well we’re going in and we’re solving a problem. We’re going and solving the border crisis that we basically created, right? Here, he’s spending a lot of time and effort and risk to have avoided what I think are massive potentially unovercomeable problems.

The other side of it is the contributions, and so there we’re kind of in the middle phase. I think he’s already accomplished, to be honest with you, from when I met him the first time and he told me about a lot of these dreams, I think he’s accomplished way more than I think anyone could have expected. And I think the cool thing is he’s just getting warmed up. And so now you think about these projects, he’s a very out of the box thinker. I see that he’s getting better and better. The ministers around him, again, they all sit around. It’s like sitting with the leadership team of a startup. They’re getting better and better. They’re competitive with each other, but in a friendly way. And I think that there’s a real ambition and an appetite for risk there that you don’t see in a lot of countries, and they have the resources and you think about the location. They have access to, in the Gulf right now, one of the reasons I’m so bullish there is you have access to the European market and to the US market, but then you have access to the Asian market where there’s massive, massive growth.

So, you look at the circumference around them, you have like 4 billion people and you have established markets, emerging markets, they have net surpluses because of their oil trade. They’re making massive investments in renewables. They’re being a true leader in a lot of fronts, and I think that’s very exciting.

So, again, I was very… Without him, I don’t think we would’ve been able to turn the tide in the region. I’m still very optimistic. I think now, it’s funny, they’re talking about with Israel; it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when and how and for what. Right? And so those negotiations are ongoing. I think they could conclude a week from now, they could conclude a year from now. But they’re going to happen, and that’s all because of the effort that he’s bringing. And I think that you’re going to see a different Middle East, a different world because of the work he’s done. So, I think it’s very exciting.

Tarek Masoud: You’re definitely clearly bullish on MBS and on Saudi. Are you so bullish on them that you’d invest there?

Jared Kushner: Yeah.

Tarek Masoud: Okay.

Jared Kushner: Yeah. Look, one of the challenges of investing there is that they’re doing so much investment internally. I’ve looked at several things.

We made one great investment in the UAE in an online classified business, which is basically correlated to the growth in real estate. But UAE in this last conflict really said, we want to take the role of Switzerland. And so, they basically said, we’re not getting involved, we’ve been in the middle of too many things. And so, they’ve had an explosion in their market and that’s been a massively successful investment for us. That business is going into Saudi as well. And we have another couple of businesses we’re looking in Saudi and I definitely would invest in the right way. Again, you have to get comfortable; it’s like every market has its insiders and its local customs; so we’ve gone slowly, but I am very bullish there.

Tarek Masoud: All right, so when we started here, I told you, you should never count on a middle-aged Egyptian man to keep time, particularly when you’re talking to somebody as interesting as Jared Kushner. So, can we take maybe two questions?

Jared Kushner: Yeah, of course.

Tarek Masoud: Is that cool?

Jared Kushner: Of course.

Tarek Masoud: So, I want to call on students in my class, IJ655, and the first person I have is Zantana Efrem, who’s right over here? Yep.

Zantana Efrem: Hi Jared. Thank you for being here with us today. So, the question I had submitted to Professor Masoud is this. As you’re undoubtedly aware, there have been numerous significant discussions across the country surrounding the campus culture in higher education, particularly in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These conversations often touch upon anti-Palestinian sentiments, Islamophobia and antisemitism. I assume your presence here today suggests that you recognize the necessity of what the Harvard Kennedy School calls candid conversations, particularly within institutions of higher education. In light of this, could you share your perspective on areas where you believe Harvard University, its donors, or students, may have faltered or faced missteps in addressing the complexities of the conflict on our campus?

Jared Kushner: Sure. So, I’ll be honest. When I got reached out from Tarek, it was at a time where a lot of my friends were getting very, very negative on Harvard. And I’ve always been somebody, I’m not big into condemnation, I’m big in engagement. Every now and then you got to do condemnation. But they say you don’t make peace with your friends, you have to go out there and go into places that are uncomfortable. I will say that… and by the way, I’ll say one of the pretexts, which is I got here about an hour before this and I was walking around campus and you guys are all so lucky to be here. This place is absolutely amazing. It is so special. It survived for a long time and it’s always been a beacon of excellence, and like all great institutions perhaps maybe it lost it’s way a little bit. I’m sure that’s happened in the past. I have not studied the history of Harvard as much as I have some of these other topics, but…

Tarek Masoud: It’s much harder, the history of Harvard.

Jared Kushner: But what I would say is this, is that I’m more interested in tomorrow and the future. I think that what we’ve been through has been a very interesting time for the country. I think it’s been an interesting time in the world. I think there’s been a lot of emotions. I think I would just encourage people, no matter what your persuasion is, to figure out how to engage. I saw this when I was in New York, before I went into the political world, I only had one friend who was a Republican. I remember sitting here at Harvard and the things that we would say about George Bush and how certain and how arrogant we were about his policies. And by the way, I’m not a fan of him as a president. I don’t think he was a good president. But it was such a self-righteousness about the thought that now I look back on reflection and I see.

I saw the same thing in New York where the echo chamber I was in, which I thought was a very worldly echo chamber, I was with the heads of the banks, the heads of the hedge funds, the heads of the fashion companies, the heads of the technology companies. We’d be at our house, we’d have artists over, I’d have journalists. I thought I was just with this very eclectic, worldly diverse group. It turned out I was just in a massive echo chamber. And what I would say for all of you is, I would say try to pursue independent thought. When people are screaming, I’m not sure that that’s necessarily the most productive way. I would try to do your research. I would try to meet with people on both sides and I would try to engage.

This place has a very special history; it has a lot of that’s special to it. And I think that if each of you say, how can we try to contribute to make this a comfortable place for everyone, let’s learn, let’s continue to grow and evolve, I think that it’s possible that this place can hopefully come back to where it has the potential to be.

Tarek Masoud: Great. Okay. We’ll take one more. I have Barak Sella over here.

Barak Sella: Hi, my name is Barak Sella. I’m a student in Tarek’s class. So, let’s pretend that in a year from now you are a Secretary of State. And looking at sort of the situation of foreign policy in the US, a lot of dissatisfaction on the right and the left and post-October 7th, knowing that we can’t go back, you’re always talking about going forward. How should America’s foreign policy in the Middle East change regarding the challenges that are now facing the Middle East, Israel, the Arab world after October 7th? What has changed? How has it changed fundamentally, how the United States needs to approach this foreign policy?

Jared Kushner: So first of all, I’m just going to say all this is as a hypothetical, which is always dangerous to do. But what I would say is that if you go back for, I think… look, when President Clinton left office, America was an [inaudible] superpower in the world, and it was mostly peaceful. You think about through both the Bush and Obama administrations, I think the foreign policy of both administrations did not achieve great results and made the world a lot less safe, allowed China to rise, got us into war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, led to a big instability in the region, which again, when President Trump got in 2017, we had to deal with literally a decade and a half of massive mismanagement. Again, I think we spent the whole time trying to fix a lot of problems that we inherited, and I think at the end we left it with a lot of good momentum. How do you go back to where we had it and then build upon it in that regard?

I think there’s a couple things, and I wish everything was black and white, but I found in foreign policy, like in most things in life, there’s always a thousand shades of gray and you need to figure out how everything connects to everything else. So, number one is that you need to impose a penalty on Iran and you need them to feel like there is a risk to keep the trouble they’re making, right?

So, what President Trump used to say about Iran is that they’ve never won a war, but they’ve never lost a negotiation. So, they’re always going around feeling, trying. In 2016, Iran, after the JCPOA, when Obama left office, was selling about 2.7 million barrels a day of oil. By the end of the Trump administration, they were selling 100,000 barrels of oil a day on the illicit market. So, basically we totally dissected their economy; they were out of foreign currency reserves and they were dead broke. I mean, they’re pretty good with ballistic missiles, but they’re air force is from the 1970s. So, they had no capabilities. Wars are expensive; they had no capabilities to withstand war, and we had the world pretty united in enforcing the sanctions against them. And that was a very tough battle with Europe and with China and with Russia and a lot of others; but we were able to create enough issues everywhere else. We were able to really kind of put them in a box and make them fear us.

So, I would say number one is you have to focus on Iran and they have to feel, first of all, start cramping down on their resources.

And number two, you need to create some kind of fear that this behavior is not going to be treated lightly. I also think there’s an issue where you need to figure out how to reset the relationship with China, and I think you need to figure out an end to the Russia/ Ukraine war. I don’t think there’s much there that’s happening. I think that Russia wants to see us now more distracted, so I do think that they’re incentivized to be against whatever position the US is in the Middle East. So, let’s say the US came out tomorrow and said, we’re against Israel, Russia would then go back Israel. I think that there’s a dynamic there where they want to see us distracted so that we focus less on them. And so I think that that conflict strategically is not good for us. I think you need a resolution there.

So, I think number one is contain Iran.

Number two is we took a little bit of a different approach than the administrations before us and after us with Hamas.

So, if you go back with Hamas, they had the same business plan from basically 2006 up until 2017. They would fire rockets into Israel. Israel would overreact. The world would then reflexively condemn Israel because every one of their military targets is underneath a school or a residential area. Israel sends out leaflets saying, “Please, civilians move, we’re about to bomb,” which really eliminates the element of surprise. But they basically would fire rockets into Israel. Israel would overreact. The world would condemn Israel. Then there’d be a conference; they’d raise money, Hamas would get cash. They’d be good for a couple of years. They’d run out of money. They’d say, what should we do? Oh, I’ve got an idea. Let’s fire rockets into Israel. Israel will overreact. The world would condemn Israel. They’ll hold the conference, we’ll get some more money, we’ll be good for a couple of years. When Hamas did that the first time with us, what the State department was saying is we urge both sides to show restraint.

We basically did something different. We said, Israel has the right to defend itself. We support that. Israel went in, bombed the crowd. We said, no more money. We’re not putting more money in until they stop bombing. We’re not putting good money after bad, if you guys actually show us a paradigm.

The thing with Gaza that was different from the West Bank is there was no religious sites. So, there’s no border disputes and there’s no religious sites. So, it was kind of like a very simple concept of like, you guys stop being terrorists and we’ll figure out how to rebuild the place. And so, the notion there was, show them that there’s going to be a real… they’re not going to be rewarded for their bad actions. Now, giving them a Palestinian state is basically a reinforcement of we are going to reward you for bad actions, right?

Tarek Masoud: We’re not giving Hamas a Palestinian state. You’re giving Palestinians a Palestinian state.

Jared Kushner: What do you think that will do for the popularity of Hamas and for people? If you’re a young person and you have two people trying to influence you, and you have Muhammad Abbas saying, my way of being peaceful has what brought us a state. By the way, they all think he’s corrupt. They don’t like when you criticize their government. But he says, my way of being peaceful, or you have Hamas saying, the only way we ever got anything was by going in and killing and raping and murdering, and we showed them that we can be tough and they feared us and the world rewarded us for it.

So, my sense is it’s an unbelievably awful precedent to do. You have to show terrorists that they will not be tolerated and that we’ll take strong action.

So, number one, you’ve got to put some cramps on Iran. Number two, you have to be very tough at going after the terrorists.

Number three, you have to work with everyone. There was a lot of trust eroded in the region since we left. UAE was shot from the Houthis. By the way… Anyway, it doesn’t matter. But bottom line is then I would focus on how do you get the deal with Saudi done. And those talks continued to evolve.

And I did an interview with Lex Friedman basically two days after. And he asked me, “Is the Saudi deal dead with Israel?” I said, “No, no, no. The industrial logic is still strong there. It’s just now Israel’s going to have to do what they’re going to do, and then when it’s done, it’s in the interest of all sides.”

So, Israel still wants that deal, the Biden administration still wants that deal and Saudi still wants that deal. So that deal is still very much alive. And it’s interesting too, the dynamics. The Biden guys initially said they’re going to make Saudi a pariah, and now they’re basically running over there begging them for help to try to figure out how to get this resolved.

So, the long answer is, I think that’s really how you have to do it. You have to stand with Israel. I think it’s very, very important. We deterred a lot of threats because we stood with Israel.

I think the north right now is combustible. I am nervous. I think the US did the right move sending the carriers over initially. But think about it like a woods with a lot of dry leaves. It just takes a little spark and that thing can conflate. There, it’s a pretty tough situation. You need a long-term plan to try to diffuse that situation, but you have to figure out how to hope.

But it’s about being strong, being strong with Israel, containing Iran, showing the terrorists they’re not going to be rewarded for their actions, and working closely with your partners in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf to try to figure out how to continue the economic project that we started.

Isn’t the Most Important Arab-Israeli Peace Deal the one with the Palestinians?

Tarek Masoud: But Jared, you’ve got to agree with me and then we’ll have to end, you’ve got to agree with me that ultimately, at the end of the day, the real deal with Arabs that matters for Israel is with Palestinians.

Jared Kushner: So, I’ll just say this, as I think that for Israel, and actually for the Jewish people, having a proper resolution to that is very important, right? Because I do think that that’s been an excuse for a lot of global antisemitism to hide behind this conflict. And I think that that’s been… It’s definitely within the interest of Israel and the Jewish people to find a resolution to the issue. But, and this is the most important, but, it has to be a solution that’s sustainable.

And when you ask me what’s my biggest fear? My biggest fear is that you have a lot of people who are chasing a deal for the sake of a deal and not looking to make a deal that will really leave this in a position where it makes future conflict less likely.

And the way you do that is by creating a paradigm where you don’t reward bad behavior. You need the right institutions to allow the Palestinian people to live a better life. You said something to me when we were talking, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, or I could just say, I heard this from a friend.

And I actually thought it was really smart, it had me thinking, and it’s absolutely true, that Oslo has been a total failure. And again, we’ve all worked in the constructs of that. But if you think about it, for all these years in the Middle East, again, before you had all these countries and all these arbitrary lines that we spoke about with Sykes-Picot, you basically had a situation where you had the tribal system, and there’s still form of governance in the different cities and towns in the tribal system. Oslo, I went before about how Arafat was in Jordan, he tried to assassinate the king. They had black Saturday…

Tarek Masoud: Black September.

Jared Kushner: Black September. They got these guys out. They went up to Lebanon, they caused some problems in Lebanon, they kicked them out of Lebanon. They went to your favorite place, Tunisia, they’re in Tunisia, sitting in villas on the beach, basically broke and there. And then the US and Israel had this great idea of say, we’re going to take this former terrorist who’s sitting in a villa in Tunisia and we’re going to put him in charge of the Palestinians. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got this tribal system that’s been working there for a long time. They’re like, why the hell is this guy in charge of us?

And then for 30 years, we’ve had nothing but failure; the people’s lives have not gotten better and that hasn’t worked. So again, my fear is that I’m seeing a lot of conventional thinking with the same people who have failed. Again, you go to Abas, he’s like a broken record. He said the same thing, and his record of non-achieving is not good.

And my fear is really for the people because I think that they’ve been pawns in this situation. And the one thing I’ll say strongly, people who are pro… I always say this. There’s four categories in this conflict. You have pro-Israel, that’s acceptable. You have indifferent, that’s acceptable. You have pro-Palestinian, that’s acceptable. You have pro-Hamas, that is not acceptable.

You think about if you want to be pro-Palestinian. The best thing you can do is, say the people who have been holding these people back is their leadership. When we held a conference in Bahrain… Sorry, I’ll do this part very quickly, then we’ll wrap.

We held a conference in Bahrain. Again, go to my Peace to Prosperity, Google it. You’ll go through, I have a full business plan that I built. It’s 100, and I think, 83-page document that goes through all the different changes you need and every investment that we would make in order to build a functioning society.

We had every businessman from around the world, Steve Schwartzman came, [inaudible] AT&T; had all the leading Arab businessmen. And they all said, we want to do things to make the lives of the Palestinian people better, and we will invest there.

But the reason we’re not going to invest there, again, you can’t have jobs in prosperity without investment. They still teach capitalism at Harvard, I think.

Tarek Masoud: Secretly.

Jared Kushner: Secretly, right? And capitalism is a very powerful force towards improving people’s lives. And that’s been proven time and time again. And so, what they all said is, the reason we’re not investing has nothing to do with Israel, it has to do with there’s no rule of law. We don’t want to go build a factory or a power plant, then have it blown up by terrorism. There’s no property rights. How are we going to go do something, then it’s expropriated by these thugs.

And so what I would say is that without the proper Palestinian leadership, and again, you can’t just say, oh, we’re going to do a reinvigorated Palestinian authority. It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. You need a new idea that’s actually going to work. Because if you’re Israel, yes, I think, and a lot of Israelis at their core, they want the Palestinians to live a better life. They want a Palestinians… The state right now, the state means a lot of things.

So, it’s a very controversial word, even though it shouldn’t be, because it means different things to different people. But the fundamental underlying part of it that’s essential is, is there a governing structure in this area for the Palestinian people that will not threaten Israel security wise, and that will give the Palestinian people the opportunity to live a better life. Without those two things, nothing is acceptable. You can call it whatever the hell you want.

How can Palestinians Build their Institutions while under Bombardment?

Tarek Masoud: Yeah. So, I think this is a really important note to end on though, because I think anybody who leaves here would think, well, the tune that Jared Kushner really wants us to hum is that the number one most important thing that we’ve got to do is invest in the building of Palestinian institutions. And I don’t know how you do that while a big chunk of Palestine is under this massive bombing campaign.

Jared Kushner: So, what I would say this… that’s one of the cool things…

Tarek Masoud: I’ll give you the last word.

Jared Kushner: Okay, cool. Yeah. So, one of the things I learned also in government is that especially in the Middle East, the number one rule you should follow when doing it is that if they’re not screaming at you, you’re not on the right path because all of…

Tarek Masoud: That must mean I’m always on the right path.

Jared Kushner: Exactly. Yeah. So, the conventional thinking in that region has just the track record of everyone who’s going to be talking is just wrong. So, think about it, again; we go back to, how do I look at it, first principles, results-oriented, results outcome, and how do you advance human prosperity? How do you advance human potential? How do you give people the chance to live safe, have better life? If it doesn’t fit in those criteria and you put patchwork on it, then you’re doing what politicians do, which again, Trump coming from the business world, myself coming from the business world, a problem’s either solved or it’s not.

You can’t put a band-aid on something and call it solved because it’s going to go back. I think the psychology right now of Israel is very much, we can never let this happen again. And so, I think what they’re doing is they’re hoping that a solution will develop. And again, I think this is the burden now that the Biden administration carries.

I think the Arab countries want to see this happen as well. But I do think there’s a very big desire to come up with a solution that will make everyone more prosperous and more safe in the long-term. And that’s what it’s about, right?

Again, I have friends now who are Muslims, who are Christians, who are Jews. When I would go sit with people, they knew I was Jewish; I was an envoy from America. We’re all the same people. We have the same blood in our veins. And when we recognize that, we all kind of want to make things better, whether you’re a Democrat, you’re a Republican, Israeli, Palestinian; and if you kind of come with that framing, then there’s a lot of progress that you can make. But you can’t do stupid things short term that you’ll pay the price for long term.

Conclusion

Tarek Masoud: Okay. This is a good note to end on. First of all, I want to thank you, Jared, for coming to Harvard. I know it’s your old stomping grounds, but one could be forgiven for thinking it’s like going to enemy territory. Hopefully you feel that this was a welcoming environment, and we can get you to come back so we can argue some more with a bunch of things that you said that I still want to argue with, but we don’t have time for. And I want to thank all of you for coming and just being an exemplary Harvard audience. And so please join me in thanking Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Multipolarity: An Era of Great Transition

We are living in an era of great transition. The era of the unipolar world is ending, and the era of multipolarity is coming. Changes in the global architecture of the world order are fundamental. Sometimes the processes unfold so rapidly that public thought lags behind. It is all the more important to focus on comprehending the grandiose events that are shaking humanity.

No one—except fanatics—is able to deny the fact that the West, after the collapse of the socialist system and the USSR, received a unique chance for sole global leadership, and failed in this mission. Instead of a reasonable, fair and balanced global policy, the West has turned into hegemony, neocolonialism; acting in its predatory selfish interests, using double standards, inciting bloody wars and conflicts, pitting peoples and religions against each other. This is not leadership—it is aggressive imperialism, continuing the worst traditions of the selfsame West—the principle of divide and rule, colonization; in fact, transformation into slavery.

The collapse of the leadership of the collective West is accompanied and reinforced by the precipitous moral decline of Western culture. The values forcibly and stubbornly promoted by the West—LGBT, uncontrolled migration, legalization of all kinds of perversions, culture of abolition, brutal purges and repression of all dissenters, loss of humanistic principles and readiness to move towards Artificial Intelligence domination and transhumanism—have further lowered the prestige of the West in the eyes of global humanity. The West is no longer the universal model, the supreme authority, let alone a role model.

Thus, in opposition to unipolar hegemony, a new multipolar world was born. This is the response of great ancient and original civilizations and sovereign states and peoples to the challenge of globalism.

It can already be said that global humanity began to intensively build independent civilizational poles. These are, first of all, Russia, which has woken up from its slumber, China, which has made a rapid breakthrough, the spiritually mobilized Islamic world, and India, which is gigantic in terms of demography and economic potential. Africa and Latin America, which are stubbornly moving towards integration and sovereignty of their large areas, are on the way.

Representatives of all these civilizations are united today in BRICS. It is here that the parameters of the new multipolar world are being formed; its principles, traditional values, rules and norms are being developed. And on the basis of true justice, respect for the positions of others, with true democratic proportions and without any attempts to make one of the poles claim hegemony. BRICS is an anti-hegemonic alliance where the main resources of mankind—human, economic, natural, intellectual, scientific and technological—are concentrated today.

The unipolar world is the past. The multipolar world is the future.

If the West renounces its violent hegemony and policy of neocolonialism, recognizes the sovereignty and subjectivity of each human civilization, refuses to forcibly impose its rules, norms and values, obviously rejected today by the majority of humanity, it could become a respected and sovereign pole—recognized by all others and existing in the context of a friendly and equal dialogue of civilizations.

This is the goal of building a multipolar world—to establish a harmonious model of friendly and balanced existence of all civilizations of the Earth, without building hierarchies and without recognizing the hegemony of any of them.

Most civilizations—Russian, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, African and Latin American—today unanimously turn to traditional values, to the sacred, to the spiritual content of their cultures and societies. Progress without reliance on deep identity is impossible; it will lead to degeneration and degradation of man himself. Although traditional values differ from nation to nation, there is always something in common—holiness, faith, family, power, patriotism, the will to good and truth, respect for man and his freedom and dignity.

The multipolar world is based on traditional values, which are recognized and protected in every civilization.

The main idea of multipolarity is peace and harmony. But it is obvious that any change in the world order—especially such a significant one—is invariably met with fierce resistance of the old structure. The downward wave of the unipolar world prevents the upward wave of the multipolar one. This explains most of the conflicts today—in Ukraine, Palestine and the wider Middle East, the escalation of tensions in the Pacific around China, trade wars, sanctions policies, and the fierceness and hatred of the declining hegemon against all those who challenge it.

But unipolar globalism has no chance of winning and maintaining its completely discredited “leadership,” if the supporters of multipolarity—and this is global humanity (and in the West itself, where the percentage of sober-minded people with an independent consciousness that does not succumb to propaganda is still very high)—stick together, clearly understand the contours of the new world and support each other in the common struggle for a just and truly democratic system.

This is the most important thing now—to comprehend the contours of the new multipolar, polycentric world order, to lay down the principles of friendship, respect and trust between civilizations, to unanimously fight for peace and harmony, to strengthen our traditional values and respect the traditional values of others.

If we all together oppose the universal will for peace to the globalist instigators of wars and bloody conflicts, sponsors of color revolutions and the moral decay of public morality, we will win without firing a single shot. The collective West—despite its still considerable potential—cannot stand alone against the unity of humanity.

This year, 2024, Russia becomes the president of BRICS. This is deeply symbolic. There is much to be done in this direction—to admit new members, to develop and launch new economic mechanisms, to make financial institutions (first of all, the BRICS Bank) work, to promote security and conflict resolution, to make the cultural exchange between civilizations more intensive. But most importantly, all of us will have to not just comprehend, but to develop, create and establish a philosophy of multipolarity, learn to live with our own minds, and carry out a profound decolonization of consciousness, culture, science and education. During the epochs of its colonial domination, the West has managed to inculcate in many non-Western societies the false idea that thought, science, technology, economic and political systems are truly effective only in the West, and that all others are offered only “catch-up development,” completely dependent on the West. It is time to put an end to this slave mentality. We are humanity, representatives of different ancient cultures and traditions, in no way inferior to the West, and in many ways superior to it.

These are the conclusions of our Multipolarity Forum. Despite all the differences, we all agree on the main thing—we are entering a new era and what it will be depends on ourselves and no one else.

We will create the future together!

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Featured: Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300.

The End of the Christian Caucasus?

The fact is little known outside a few specialists: a large part of the territory of today’s Azerbaijan corresponds to the borders of an ancient Christianized kingdom (probably as early as the 2nd century) known as Caucasian Albania (or Alwania). It disappeared in the 8th century, partly as a result of the Muslim conquest, and partly under pressure from its large Armenian neighbor.

The coveted Karabakh (known as Artsakh) is one of the regions of this small kingdom attested by Greco-Latin and Armenian historiographical sources.

The discovery of an Albanian lectionary in 1975 at the Sinai monastery suggests the early Christianization of Albania, with links to Jerusalem, where Albanian communities financed the construction of several churches. The discovery was not widely publicized, but is well recounted by Bernard Outtier.

While this vanished Christianity is of no interest to the Christian or Catholic world, the Turks are particularly well-informed about the history of the Albanians of the Caucasus (the Baku school of history), and they are today exploiting this knowledge admirably to support their claim to Nagorno-Karabakh and assert their legitimacy over this territory, which they regard as a “proto-Azerbaijan.”

In February 2022, AZERTAC (Azerbaijan’s State Information Agency) posted an article by Mr. Rahman Mustafayev, Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the Holy See: ” Les racines chrétiennes du Caucase. L’histoire de l’Église d’Azerbaïdjan [“The Christian Roots of the Caucasus. The history of the Church of Azerbaijan”]. In it, the author begins by tracing the main lines of the history of this small kingdom, which was Christianized very early on, a Church that, if not apostolic, was at least closely linked to the chain of the first disciples. And what he traces is consistent not only with what academic research has elaborated, but also with extant traditions, often oral.

The problem lies in the Azeri account of recent history: “At the beginning of the 19th century, following the Russo-Persian and Russo-Turkish wars, won by the Russian Empire, the process of settlement of Armenians from the Ottoman and Persian Empires began on the territory of the Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhchivan Khanates of the Russian Empire.”

All these territories were Armenian long before the Muslim occupation. It is not a question of “appropriating” Muslim territories, but of reappropriating the land from which they have been dispossessed, and this of course involves major human problems on both sides.

Assuming that the Armenians had to familiarize themselves with an Albanian architectural heritage and that they restored and renovated the monuments by introducing elements of Armenian architecture “that are not characteristic of Albanian architecture,” why is this scandalous? The two architectures, while not twins, are very similar. To claim that the Armenian epigraphy on medieval Albanian monuments constitutes the beginning of a process of “Armenization” is quite absurd, because the “Albanian” community has practically disappeared today. What remains is a “Udi” church, and a few speakers of the Udi language, which researchers admit is the heir to the Albanian language. In April 1836, the Tsarist government had abolished the Autocephalous Church of Albania, which was then subordinate to the Armenian Gregorian Church, according to the ambassador, in order to strengthen the position of the Armenian population and clergy in the Muslim territories of Transcaucasia. This may well be the case, and it was undoubtedly a pity for the little Albanian church. But it was also a political act. Since 2003, this small Albanian church has once again become autocephalous.

The extravagance of Azerbaijan’s accusations is astounding. If we are to believe their allegations, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Armenian Gregorian Church—with the authorization of the Russian Holy Synod—destroyed all traces of the archives of the Albanian Church, as well as the library of the Patriarchs of Albania in Gandjasar, which contained the most precious historical documents, as well as the originals of Albanian literature. The destruction (or concealment) of archives would thus have enabled Armenian historians and archaeologists to deny the autocephalous nature of the Albanian Church, the Albanian ownership of the Christian temples (?), monasteries and churches located on the territory of today’s Karabagh region, and to claim that they are the cultural heritage of the Armenian people and the property of the Armenian Church.

Today’s Albanian heritage obviously belongs to the Church of Armenia, not to the Muslim Azeris. To believe that the Azeri state has set up the great dome of secularism to give all churches their place in the country is to be naive or totally ignorant.

It is true that in the 8th century, Chalcedonian Albania was pressured by its large and prestigious neighbor to submit to Armenia’s anti-Chalcedonian choice. And after the conquest of the Caucasus by the armies of Islam, while Georgia emerged as a regional power and Armenia survived as a Christian power, Albania disappeared, at least politically. This is a matter for historical research. It is delicate because Albanian history is known mainly through Armenian historiography, and since history shows that spiritual and theological divisions were reflected in relations between states and kingdoms, religious theological conflicts were unfavorable to the small Albanian kingdom.

When the ambassador to the Holy See rejoices at “the liberation of Karabakh after 30 years of occupation,” and asserts that a new stage is beginning, so that “the Christian churches are returning to their masters, to the Albanian-Sudinian Christian community of Azerbaijan,” he is mocking us. The Albanian-Azerbaijani community is a mere pittance located in three cities in Azerbaijan (not even Baku). Are they naive enough to believe that their heritage will be restored to them under a Muslim regime? We are not. We have been searching the web in vain for images of the Albanian community so highly praised by the Azeris.

The tourist guides tell us: the Artsakh Ministry of Culture has restored the conventual buildings of the Gandjasar monastery, a major center for the copying of illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages, and has set up a Matenadaran (Yerevan’s BNF, albeit on a more modest scale) with the same functions: to exhibit the manuscripts created on Artsakh soil, some 100 of which are housed in the Matenadaran.

Vatican News has relayed Pope Francis’ call to protect the spiritual and architectural heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh. Here is what it says, written by Delphine Allaire:

“Nagorno-Karabakh’s millennia-old spiritual heritage makes it the cradle of Armenia. This pivotal region contains hundreds of churches, monasteries and tombstones dating from the 11th to the 19th century. Being mountainous, it was not evangelized at the same time as Armenia. However, Christianity in Nagorno-Karabakh is mainly because of the action of King Vatchagan the Pious who came to the throne in 484. He spread the cult of saintly relics, and the region owes him the construction of Karabakh’s oldest religious monument, the mausoleum of Grigoris, grandson of Saint Gregory the Illuminator and Catholicos of Albania in the Caucasus. Today, this monument is the Amaras monastery in eastern Artsakh. The history of Armenia and Caucasian Albania has been linked since the Christianization of the two countries in the early 4th century.”

This calls for a few comments.

Nagorno-Karabakh is an ancient region of Caucasian Albania, and thus the cradle of the Christian Albanians. But of these Albanians, only a tiny community remains: the Udi, whose language is that of the ancient Albanians, but whose writing has been lost. Thus, there is nothing wrong about this, and it is no falsification to claim it as the historical cradle of medieval Armenia, once the Albanian kingdom had disappeared.

At the beginning of January 2022, journalist Anastasia Lavrina (in the pay of the Azerbaijani government) carried out a curious investigation in Karabakh into “how the Christian churches of Karabakh were destroyed by Armenian separatists,” which was published on the website of the Journal musulmans en France a few days later. An impressive video shows the alleged exactions of the Armenians, as well as the testimony of an Orthodox priest from Baku on the freedom of worship enjoyed by the churches and the repair of this fabulous ancient heritage of which they are so proud. The images only show a priest commenting on all this in front of a small pile of old stones.

The same Journal des musulmans de France plagiarized Ambassador Mustafayev’s text to proclaim the liberation of Nagorno-Karabakh: “A new stage… in the history of Christian churches in Azerbaijan—a stage of restoration after destruction and historical falsifications, a stage of healing wounds, of rebirth to life in the name of peace and cooperation between all religions of Azerbaijan.”

Who can believe that Azerbaijan will finance the restoration of Armenian heritage once it has emptied the country of all Armenians? We know the devastating rage of Islam. Mosques will cover the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, erasing Christian memory and the religious roots of humanity, just as Turkey did in two bloody genocides.

But there is a lesson to be learned from all this propaganda, and it is an important one: Muslims have admitted the existence of a very old Albanian Christianity, old enough to confirm a very old, apostolic first evangelization, which Eastern tradition has maintained to the last.

Over and above this ancient history and the existence of a third Christianity in the Caucasus (totally ignored by the Caucasologists of our French media), most articles specializing in Caucasus affairs never cease to evoke “ethnic” or “racial” hatreds, and never mention “religious hatreds.” This ignores the Armenian genocide, which has been documented, even if not recognized by the nation historically responsible for it.

Almost all the articles available do not go beyond 1993, the supposed start of hostilities between Azeris and Armenians.

This silence is irresponsible, not to say guilty.

The question of Nagorno-Karabakh is an old one, whose seeds of death were sown by the British when they awarded Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in 1919. Stalin merely ratified their decision.

At the end of 1918, Great Britain moved into the Caucasus. Through diplomacy, it made up for the few material resources it had in this “turbulent” region, as the experts put it. The cunning, deceitfulness, cynicism and well-understood self-interest of this England of the dying empire are well known. Her own, of course. The pretext invoked by the most imperialist circles in London to justify this presence in the Caucasus is that it was one of the roads into India. In reality, it is because of Baku’s oil. During British rule in 1919, Azerbaijan still had access to the oil that crossed Georgia to the port of Batumi (promised to Georgia, but occupied by the British). As for Armenia, it had been promised vast territories in Anatolia. But without the means to conquer or hold on to them. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees were crammed into a tiny territory. Of what was then called “Turkish Armenia,” only one vilayet remained, that of Sivas, and only a handful of Armenians.

For Turkey, the Batumi treaties were nothing more than legal façades providing a pretext for invading the Caucasus. At the beginning of August 1918, Nuri Pacha demanded the annexation of Karabakh to Azerbaijan. The Armenian Republic refused. Once. Then a second time. The Turks then sent a Turkish-Azeri detachment against the capital, Shushi, which the Turks entered on October 8. The villages went into sedition, and the following month, taking advantage of their withdrawal, the Armenians regained control of the region.

In October 1918, Enver Pasha sent precise instructions to the Army of the Caucasus for the regions between the Transcaucasian republics and the line of retreat of the Turkish forces. Before withdrawing, the army was to arm the Kurdish and Turkish populations, leaving behind officers capable of organizing the region politically and militarily. The main objective was to prevent the repatriation of Armenians.

The commander-in-chief of British forces in the Caucasus, General William Montgomerie Thomson, was on the best of terms with the Azerbaijani government, which enabled Great Britain to obtain very large quantities of oil. On January 15, 1919, he authorized the appointment of an Azeri governor for the provinces of Karabakh (165,000 Armenians vs. 59,000 Azeris) and Zanguezur (101,000 Armenians vs. 120,000 Azeris).

In February 2019, the Azerbaijani administration entered Karabakh under British protection, while the Armenians held their fourth assembly in Shushi, which still refused to submit. Talks continued at the fifth assembly, held at the end of April with the participation of the Azeri governor and General Digby Shuttleworth, Thomson’s successor.

Armenian refusal persisted, and relations soured. On June 2, the Azeris attacked.

In August 1919, the Armenians accepted Azeri authority. Did they have any other choice?

On January 8, 1920, the Armenians signed an agreement with Major General George Forestier-Walker, commander of British forces in Batumi, for the establishment of an Armenian civil administration in Kars. When it arrived, escorted by the British, the Muslims refused to submit and, at the end of a large congress, proclaimed the provisional national government of the south-west Caucasus. General Thomson arrived in Kars and de facto recognized this government, while the Armenian administration turned back. With the Turks and Kurds making it impossible to repatriate Armenians to the west, the Armenians decided in January to attack Nakhichevan.

Thomson offered to help the Armenians take control of Kars and Nakhichevan, if they agreed to cede Karabakh and Zanguezur to the Azeris. Following an agreement in principle, Thomson occupied Kars on April 13 and dissolved the South-West Caucasus government. The British withdrew from Nakhichevan, leaving the administration to the Armenians. In July, the Muslims of Nakhichevan attacked the Armenians and forced them to evacuate the district.

When Colonel Alfred Rawlinson visited the Kars region in July, he found that, apart from the towns, the rest of the territory was held by the Kurds, from the Aras valley to Oltu and Ardahan.

What about the French? They knew, of course.

On December 10, 1918, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre-Auguste Chardigny, commander of the French detachment in the Caucasus, sent a six-page letter to the Minister of War, in which he outlined the situation in the Caucasus and the proposed organization of the country.

He pointed out that “recent attempts at Russian colonization have produced a complete mixture of races and an incredible dispersion of populations,” and asked whether the organization of the Caucasus into four independent republics, “following the collapse of Russian power and the threat of Turkish invasion, is likely to provide the populations with the peace and prosperity to which they aspire?”

This is no rhetorical question. Here is the answer in extenso.

What is this organization?

“1. It is none other than the realization of our enemies’ plan, which can be summed up as follows:

a) Constitution of a large Muslim state in the Caucasus, uniting under Turkish protectorate the highlanders of the North Caucasus and the Tatars of Azerbaijan. This concept, of purely pan-Islamic origin, would have brought the Crescent to the edge of the Caspian Sea in the event of victory for the allied powers. The Republic of Armenia, born of necessity and reduced to infinite proportions, would have been short-lived, the disappearance of what remained of the Armenian people being the direct and fatal consequence of the Turkish plan.

b) Creation of an independent Georgia, under the protectorate of Germany, which would itself be responsible for exploiting the natural wealth of the most favored region in the Caucasus.

2. That none of the four new republics had sufficient resources to create an independent life for themselves, ensuring the country’s future development. Two of them, that of Azerbaijan and that of the Montagnards, do not even have an educated class large enough to ensure the direction of affairs, the mass of the people having so far remained in a state of profound ignorance.

In a note, the lieutenant-colonel pointed out that while in Georgia all Russian civil servants had been replaced by Georgians, in Azerbaijan, given the absolute lack of educated Muslims, Russian civil servants had been retained.

…Georgians and Tatars (Azerbaijanis), supported by German and Turkish bayonets, incorporated parts of the Armenian regions into their respective territories.“

Lieutenant-Colonel Chardigny concluded with a novel and intelligent proposal: that the Swiss model should be copied in the Caucasus and the region organized into “cantons.”

And he concluded, with a certain realism, that to save order in this country, a foreign master was needed, who could only be the Allies, acting in the name of Russia, until calm had been restored.

He concluded this intelligent letter with the fate of Russian Armenia (Caucasian Armenia) and that of Turkish Armenia, “a devastated and deserted country whose reconstitution would be a long-term task.”

The constitution of a large Muslim state in the Caucasus, uniting under Turkish protectorate the highlanders of the North Caucasus and the Tatars of Azerbaijan, is still on the agenda.

This is President Erdogan’s project.

The “fourth republic” of the North Caucasus did not last, but there is still Azerbaijan, a Turkish protectorate (or satellite) that takes the Crescent all the way to the Caspian.

The great Muslim state of the Caucasus, in a Turkish-speaking zone stretching from the Bosphorus to Central Asia: that is Turkey’s geopolitical vision.

Erdogan is moving forward, barely masked, with the same determination of his great predecessors, the gravediggers of the Christian Caucasus who did most of the work, with the duplicitous complicity of the Entente powers.

Today, France’s absurd support for Ukraine and the press’ aversion to Putin have foolishly deprived it of Russian gas. Today, it is turning to Azerbaijan (Baku) to obtain, in an unnatural alliance, what it could have continued to negotiate if it had chosen realism and common sense: to leave Zelenski to his destructive madness and demented plans; to turn away from a war decided and willed by NATO; to develop ties with Christian Russia prepared by three centuries of political, cultural and linguistic history.

Today, the gravediggers of the Christian Caucasus are still there, slyly preparing the ruin of the small Armenian state, an unfortunate landlocked state which today lies on the route of tomorrow’s oil pipelines.
And by the same token, irresponsibly organizing a future Muslim Caucasus.

Marion Duvauchel is a historian of religions and holds a PhD in philosophy. She has published widely, and has taught in various places, including France, Morocco, Qatar, and Cambodia. She is the founder of the Pteah Barang, in Cambodia.

Featured: Albanian Church in Kish, Shaki Rayon, Azerbaijan.

The Sahel and the Guinea Gulf: A Macro Region Still in Trouble

It is matter of fact that the macro region, which includes the Sahel and the Guinea Gulf, continues to be affected by the various fractural lines—from the lack of security, which remains the more visible one, to the weak economic and social development, to the radical Islamism and tribalism divide. However, security still remains one the most critical points. The Sahel region is one of the epicenters of jihadist terrorism worldwide, and in 2019 it was established as the area on the planet most affected by terrorism. Being close to the European borders and constituting a node of interconnection between all of West Africa, the possibility of jihadist terrorism expanding from the Sahel up to the Guinea Gulf and reaching the Maghreb and Mediterranean coasts, its stability is an issue that has always been worrisome. However, the evolution of strategic and institutional developments in the Sahel could mean that the concern for the security has led to monitoring, with increased attention the advance of jihadism towards the neighboring Gulf of Guinea as the first target.

The Gulf of Guinea is made up of seventeen coastline countries (and runs for 6,000 kilometers in total, ranging from Senegal to Angola). It is an interesting and strategic area in terms of hydrocarbon reserves, minerals (tin, cobalt and diamonds), agricultural and fishing resources. Furthermore, the Gulf of Guinea is important in maritime trade: around 25 percent of African maritime traffic passes through its waters and there are twenty commercial ports that supply both Africa and Europe with important raw materials. And then there is its importance in terms of demographics: it is one of the African subregions where the population is growing the most (the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is Nigeria, where the population is expected to double in 2050 to reach 800 million inhabitants).

Both Nigeria and Ghana are considered part of the six ‘African lions’ (the others are Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa) in terms of potential economic growth, despite important domestic problems. However, for some years now—especially since the AQIM attack in the Grand-Bassam tourist resort (which occurred in 2016 in Ivory Coast)—there are fears that the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, which in the north borders Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (which are now under illegal governments after coups) will swell the ranks of jihadist groups and this scourge will end up turning Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin into terrorist sanctuaries. While it is true that there were already affected Gulf countries (like Nigeria and Cameroon), the reality is that the subsidiaries of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State that operate in the region now have their sights set on the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, where the presence of jihadist fighters and attacks has been detected.

Meanwhile, France is still immersed in a long-term process of re-evaluating its “foundations of its diplomatic and military policy in the region” after the deterioration of relations with Mali, Burkina Faso and now Niger. This situation is because of the coups d’état that occurred in these countries and the growing Russian influence in the Sahel through the Wagner mercenary group (now absorbed within the regular Russian armed forces).

In Niger, to help in the anti-terrorist fight after the end of the “Barkhane” operation, French troops had re-deployed some 1,500 soldiers from Mali. However, after the coup of 2023 and a bitter diplomatic tussle, Paris was obliged to withdrew its troops from the country, together with the German contingent. Consequently, the EU presence in the area has suffered a significant loss, which further pushed the Twenty-Seven to redefine the future of European operations and their nature, not only in the Sahel, the Guinea Gulf region and elsewhere (military, police, diplomatic, civilian, combat, mentoring/training, assistance).

For its part, the US has maintained a lower profile than France in reaction to the development of events in Niger and has retained its nearly 1,500 soldiers and armed drone patrols, deployed in two main compounds, tasked to the highly profiled hunt of terrorists and to identify illegal traffics and trade.

The presence of Western countries received another blow in mid-March when the junta in power in Niamey suspended “with immediate effect” all the agreements in defence and security with the US and, as a natural consequence, those forces should prepare their departure from the country (this new development, for now, seems to exclude the presence of the Italian troop contingent based in Niger).

The worsening of the security situation in the Sahel increases the dangers, given that in consideration of its geographical position, it plays the role of “sanctuary” of instability not only vis-à-vis the Guinea Gulf region, but also with the Mediterranean façade, and as mentioned also to the European continent.

It appears that in the Sahel, there are not only jihadist groups and their destabilizing threats, internal and external, but there is also the threat of the institutional changes manu militari (not only current, but also looming), together with new influences of new/old stakeholders (e.g., Russia, China, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Japan). The most visible is the dissolution of the regional architecture, ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and G5S (Group of Five—Sahel).
The coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the confused “transitions” in Chad, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau (and now Senegal) weakened the already weak institutions. In January the military juntas in West African nations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger jointly announced their immediate withdrawal from ECOWAS. The juntas accused the regional economic bloc of imposing inhumane sanctions aimed at reversing recent coups in their respective countries. After long and senseless tussles, ECOWAS de facto abandoned the idea of sanctions and punitive measures against the juntas. But already in the summer the three juntas decided to set up their own architecture, undermining further the solidity of the regional pacts and the plans to replace the current ones and prepare alternate architectures. ECOWAS, which recognizes only democratic governments, has faced previous challenges to its authority, with its regional court ruling last year that juntas lack the power to act on behalf of their nations in place of elected governments.
The move of the juntas followed a series of events that heightened political tensions in West Africa, including a coup in Niger last year. The three nations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have recently formed an economic/monetary, security alliance, severed military ties with France and turned to Russia for support, and clearly look to expand their network. Moscow looking to expand its area of influence in Sahel, and based on old ties (such as, thousands of student grants issued for many years) is now looking at Chad.

In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Chadian incumbent leader Mahamat Idriss Deby, who is the son of the long-time General-President Idriss Deby, who fell in battle against Jihadists in 2021; Mahamat has been designated by the country military leadership as the “provisional” president). Thus, the Kremlin is courting a country that had previously maintained a pro-Western policy and had spurned Russia’s outreach in Africa’s Sahel region. Russia has been moving to edge out the influence of France, the former colonial power in West Africa and the Sahel, and build ties with countries that have been roiled by a wave of coups since 2020. The junta initially promised an 18-month transition to elections, but later delayed them until October this year, anticipating a massive wave of protests. Putin said that the two countries had “great opportunities to develop our bilateral ties,” and that Moscow would double the quota for Chadian students studying at Russian universities. Deby’s visit comes a week after the prime minister of Niger, also appointed by a junta, visited Moscow. Russia has courted Niger since a July 2023 coup ousted a pro-Western government there.

Chad, however, had been seen as an enduring keystone of French influence in Africa, with Moscow’s clout there far more limited than in its neighbours. Russian influence in some countries, including in Mali and the Central African Republic, was initially spearheaded by Moscow’s Wagner Group mercenary army, led by businessman and one-time Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash last August, two months after he led Wagner in a failed mutiny aimed at ousting Russia’s top military leadership, accused of bungling Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. Since Prigozhin’s death, Moscow has moved to seize control of his network in Africa, incorporating Wagner’s operations into its formal armed forces and security state led structures.

Mahamat Idriss Deby is running in the election scheduled for May 6th, with a second round on June 22nd; the Prime Minister, Succes Masra, is running against him. The electoral campaign is marked by violent and obscure facts (like the alleged revolt of a relative of Deby, who died after a clash with loyalist security forces).

A major issue for Chad is the presence of French troops in the country, the last outpost of Paris (France, after the independence of the country, carried out several military operations in order to keep her influence there, raising the confrontation with Libya in the 1980s close to open conflict). Earlier this month France’s Special Envoy to Africa, Jean-Marie Bockel, met both candidates in the capital, Ndjamena, and said the roughly 1,000 troops stationed there would stay. “We need to stay and, of course, we will stay,” he said.

There is strong concern in the small civil society of the country that France and other Western partners will not push for real change in political rule in case it jeopardizes their military presence in strategically-located Chad.
Finally, the problems of Chad are not only internal; in fact, the relations between Chad and Sudan have worsened since the conflict in Sudan occurred in April 2023, which appear without any solution. Sudanese officials and Sudanese armed forces claim that Chad is involved in the facilitating of arms to the RSF (the organized “Janjaweed” of the brutal civil war in Darfur) through their borders, leading to the recent diplomatic expulsion of diplomats in both countries. Additionally, the influx of refugees and reported war crimes on ethnic groups from Sudan by the RSF has led the situation to become uneasy between both countries as Chad and Sudan face worsening instability, even though the bilateral relations will likely decline. But an open conflict between the two is unlikely in the short term, as both nations focus on domestic issues. Chad will reinforce its refugee hosting capabilities with foreign partners as the conflict worsens in Sudan.

As mentioned above, the spread of terrorism to neighboring regions and especially to the Gulf of Guinea because of the porosity of the borders. This subregion also has its particular security problems coming from the sea: piracy, organized crime and illicit trafficking and illegal fishing. Some analysts observed that the terrorist groups have stated that they will not give up expanding their activities from the Sahel to the Gulf of Guinea (specifically, Benin, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea and Togo).

This regional repositioning strategy responds to multiple objectives: a double political target, which confirms its call of protection for oppressed Muslims (the coast countries have large Christian populations that could be targeted and pushed to exile/forced migration by focused violence campaign) and the establishment of a regional caliphate. As well, there is a strategic objective, which allows projecting a more dangerous image, and a tactical objective, which seeks control of borders marked by the presence of natural parks as a tool of refuge and a base of operations and internal communication routes.

On the other hand, for any initiative to be successful, the financial tool is required. In this sense, the survival of these extremist groups depends on illegal activities, including arms and drug trafficking, livestock theft, gold extraction and poaching, activities that they can exploit more prolifically by gaining the control of territories in the Gulf of Guinea and setting up “no-go-areas” and/or “sanctuaries.”

Furthermore, the plans of these terrorist groups include the creation of a great caliphate, which requires conquering territories. Added to this, is that the Gulf of Guinea is a strategic area of great interest for jihadists because it allows access to the sea, and from there the further expansion of their range of threat (e.g., how the Yemenite Houti have affected the world trade market and global communication network).

In the hypothetical case that terrorist groups gain a foothold in this region, the benefits they would acquire would be multiple. Firstly, this would increase their logistics and movement capacity, especially on the northern border of the Gulf countries bordering Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where there are a large number of natural parks with impressive forests that could serve as refuge (like the Camoé National Park (Ivory Coast) and the W-Arly Pendjari which exceeds 32,000 square kilometers of protected areas. The last one is becoming an important corridor for jihadist movements due to the operational capabilities it allows. This park serves as a shelter and training site, while making aerial surveillance and obtaining supplies difficult. Furthermore, it makes it possible for terrorists to establish close contact with the populations, to whom they allow to continue their illicit activities—or even encourage them—and to whom they present themselves as an alternative government. For this reason, it is the area with the most jihadist attacks, as can be seen in the map below.

On the other hand, by controlling more territory, jihadist groups could expand their financing capacity, since this implies controlling more of the population and an increase in the number of people who must pay “zakat” (as one of the pillars of the faith, it requires all Muslims to donate a portion of their wealth to charity. Muslim believers must meet a certain threshold before they can qualify for “zakat.” The amount is 2.5 percent or 1/40 of an individual’s total savings and wealth. Of course, in a framework of terrorist caliphate it is a criminal toll), thus increasing their coffers. This money is used to pay fighters, acquire weapons and other products, build mosques and madrassas and is also invested in the community to administer justice, make donations, etc., which, ultimately, favors the radicalization of the population. At the same time, territorial expansion allows jihadist groups to expand the places where they commit illicit activities, either through the illegal exploitation of resources or through participation in illicit trafficking businesses.

West Africa is a region with abundant raw materials that are welcomed in the international markets, given that they are in constant high demand, such as gold which brings high benefits. In this region, artisanal mining or unregulated extraction is increasingly widespread, and jihadists take advantage of this by charging taxes to miners or trading the extracted mineral. Again, the situation can contribute to the radicalization of the population or to its sympathization with the jihadist cause to the extent that the terrorists can offer it protection against the forces of the State that expels them from the mines or demands legal (taxes) or illegal (briberies) contributions to continue the exploitation.

However, organized crime and terrorism maintain different objectives and modus operandi. The first acts more discreetly so that their operations are successful, while the latter seeks publicity for their attacks to spread terror and to get popular support. Even so, both types of criminal organizations cooperate on numerous occasions, although these are usually short-term relationships of convenience. For example, one of the most profitable illicit businesses for organized crime is drug smuggling, for which African routes are increasingly important internationally. Tobacco, hashish, heroin, amphetamines and, above all, cocaine are trafficked through what is known as “Highway 10” (the name comes from the 10th parallel, which covers South American countries such as Colombia or Brazil, places of origin of cocaine, and the Gulf of Guinea, whose ports receive the drugs that are brought into Europe through the trans-Saharan routes via Morocco and Algeria to Spain, France and Italy). This promises to be more fruitful if the increase in demand for cocaine in Middle Eastern countries is consolidated.

The jihadists benefit from smuggling by providing security services and collecting tolls from traffickers in the large areas they control, ensuring the destination of their shipping. All of this contradicts the image of men of faith who follow the tenets of Islam that the jihadists want to project, and for this reason the links with illicit activities depend on the groups’ need for money at all times. In fact, AQIM or Ansar el Dine issued fatwas condemning drug trafficking and confiscated and incinerated cigarettes and narcotics. However, for other groups like MUJAO smuggling is an advantage for the logistical and operational capacity of the jihadists groups since it allows them to acquire weapons, fertilizers (for explosives and IEDs) vehicles and motorcycles that they use in their attacks. And sometimes smugglers occasionally swell the ranks of jihadists to commit attacks in exchange for money.

Therefore, the strategic objective of conquering territories allows jihadists to increase their recruitment niche and sympathizers among the population, which favors their intelligence work. Thus, through the Koranic schools they replace the state in the provision of basic services, allowing the population to continue with their illicit economic activities or supporting the cause of the Fulani or Peul tribe herdsmen.

When analyzing the aspects that may favor the ability of jihadists to move to the Gulf of Guinea, the first thing to take into account is the idiosyncrasy of these countries: porous borders; exponential population growth; structural weaknesses at the political, economic and social levels; and where ethnic, religious and shepherd-farmer conflicts are common. The population is numerous, very young, but has few economic and educational opportunities; there is are striking differences in standard of living between those who live in the coast and inner areas.

The aforementioned challenges cause terrorism to proliferate, expand and exploit. On the northern borders of these countries with the Sahel, specifically with Burkina Faso, there were recorded more than 189 unofficial access points, which facilitate the entry and exit of jihadists and take advantage of the lush forests of the national parks. to make quick raids and avoid security forces.

As mentioned, the demographic trends indicate exponential population growth: by 2050, Africa is expected to be populated by 2.4 billion people and Nigeria is expected to become the third most populous country in the world. Although this phenomenon represents an opportunity, it also represents an enormous challenge to the extent that it exacerbates social problems and the feeling of marginalization among part of the population, especially among young people, and shows in full the poor governance of the state authorities.

At the same time, in the inner side of the Gulf of Guinea, and bordering the Sahel, there is significant disaffection towards the State, due to its unequal access to basic resources such as drinking water or electricity. These communities are persecuted for their economic activities, while half of their inhabitants live in extreme poverty. Added to this is that the majority of people who live in these areas are Muslims and tend to be discriminated against by the often Christian dominated leaderships, like in Ivory Coast, with a strong Christian identity in the south, where the administrative, political and economic power is located and the question of ivoirité is decided. In this way, the religious component plays a fundamental role. In the examples of Togo and Benin, the Muslim population represents less than 20 percent of the total and is mainly found in the north, where they often lack access to basic resources. This situation is a great window of opportunity for the jihadists to exploit the situation to their advantage, attracting to Salafism young Muslims who feel betrayed by the elites of their religion, with a Sufi majority, relatively close to a Christian government that does not satisfy basic needs.

In Ghana, where in principle the religious component does not generate so many differences between its inhabitants—the different confessions coexist peacefully and interreligious marriages occur and there are good relations between leaders—the jihadists find another way to exploit friction, as the Katiba Macina does. Also known as the Macina Liberation Front, this jihadist group is made up of a majority of former MUJAO combatants from the Peul community. Their recruitment method is based on exploiting the inter- and intra-community tensions of the Peul. Furthermore, they consider that the upper castes “act in complicity with the administrative, judicial and military authorities, which prevents Peul herders from turning to the state to assert their rights, leaving them with no other alternative than to turn to terrorist groups.” The conflict is exacerbated by the progressive degradation of land caused by climate change, which makes this disputed resource increasingly scarce.

This same intercommunity violence occurs in other Gulf countries. In Ivory Coast, the Lobi and Koulango ethnic groups, farmers and landowners, confront the Peul, nomadic shepherds. In Benin, it is the Bariba and the Dendi who confront them. The problem is that because of the difficult living conditions in the south of the Sahel countries, the Peul are moving to the north of the Gulf of Guinea territories, which generates tension among the local populations, already in difficult situations.

While it is true that the current economic and social situation of the Gulf nations is not as bad as that of the Western Sahel countries when they began to feel the jihadist threat, both subregions have many weaknesses in common. Jihadists are aware of this and, for this reason, they replicate the models that have proven successful over the last decade.

The jihadists begin by progressively integrating into the political, economic and social structures of the localities that interest them—specifically, in the areas belonging to natural parks—creating clientelist networks and taking control of trade routes, given the importance of the organized crime in the region. After this, they attack infrastructure and posts linked to the state, such as schools, municipalities, police stations, customs, etc. In this way, they manage to delegitimize the state—which already has a bad reputation—while instrumentalizing the unrest in these societies, injecting weapons that aggravate conflicts and later presenting themselves as peacemakers. Ultimately, they settle in communities, consolidate themselves in a certain area and end up supplanting the state.

However, the Gulf of Guinea does not yet suffer from established terrorism as the Sahel does, which requires the establishment of a strategy to confront the jihadist threat as soon as possible. There are many dimensions that must be taken into account for the fight against jihadist terrorism to be effective and to contain its advance in the Gulf of Guinea. Unlike the Sahelian countries, those in the Gulf of Guinea are stronger economically and politically (both relatively), although they must face similar challenges. In this sense, not repeating the mistakes that have led Mali or Burkina Faso to become the focus of jihadist terrorism worldwide becomes imperative for the Gulf of Guinea. Therefore, the approach of these countries must be comprehensive. That is, the solution lies through the indissoluble link between security, good government and development; however, there is still a long way to go to contain the threat.

The most urgent measure—because it is the most short-term—is to secure the borders by promoting security. This requires increasing the preparation of the armed forces and police—including respect for human rights—and improving their equipment and training. As of now, Benin and Togo are at the lowest level and the most threatened and weak, to the point that they are not even among the 140 best military forces in the world. Benin has already increased defence spending and requested aid from Rwanda; Togo has also increased defence spending, declared a state of emergency in the north and launched a development program for the “Savanes” (in French) region, the northernmost, poorest and most threatened by jihadists groups filtering in from Burkina Faso.

Promoting development is essential to stop the jihadist advance, although its results will only be seen in the longer term. It is necessary to invest in public infrastructure—especially in communication networks—education, health and employment. However, traditionally these types of measures have lacked effectiveness because the financing—national and international—ends up not being directed to the projects, since the corruption within state structures has hindered previous attempts.

For the above reasons, establishing good governance in these countries is key for future stability. The situation not only requires fighting corruption, measures must also be put in place to promote social cohesion and ensure peaceful coexistence, so that citizens, when threatened by terrorists, do not choose to turn their backs on the state, but that they take advantage of its protection.
The countries of the Gulf of Guinea are increasingly aware of the threat posed by the transfer of jihadist activities from the Sahel region to their northern borders and are taking measures to combat them. However, these have not yet had any effect and it is necessary to give them greater impetus, especially with regard to development.

Again, there are several points that must be taken into account: first, the religious issue must be addressed, cooperating with religious and ethnic leaders to prevent radicalization and promulgating a moderate and peaceful Islam, but avoiding the external hand of countries that use this tool to try to expand their area of influence like Morocco (which use religious diplomacy as one of its multifaced external action, focused to contrast the one of Algeria). Second, grazing and agriculture must be regulated with projects that establish conciliation in land use. Third, the sources of financing for terrorists must be cut off through the fight against organized crime, the regulation of small-scale mining and the implementation of blockchain technology to control the origin of gold and other traded materials. Likewise, the efforts made by these countries must be accompanied by international cooperation, especially in terms of financing and capacity support. For example, the “Accra Initiative” has to be strengthened to avoid the disastrous results of the G5-Sahel. Therefore, the involvement of Europe and specifically France is essential, which must rethink cooperation relations and approach—especially in terms of security—with its former colonies, since the current situation in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger risks to make things replicated also in the Guinea Gulf region. A greater role for the local security forces, with training help from the West, would boost cooperation in intelligence and prevent the warlike scenario that is taking place in the Sahel.

All these measures and initiatives should be periodically monitored to control their evolution and effectiveness, which would also allow for the establishment of an early warning system that helps anticipate threats. At a European level, a careful monitoring of situation and trends must be promoted, given the high interests in terms of energy, raw materials (minerals, fishing) and immigration. Although only 10 percent of migrations in Africa are destined for Europe, in the face of a demographic boom as high as the one expected, the number of people who want to reach European soil could become unaffordable.

Today the outlook is not very promising, taking into account the deterioration of security that is being experienced in the neighborhood of these countries, especially after the recent coups d’état in Niger and Gabon (the dubious situation in Senegal is reason of concern, as well the situation in Cameroon and Central African Republic). Europe must pay attention to the role that Russia plays—for now, through Wagner—in the region, given that Moscow has presented itself as a partner for security cooperation in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger or Chad: Sergei Lavrov made reference in statements to Guinea and the rest of the countries bordering the Gulf.
Further, the appeal of Russia as anticolonial and antagonist of Western economic and security architectures has found a large and positive feedback in the local populations. The Gulf of Guinea is, therefore, at a crossroads. Behind it, there is the multifaced pro-Western system (EU, NATO, G7, OECD, IMF/WB) which is veering away from the evolution of the microregion (and the two subregions). Rather, it depends on the capacity of the Guinea Gulf states, singularly taken and/or organized in the residual regional architectures, to face this challenge whether this ends up becoming a replica of Sahel, or whether it ends the jihadist threat and is more resilient in the fight against other security problems it suffers from, such as organized crime and piracy.

Enrico Magnani, PhD, is a retired UN official and expert in military history and international politico-military affairs.

Multipolarity Forum and Russophile Congress 2024

The Multipolarity Forum and Russophile Movement Forum, which took place from February 26-27, 2024, is a unique event that brought together influential experts, activists, politicians and members of the public to discuss key issues in international relations, politics and diplomacy. These forums have fostered dialog and exchange of views on current topics related to global politics.

The Multipolarity Forum discussed the problems of a multipolar world, new challenges and opportunities for global development. The forum participants talked about the role of different states and regions in the world, strategies of cooperation and conflicts, as well as modern trends in international relations.

The forum of the Russophile movement, in turn, is aimed at discussing and popularizing Russian culture, history, language and values. Forum participants discussed issues related to the preservation and promotion of Russian heritage, Russia’s cultural influence, and the Russian language in the world.

Both forums featured highly qualified speakers, discussions, plenary sessions, workshops and roundtables. Participants had the opportunity to exchange experiences, knowledge and ideas, strengthen ties and forge new partnerships. These forums will have a significant impact on global politics, culture and diplomacy, fostering greater international cooperation and understanding.

The Multipolarity Forum and the Russophile Movement Forum are important platforms for discussing contemporary challenges and finding joint solutions on a global scale. Participation in these forums allowed participants to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary processes in international relations and to share their ideas and proposals for achieving peace, justice and development.

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, there is an increasing substitution of concepts in the world. Freedom, as Western leaders see it, means forced adherence to their understanding of world order and hegemony. Despite what used to be said only about the interests of certain clubs, today all countries, including the Global South and Global East, have equal rights. This has been achieved thanks to Russia’s efforts. Today, the real-world majority gathers not at Western conferences, but here in Russia.

According to Alexander Dugin, today humanity is experiencing significant changes in the civilization process. He advocates the idea of a multipolar world, which is based on the criticism of Western universalism and its racist and imperialist aspects. Previously, Britain claimed to be the center of consciousness of humanity, which led to the establishment of a world with the only acceptable political system, economic approach and culture. Dugin argues that there is a need to move towards diversity and get rid of the monopoly of one country or culture.

Multipolarity is a philosophy which argues that the world is not limited to the West alone, but is a multitude of civilizations. Russia, China, India, the Islamic world, African countries, and Latin America are all distinct civilizations with their own traditions and values. Despite their differences, they do not clash with each other but strive for peaceful coexistence.

Western civilization has the potential for harmonious coexistence with other civilizations, the Russian philosopher argues. Multipolarity is not opposed to the West as a whole, but rather to its claims to exceptionalism, world leadership and universality. The West’s toxic ideology has undermined the national elites of many countries, using them to support one hegemon. Today, however, this state of affairs is on the wane.

Russia is engaged in a deadly battle with the collective West in Ukraine, seeking to resist a unipolar world. Sanctions and pressure from the West are trying to strangle us, but our victory will be important for all of humanity, Dugin argues. China is leading on the economic front, fighting the West. The Islamic world is resisting pressure on religious and family values. Africa is moving from being a raw material colony to a global giant. Latin America continues on the path of anti-colonial struggle, representing all its countries in the forum.

As an example of the new world order, we can cite the unification of representatives of six civilizations out of seven within the BRICS framework. This indicates the formation of an institutional system of multipolarity. At the same time, the West is not unified. The peoples of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world are subjected to their globalist governments that seek to destroy their cultural and national identity. This remark by Alexander Dugin drew a round of applause. The peoples of the West are not opponents of a multipolar world, but rather victims of the despotism of their elites.

Chang Weiwei, a leading international relations expert in the Communist Party of China, emphasized that the concept of a unipolar world is already outdated. “Unipolarity is outdated. This order will change with the strengthening of the international influence of China, Russia and the expansion of the BRICS by adding countries from the global South and East to the alliance,” he said.

The speeches of Cardinal Vigano and Archpriest Tkachev delivered a verdict on the hegemony of Western elites, condemning their diabolical roots and the private club of Satan-worshippers. They openly criticized the hatred of traditional biblical man, dotting the i’s and calling things by their names.

After the plenary session of the forum there was a division into three thematic sections devoted to different centers of world civilization. During the discussion in the section, “Prospects of the Western World after Hegemony: Is the Salvation of European Civilization Possible?” the participants deeply analyzed the ways of development of Western countries.

Representatives of Italy, Cyprus and Greece spoke in favor of returning the Mediterranean civilization to its roots and getting rid of the influence of the United States. The section “China’s Role in a Multipolar World” discussed the Eastern center of gravity of state-civilization. China, as a country that has achieved prosperity through its unique model of cooperation without hegemony, offers its economic support for the prosperity of many countries. The “One Belt, One Road” global project aims to unite the interests of different states and world development centers to achieve common goals.

A guest from Kyrgyzstan, Valdai Club expert, Kurbat Rakhimov, examined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an important institutional structure for regional development. He emphasized the need to develop the world without one superpower prevailing over another. Rakhimov expressed the opinion that multipolarity does not always guarantee the absence of conflicts between countries and blocs, and called for striving to ensure that the actions of one pole do not provoke conflicts with others.

The multipolarity forum held in Moscow emphasized that diversity of cultures and beliefs facilitates the exchange of ideas and creates harmony in the development of the global economy. The section “Global South: Changing the Global Architecture” attracted a lot of attention from participants who expressed a desire to unite after a long time of division and to stop the exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations.

For the representatives of Iran, Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, it is important to create a new economic model, different from the liberal Western dictatorship of global corporations. They see the battle in the Red Sea and Palestine as having not only military but also cultural and economic significance. African countries have highlighted the fight against terrorism and the pandemic as top priorities. The example of Mali, the Central African Republic and Niger showed that with Russia’s support it is possible to quickly and successfully defeat the terrorists they have been fighting for many years.

The guest from Zambia expressed her desire to quickly overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, taking inspiration from the history of African victories over measles and polio. This requires effective vaccines available through Russian efforts and increased public awareness of the importance of vaccination. She noted that the continent’s current main challenge is the development of the health care system and protection of public health.

The Forum on February 26,.2024 turned out to be productive and allowed participants to exchange views and experiences, as well as to outline further steps to build a more sustainable and just world order.

Sergey Lavrov, speaking at the Congress of Russophiles, emphasized that the development of international relations is an important priority for Russia.

Russia strives to be friendly and open to all countries of the world. We pursue an independent, pragmatic and peace-loving foreign policy, supporting the democratization of international relations in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter. Our efforts are aimed at developing this task through our chairmanship of BRICS, CIS, active work in EAEU, SCO, G20 and other multilateral formats. We are also strengthening ties with regional integration associations.

“Multipolarity is important because it offers the world alternatives. We hope that Senegal will join BRICS. It would be better if the alliance accepts countries that have applied to join as soon as possible,” said Oumi Sen, secretary general of the Kalinka Cultural Center in Senegal.

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Jeff Monson also attended the forum and spoke in favor of deepening economic cooperation among the BRICS countries: “If the BRICS countries came to an agreement to introduce a common currency, it would be a very effective step. It could be used for joint trade,” Monson noted.

According to the idea of the organizers of the event, the platform is designed to unite scientists from different countries who advocate the concept of a multipolar world based on mutual respect.

To date, the International Movement of Russophiles actively advocates for the dissemination of Russian culture and humanitarian values.

Anastasia Gavrilova writes from Russia. This articles appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Multipolar Humanity

Speech at the Multipolarity Forum. Moscow. Lomonosov Cluster, February 26, 2024.

The multipolar world is first and foremost a philosophy. It is based on criticism of Western universalism.

The West has racially imperialistically identified itself with humanity. Britain once declared all the seas and oceans its property. Western civilization has declared all of humanity—above all its consciousness—to be its property. This is how the unipolar world came to be.

It has only one value—Western values. There is only one political system—liberal democracy. Only one economic model—neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture—postmodern. Only one idea of gender and family—LGBT. Only one version of development—technical perfection up to posthumanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.

The unipolar world, according to its supporters, is “the triumph of world history,” the total victory of the Western New Age, liberalism, which has become the sole and unquestionable ideology of all mankind.

Multipolarity is an alternative philosophy. It is based on a fundamental objection: the West is not yet the whole of humanity, but only a part of it, its region, its province. It is not a civilization in the singular, but one of civilizations. And there are at least seven such civilizations today—hence the most important concept of multipolar theory—heptarchy.

Some civilizations are already united into huge continental States, World-States, Civilization-States or wénmíng guójiā (文明國家). Others have yet to do so. The collective West, NATO countries and US vassals are only one of the poles.

Three others are:

The other three are

  • Russia-Eurasia,
  • Greater China ( Zhōngguó 中國) or Tiānxià (天下),
  • Greater India.

They are all Civilization-States, that is, something more than ordinary countries.

And then there are three other large spaces, integrated to varying degrees

  • the Islamic world, tightly knit together by religion, but politically still fragmented,
  • black Trans-Saharan Africa,
  • the Latin American ecumene.

All seven civilizations have completely different religious profiles, different systems of traditional values, different vectors of development, and different cultural identities.

And Western civilization, contrary to its claims, is only one of them. Arrogant, insolent, aggressive, deceitful, predatory and dangerous. However, its claims to universalism are unsubstantiated, and its dominance is based on double standards.

It is not the West that opposes multipolarity, but the West’s claims to oneness and universality. We know these claims firsthand. They permeate all systems of our culture, science and education. The West has penetrated with its toxic ideology inside our societies, seduced, corrupted the elites, put our society under its information control, tried to lead our youth as far away from faith and tradition as possible.

But the era of the West’s sole hegemony is over. It ended with the position of Russia and personally our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when we refused to sacrifice our sovereignty and entered into a deadly battle with the West in Ukraine. We are at war in Ukraine not with the Ukrainians, but with the unipolar world. And our imminent victory will be not only ours, but the victory of all humanity, which will see with its own eyes that the power of the West is not absolute, that it and its policy of neo-colonialism and desubordination can be said a decisive “no” to and the world can insist on its own.

Russia is one of the poles of a multipolar world. This is not a return to the bipolar old model. It is the beginning of a completely new world architecture.

The rapid growth of the Chinese economy and the strengthening of China’s sovereignty, especially under the great leader Xi Jiangping, has turned China into another completely independent pole. And seeing this, the West, represented by the US globalist top brass, immediately declared a trade war on China.

The Islamic world has challenged the West primarily in the religious and cultural sphere. Western values that openly call for the destruction of tradition, family, gender, culture, religion are incompatible with the foundations of Islam. Each of the nearly 2 billion Muslims understands this today. And today the Islamic world has its own war with the globalist West—in Palestine, in the Middle East, where the shameful genocide of the Palestinian people—the slaughter of Palestinian babies, women and the elderly—is in full swing with the total approval of the West.

India is another pole. Today—especially under Narendra Modi—it is an entire civilization that is returning to its Vedic roots, to its ancient tradition, to its fundamentals. It is no longer a cultural and economic colony of the West, but a rising global giant.

Africa and Latin America are consistently and methodically, though not without problems, following the same path.

The Pan-Africanist movement is preparing the way for a unified and comprehensive African integration free from neo-colonial control. It is a new theory and a new practice, incorporating the best aspects of the previous stages of the liberation struggle, but based on a different philosophy, where religion, spirit and traditional values play the most important role.

Latin America also continues its path of anti-colonial struggle. Here, too, peoples are seeking new ways to consolidate and unite, partly overcoming outmoded models that divided everyone into right and left. In many Latin American countries, supporters of traditional values, religion, and the family are uniting with those who advocate for social justice under the banner of a common struggle against the neocolonialism of the collective West and its perverted anti-human culture.

The multipolar world today is neither a utopia nor only a theoretical project. Six civilizations out of seven (from the planetary heptarchy) have united in a new bloc in BRICS. There are representatives of each of them there. We are dealing with the institutionalization of multipolarity. Greater Humanity is uniting, comprehending itself, beginning to harmonize its traditions and its orientations, its systems of traditional values and its interests.

Only the collective West, trying to preserve its hegemony at any cost, categorically refuses to be included in this inevitable multipolar process. It opposes it. It intrigues, provokes conflicts. Intervenes. It tries to strangle all pockets of independence with sanctions and direct pressure. And if it fails, it engages in direct military confrontation—as in Ukraine, in Gaza and if not today, then tomorrow in the Pacific Ocean.

However, the West is not monolithic. There are two Wests. The globalist West of liberal elites and the traditional West—the West of peoples and societies. The traditional West itself suffers from the omnipotence of the perverted globalists and tries, where it can, to revolt. The peoples of the West are not enemies of the multipolar world. They are first and foremost victims. And as our President’s interview with conservative politician and journalist Tucker Carlson shows, Russia and the anti-globalists of the United States have far more in common than they appear.

Therefore, the real Victory of multipolarity will not be the defeat of the collective West, but its salvation, its return to its own—Western—traditional (not perverted)—values, its culture (not a culture of abolition), its classical Greco-Roman, Christian roots. I believe that the nations of the present West, freed from the globalist yoke, will sometime in the future also join the Greater Humanity, becoming a respectable pole of a multipolar world. To stop being a hegemon is not only in the interests of all non-Western civilizations, but also in the interests of the West itself.

I welcome all participants of our Forum. We have gathered here to create the future, to make sense of the present, and to save our glorious past by ensuring the continuity of culture.

So different, so special, so unique, so distinctive, sovereign—humanity is us!

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.