Trump bypasses Congress to sell weapons to Middle East allies
President also will send 1,500 troops to region
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump circumvented Congress on Friday by declaring an emergency over Iran and moving forward with arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan that had been blocked by Congress since last year.
Trump also announced Friday he would order about 1,500 additional troops to the Middle East to increase protection of those U.S. forces already there. The new deployment is less than what hard-liners in the Trump White House were said to have wanted, and below what commanders in the region were considering.
With the pending arms sales, Trump is back in a comfort zone of viewing diplomacy through a lens of economics and business deals, and the action reinforces White House support for the Saudis despite congressional pressure to punish Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the killing in October of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
The weapons sales decision immediately drew criticism from lawmakers, who are also furious over the civilian death toll from the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen.
With the two decisions, the Trump administration is rewarding allies like Saudi Arabia and arming them to counter Iran and its partner Arab militias, even as the president himself remains reluctant to more significantly increase the number of military personnel on the ground in conflict zones across the Middle East.
Both moves will almost certainly be seen by Iran’s clerical leaders as further escalations by Washington one year after Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear containment deal, to which Iran was adhering, and reimposed harsh sanctions on the country.
The troop increase is far less than had been anticipated; U.S. commanders in the region initially proposed asking the White House for an increase of 20,000, officials said. In the end, the actual troop increase will be 900 because 600 of the troops are already there and will simply see their deployments extended.
“We want to have protection,” Trump said to reporters as he left the White House to travel to Japan for a state visit. “We’ll see what happens.”
The move on arms sales drew strong condemnation.
“I am disappointed, but not surprised, that the Trump administration has failed once again to prioritize our long-term national security interests or stand up for human rights, and instead is granting favors to authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia,” said Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
U.S. companies will now be able to sell $8.1 billion worth of munitions in 22 pending transfers to the three Arab nations. The two gulf countries are waging an air war in Yemen that has come under sharp criticism from Congress and human rights organizations. Some of the munitions would take years to produce and deliver, so it is not obvious how those sales are consistent with the argument that the exports are to address an immediate crisis with Iran.
A part of the arrangement involves a transfer of munitions from the United Arab Emirates to Jordan that has nothing to do with Iran, said one person briefed on the decision.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had pushed hard for the move, over the objections of career Foreign Service officers and legislators. “These sales will support our allies, enhance Middle East stability and help these nations to deter and defend themselves from the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo said Friday afternoon.
The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, described the troop deployment as a “prudent defensive measure and intended to reduce the possibility of future hostilities.”
The president reached his decision after a meeting Thursday with top national security aides and concluded that a small increase would be sufficient.
During a Pentagon briefing Friday, Defense Department officials for the first time publicly accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of attacks on four oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, the director of the Defense Department’s Joint Staff, said American intelligence has attributed the attacks to Iran. But he disclosed no supporting evidence.