For a country where alcohol and guns are often sold in the same convenience store, it is perhaps not very awkward to have a president who doesn’t seem to be bothered by contradictions. However, contradictions have a nasty habit of materializing into headaches, or worse. And this might turn into one of those.
One of the main highlights of DJ Trump’s sales tour around the Gulf autocracies turned out to be the unexpected meeting with the president of Syria. Even more surprising, turned out to be the lifting of sanctions on this still very volatile Middle East country. The surprise turned out to be a major one, not only for the world diplomats but also for the US ones, since many are still concerned to see how Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Sunni jihadist militant, will deal with the threat to ethnic minorities. After all, the man has until not so long ago been topping the most wanted terrorist list – by the UN, the US, the EU and the UK – for leading al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and the aesthetics of his physical features highlited by DJ Trump after their meeting should be the least of our concerns.
The meeting was orchestrated in the context of the 142 billion dollar deal sealed by the American president and the Saudi Arabian king, one of the main sponsors of Ahmed al-Sharaa and his presidency. The Saudi ruler has managed to squeeze the meeting and the lifting of the sanctions within Trump’s Art of the Deal package. So, while the world and the Middle East are facing a very plausible future scenario where thousands of highly trained and experienced jihadist fighters, from Syria and the region, will have access to (almost) limitless amounts of state-of-the-art weapons, DJ Trump is heading back home with the big fat check in his pocket, wondering:
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Boris Matijas 