At Trump Forum, Countries Share a Foe (Iran) and Awkwardness (a Lot of It)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/world/europe/trump-middle-east-forum.html

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WARSAW — It was supposed to be a summit meeting of historical adversaries that gathered to unite against a common foe, Iran. But any expectation that nations with deep-rooted conflicts of their own would display a newfound amity seemed troubled from the start.

For a number of Trump administration officials, including Mike Pence, a vice president who has gained much of his foreign policy experience on the job, solving the problem seemed to be as simple as sharing a meal.

“I believe we are beginning a new era,” Mr. Pence said Wednesday night at a dinner in the Polish capital, Warsaw. It was part of a summit meeting organized by the Trump administration that drew together officials from Middle Eastern countries — including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Yemen — that are known for being on opposing, not cooperating, sides.

The vice president said he looked forward to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates “all breaking bread together and, later in this conference, sharing honest perspectives on the challenges facing the region.”

Such camaraderie, while heavily encouraged by the visiting Americans, did not always show itself in public.

This was clear from a string of pained interactions — or lack of interaction — that began when a Saudi diplomat positioned himself about as far from Mr. Netanyahu as possible during a photograph session of the participants. Israel and Saudi Arabia have long collaborated on intelligence sharing in private — if not in public displays of friendship.

Things did not improve during a working lunch later in the day, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was mistakenly referred to as the vice president of the United States. This happened minutes before the actual vice president attacked three of America’s closest allies, Britain, France and Germany, as dozens of dignitaries tucked into their lunch of cod loin.

And that was just what played out in public.

At a private meeting on Thursday, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the senior adviser overseeing the administration’s still-undisclosed Middle East peace plan, sat at a table with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Pompeo, according to people present.

At the other end of the room sat a cluster of officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, countries that have their own regional problems. That includes a blockade of Qatar by a Saudi-led coalition that accuses the Qataris of abetting terrorist activity.

A Qatari official was also seated at their table.

Facing Mr. Netanyahu during that meeting, those officials tried to contain themselves to cursory nods when they happened to agree with something. Officials have been painfully aware of the potential of their interactions to leak, though parts of the discussion did anyway.

Aside from Israel, most nations sent foreign ministers or other emissaries rather than heads of state. The White House has not released the names and titles of all those who attended, and it did not immediately respond to a request on Thursday to supply that information.

In any event, White House officials have marveled over the willingness of adversaries to sit in the same room together, hailing the fact that anyone from the region showed up as a historic accomplishment.

One person who observed the meeting described the mood inside as “let’s give it a chance” — not exactly the optimistic tone Mr. Pence struck at the pre-summit dinner.

The diplomatic calculations that Mr. Pence made throughout the event — and not always to great success — seemed to play out in real time as he weighed the benefits and costs of working with such an uneasy set of allies.

This showed itself during Mr. Pence’s speech on Thursday, when he launched into a point-by-point castigation of Iran, pausing briefly to chew out Germany, Britain and France.

The three nations had “led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our sanctions” on Iran, Mr. Pence said, before adding that the “time has come for our European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.”

The extraordinary assertion — quite awkward, too, given the European attendees — may have been an attempt at the spontaneity now closely associated with the Trump administration’s art-of-the-deal approach. Mr. Pence’s prepared remarks, which circulated just before the speech, did not contain the explicit demand for allies to withdraw from the 2015 accord.

The nuance-free calculations also showed up in comments the vice president made about the October killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident strangled last fall in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey.

In his lunchtime remarks, Mr. Pence forcefully defended the role of a free and independent press, saying that the administration continues to “demand that all those responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi be brought to justice.”

Hours later, asked by a reporter about the Trump administration’s stance on who was ultimately responsible for the killing, Mr. Pence defended Saudi Arabia as an ally.

The country, he said “plays an important role in the new alignment that you see developing across the Arab world, including with Israel, in confronting and containing and bringing economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran.”

With the Trump administration’s first major diplomatic event under his belt, Mr. Pence prepared on Thursday evening to depart for Germany, where he was scheduled to speak at the more established Munich Security Conference.

In an annual report, the conference organizers have pointed out that a key source of anxiety among America’s traditional allies was the forceful, at times erratic way in which the administration asserts itself on the world stage.