Montecristos with Bibi (and Peace in the Middle East)

I have to point out that this past week we've seen not just one but two historic milestones, a pathway to peace in the Middle East and episode fifty of Verdicts with Ted Cruz. I don't know which one is more historic. Look, it's been fifty episodes, and I got to say, you know, when it was clear to me you weren't paying attention, as when the fellow came up with a little clicky thing and said episode fifty, Oh, what's that called, by the way, the clicky thing. That's

called the clicky thing. Actually that's the technical term for it, and you apparently had no idea, so you weren't listening to him when he said episode fifty times of my eyes glazed over, absolutely because I was. I was focusing on this other I suppose more minor historic milestone piece in the middle of the world piece. Yet you know, I just think you need to re examine your priority in Michael, You're right, absolutely well. I wasn't there. I

wasn't there for the Abraham Accord. At the White House. You've got President Trump, bb Net and Yahoo, leader of Bahrain, leader of the United Arab Emirates. What makes this historic? And what happened? So the Abraham Accords they were signed this past week and the signing was on the south lawn of the White House. So I was there, and then they had chairs set up outside. It was beautiful September day, probably seventy degrees outside. I mean, it was as pretty a day as you ever see in Washington.

And their number of US gathered on these little white wooden folding chairs, and out out from the White House comes the President comes Bbing Nat Yahoo, the Prime Minister of Israel, and then the Foreign Minister of the UAE and the Foreign Minister of Bahrain, and they each give speeches and then they sit at a table down below and each of them signs the agreement. And what has happened is both the UAE and Bahrain have normalized relationships

with Israel. In other words, they're treating Israel just like any other country, and that's a big damn deal. This is the first time an Arab country has normalized relations with Israel in twenty six years. The last time was nineteen ninety four Jordan. What about before that? Before that

was Egypt nineteen seventy eight, Camp David. Wow. So this doesn't happen very often, and I think it's an extraordinary step forward in terms of bringing East to the region, but also piece globally, because look, for a long time the Middle East has been a powder keg yea and diffusing the tensions, and it was really fitting the Bahrain piece was announced on September eleventh, and I pointed out, I said, you know, there are a few greater acts of revenge we can have on the terrorists who committed

that horrific attack on September eleventh, then to bring about peace in the Middle East and make help make Jews and Arabs and Americans friends. Yeah, well, you mentioned nineteen seventy eight. So we've been working on piece in the Middle East since at least the Carter administration. I suppose

further back than that. And I know this is probably a simple question, but I think sometimes when we think about our own domestic problems, we do wonder this, which is why is America always trying to broker peace in the Middle East? Why do we care? Well, Israel's a unique country. It is the world's only Jewish nation. Was founded in nineteen forty eight, so it's just over seventy

years old, um seventy two. And it you look at nineteen forty eight, it was coming out of World War Two, it was coming out of the Holocaust, six million Jews being murdered by the Nazis and and the State of Israel was formed for many reasons, one the historical connection of the Jewish people to Judah and Samaria and to the land of Israel, but also to ensure that that never again, what's something like the Holocaust happened, that there would always be a Jewish state where where Jews could

be be safe and avoid persecution. Now, when Israel was formed in nineteen forty eight, the Arabs nations all declared war, and there was war after war after warm It was not something that happened happily. It's not that their neighbors

did not celebrate. To put it mild, and you know, you think about it, you A, in Bahrain are nearby neighbors who until this week didn't recognize Israel because because some people have been saying, well, it's not a peace deal because the UA in Bahrain they've never been in open war with Israel. So oh, you know, guys, look, it's not a big deal. Forget about it, okay, And

that's just a weird argument. Listen. Democrats are scrambling because President Trump helping broker a peace deal in the Middle East really counteracts their narrative as him as the embodiment of everything that is terrible in the world, right, And so there's a combination. Joe Biden, when the UAE deal broke, he said, well, this is really the culmination of his work, and so it's convenient. You know, it's a big deal

if Biden's trying to take credit for it, yea. And then the other sort of democratic talking point is well, it's not that important because they weren't actively in a state of war firing missiles at each other. They didn't recognize each other, they didn't acknowledge the Arab States, UAE and Bahrain didn't acknowledge that Israel existed as a nation

as a Jewish state. And I think it's important to pause and reflect how this came about, because part of the reason that we're seeing the left, both the media and the academic world and Democrats pushing back so hard on this is these Abraham Accords are the culmination of a very very different approach Trump took than Obama Biden, and the Obama Biden approach doesn't work, and the approach we've taken the last four years does well. This is

the issue. I remember when Barack Obama was running this is two thousand and eight, people told me if I voted for John McCain, we'd get more wars in the Middle East, which was true. I voted for John McCain, and we got more wars in the Middle East, even though Barack Obama got elected. We haven't had one of these peace deals in twenty six years, right, So what did they do wrong? What did Trump do right? Because we were told Trump was going to lead to World

War three? Yeah, and to some extent, those are different issues of their parallel issues. I do think too many Democrats, including the Clintons, including Hillary and too many Republicans, including John McCain, had been too eager to get US into wars,

had been too eager to use US military force. And I think that that has been an important, worthwhile shift the last four years, is to be much more restrained in terms of when we get into foreign entanglements, to use a phrase from George Washington, with respect to Israel. I think there were two decisions early on in the first year of the Trump administration that really set the

stage for this, and they were intertwined. I think these are the two most important foreign policy decisions President Trump has made. The first was moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Now, we had our embassy in Tel Aviv. Yeah, Telvi's not the capital of Israel. Jerusalem the capital of Israel. We had our embassy in Tel Aviv because the Palestinians lay claim to Jerusalem as well, and so it was viewed as if you have your embassy in Jerusalem, you

are somehow favoring Israel's choice of its capital city. Now, mind you, we have our embassies in the capitals everywhere else on Earth. Yeah, just this one exception that we didn't. When the Trump administration began that there was a big debate within the administration about whether or not to move the embassy because presidents had been promising to do this for decades. It had beneficial US policy, and just no one actually did it. Obama promised to do it. George W.

Bush promised to do it. Bill Clinton promised to do it. Both Democrats and Republicans had broken that promise over and over and over again. In twenty seventeen, the Trump administration both the State Department of the Defense Department opposed moving the embassy. Yeah, you had Rex Teller Senna, Secretary of State, had Jim Madness he was Secretary Defense, and they both

didn't want to move the embassy. And the reason they said they didn't want to move the embassy as they said it would enrage the enemies of Israel and the enemies of America. This is a foreign policy battle I engaged in very actively, and so I mean I spent a lot of time talking to the President, leaning in making the case. Look, the enemies of Israel and America

they hate us anyway. It's not like there's suddenly some other day where they break out in hosannas and start singing songs you're not going to appease them, and that appeasement word. We're going to come back to that, because that appeasement word is very, very important for understanding the

shift and path that led to this piece agreement. The past week, there were voices in the White House who were arguing against moving the embassy to Jerusalem because they said, this will make peace harder to achieve in the Middle East. We want to see peace in the Middle East. If we move the embassy, it will tick off everyone who's angry with Israel, and that makes it harder to achieve. And you saw this throughout the mainstream media as well.

This was being echoed in the popular press, and the case I made to President Trump and the case I made repeat it in the White House, as I said, look, there is virtue to clarity and lack of ambiguity. If we move the embassy, it will be seen by both our friends and our enemies as a statement that the United States stands unapologetically in four square with Israel, and that there's a president who is not going to be cowed by the New York Times or CNN. At the

end of the day, the President agreed with me. He overruled his own state department, he overruled his own defense department, and he moved the embassy. I was there when we opened the embassy in Jerusalem. It was in May of twenty eighteen. It was actually on the date of the seventieth anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel. And it was powerful, it was emotional. There's literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem. It's I've been to Jerusalem

four times. I've never seen jubilasian like there was when we opened the embassy. And what I argued to the president when he was debating whether or not to move the embassy, is I said, listen, are Arab allies, Jordan, Egypt, the Saudi's UAE said, they will all publicly denounce the decision because they feel they have to for domestic political reasons. They'll feel obliged to denounce it. But what I argued is I said, secretly, they will be overjoyed. And here's

why they will say. A president with the backbone to move the embassy, maybe, just maybe, just maybe we'll have the backbone to stand up to Iran and stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And there are few things that have clarified the minds of our Arab allies more than the Obama Iran nuclear deal, which put Iran on an barreling path towards getting nuclear weapons, and I sent them palettes of cash for famously over one hundred billion dollars.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that the very same week we opened our embassy in Jerusalem is the week the President announced he was withdrawing from the disastrous Obama Ran nuclear deal. Those two were connected, and the same fight played out in the Trump administration on pulling out of the Obama Ran deal. State was opposed, Defense was opposed. It was clear when President Trump was running he said I'm going to get out of this Iran nuclear deal. The base hats so he actually didn't.

It is a little bit astonishing. The Iran nuclear deal is one of the issues on which Donald Trump and I sharply disagreed in the twenty sixteen primarily well, I remember you were certainly opposed to it. So when I was running in twenty sixteen, I pledged to do five things on the first day in office January twentieth, twenty seventeen. One was moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Yeah. Another was ripped the deal to shreds. So those were two of

the five things I pledged to do. Trump as a candidate in twenty sixteen explicitly disagreed with me, and he said, no, I'm not going to rip the deal off. I'm going to renegotiate. I'm gonna try to get a better deal. And so we had we had, I mean, in several presidential debates we disagreed on this policy issue. So you fast forward to twenty seventeen, there's a debate within the Trump administration. Tillerson and Madis are both saying stay in the deal. Maddis kept saying a deal is a deal.

America has given our word. Yeah, And I kept pointing out to Maddis, I said, no, America didn't give our word. Obama signed that agreement with the explicit opposition of the United States Congress. The America gives our word either when we pass a statute or a treaty ratified by the Senate. The Obama ran deal was neither. He made an end run to the UN to try to get around Congress and the opposition. Once again, Trump agreed with me and

overruled his own state and Defense Department. Now let's fast forward and now those decisions. Part of the reasons those decisions were so important is you look at the UAE in Bahrain. You no longer had this moral ambiguity, this handwringing, This is, oh, we don't want to take a stance on Israel, we don't know what we believe, which I think prolonged conflict. You talked about appeasement. The Obama Biden

path was appeasement over and over and over again. It was undermining Israel, and undermining Israel ironically produces more terrorism, tension, warfare, dissension in the Middle East. In the last couple of weeks, I've spoken with the UAE ambassador, I've spoken with the Saudia ambassador. So Saudi Arabia has not normalized relationships, but we yet We've been told there could be other countries, as many as nine countries that will join on to this sort of a piece deal. And look, the Saudis

are the whale. They're they're the biggest of the players. That is outstanding, and Bahrain is very closely allied with the Saudis. Most people think that Bahrain would not have done this without the Saudis, at least giving implicit approval to it. The Saudis also announced, and this is historic as well, that they would allow Israel to have over flights, to have their airplanes fly over Saudi Arabian territory. That's

a big deal. Used to be, Israel had to fly around Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia would not allow Israeli planes in their airspace. Both the UAE ambassador and the Saudi ambassador in the past week, when I spoke to them, they said, listen, we are doing this because we want to be friends with America, because it is important for us to be friends with America, and we know that it is important to you for us to be friends with Israel. We know where you stand. It's the clarity,

and they said, that's why we're doing this. There's something called the Iran echo chamber. Okay, So that was when Barack Obama was president, they were negotiating the Iran nuclear deal. There was a so called echo chamber that it's locus was the National Security Council under Obama, but it was reporters, it was academics, it was think tanks, and it was all these lefties who were pushing the Iran nuclear deal. They viewed that as the single biggest foreign policy accomplishment

of the Obama presidency. And it's all predicated on a piecement. It's predicated on if we give Iran one hundred billion dollars, they'll make nice and won't make nuclear weapons. Even though the Ayatola regularly chance death to America and death to issue, it should be made clear this is not ambiguous here. You've got a country that chants death to America. You've got a country that is an open, explicit alli of the United States, and yet or under the Obama administration,

it made us all scratch our heads. They thought the path to peace was to make nice with the people chanting death to America. This obviously they look Middle East piece is perhaps the most complicated foreign policy issue. So just to simplify here, because it seems like there's so many layers. We were told for a very long time that supporting Israel was the cause of this chaos and violence in the Middle East. It would seem to be

that the opposite has been proved true. We were told by the leaders of these countries that they hated our support for Israel. Explicitly, and yet behind closed doors and in their own interest, it would seem that they actually have supported American clear support for Israel. Is that right? Am I clarifying here a little? I think that's right. On the latter point, they haven't as much explicitly supported it as I think it is in their interest and

they are. You know, I've joked you. Remember Barack Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize in two thousand and nine right after he was elected. He'd literally I don't think he'd unpacked his boxes yet, he was still trying to find a stapler. I believe it was nine days after he was sworn in he was nominated for the Peace Prize, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush, but the fact that he was. By the way, why didn't you win a

Nobel Piece prize? You're not waited, I know where's my phone call? So they awarded him that prize, But you look at I've joked that in retrospect, Obama may have deserved it because he did something heretofore impossible, which is he united the Arabs and the Israelis. All he had to do was put in place a plan to give one hundred billion dollars to the Ayatola Kamnee that he could use to develop nuclear weapons to threaten all of their lives, and suddenly the Jews and the Arabs are like,

holy crap, are you out of your money? Well, because this introduces an aspect that I think is often overlooked when people are trying to ravel with this, which is they think of the issue as Jews versus Muslims, and that's that's a simple. But of course we're talking about nation states here, and there are a lot of these Arab states that don't particularly like Iran. So you've instead just two and there's a divide between Sunnies and Shiites.

And so Iran is a Shiite state and most of the Arab states are are Sunni states, and so there's a religious divide within Islam between the Sunnies and Shiites. And and they're fully aware of what Iran is capable of. I mean, Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. But yet both Obama and Joe Biden, who was very active in foreign policy as Vice president,

they fully believed in appeasement. I've also joked there's a reason we don't see the Neville Chamberlain school of foreign policy. Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister of Great Britain, championed appeasement of Adolph Hitler and said, if we just give him what he wants, everything will be fine. And history teaches us that appeasement doesn't work, that it's provocative, that actually weakness and appeasement to a dictator, to a tyrant makes war were more likely. This is where a lot of

the media gets it backwards. Yeah, listen, I agree with Ronald Reagan, who talked about and emphasized and built his foreign policy on peace through strength, that if you want to avoid war, be strong enough that no one wants to mess with you. Well, it's interesting on that point of peace through strength. And we were told at that time that Reagan's a cowboy, he's a warmonger, he's crazy. I guess we were told the same thing when the Trump administration came in as well. But there is an

irony here to both of those administrations. We really did get that piece. I mean, it's not just an empty slogan. When you have weakness, you're inviting this kind of aggression. Look in eight years in the White House. The biggest nation Reagan ever invaded was Grenada. He was reluctant to use military force, as Trump has been as well, And

I think that is exactly right. I think there were too many cowboys in the GOP and the Democratic Party that option A was always send the marine, yes and listen. If there's a threat to the national security of the United States, if Americans lives are being threatened, that's what the armed forces is forced to keep us safe. But being reluctant to pull that trigger, I think is the right thing to do, not to put our sons and daughters in harm's way, but also being clear and strong.

It's why the moving the embassy was such an important pivot point. And you know, look, I'll give you an example of Obama Biden and their policies. Back in I think it was twenty fourteen. I was in Israel and I had a meeting set up with net and Yahoo

and and I've gotten to know Bobe well. Yeah, And the meeting was set up and the US ambassador to the Obama ambassadors named Daniel Shapiro, and Shapiro told me the meeting was the next day with Babe and he said, he said, you are not meeting with Net and Yahoo without me? Did? He just said, flat out you were not going to meet with him without me? And and I said, well, listen, this this is a trip I set up. I set up this meeting. I didn't go

through you, and you're not invited to the meeting. Yeah, you know, so I am a senator. You don't get to tell me what to do. Well, and Shapiro comes back and he threatens me, says, well, then i'll pull your security. So when you're traveling in Israel, you get a security detail from the embassy. Right. Um, he said, I'll pull your secure security. I said, fine, within within an hour. I'll hire a private security if you want

to do that. And it was clearly a bluff. Yeah, they're not going to let the US senator go without security. But what was obvious is John Kerry, who was Secretary of State, had told Shapiro, you keep an eye on cruise and don't you dare let him in a room together with baby. That we don't want this because they they hated Net and Yahoo and they hated me, right, and the last thing they wanted was us talking to each other, right, And so but you had a picture it.

So Ambassador Shapira is not a very big guy, and we were literally bumping chests standing in front of the Knesset, which is the Israeli parliament, and we're I mean, it was a junior high like chest to chest of him saying I'm coming and me saying you're not invited. And

he backed down. And so the next day, well and clarity and ambiguity and and and so the next day when you when you go and meet with with nat Jah who, there's a conference room that you do all the meetings in, and so if you look at any picture of any delegations, it's in Israel. There's Israeli flags, and you take a picture with a prime minister and you sit at the conference table and talk about issues.

And so I've done that multiple times. This time we'd pre arranged with with Bebe's office that we'd come into the conference room, but that Bobe would say, here, come on back to my office head And so I went back to his office, which is actually not that big an office. It's right adjoining the conference room. And we sat down and I had brought two cigars. Bibe loves

to smoke cigars. I knew I liked that guy, and we lit up to Monte Cristo's and we sat there smoking cigars and for I don't know, an hour, maybe a little bit longer. We talked geopolitics, we talked Middle East, we talked Middle East, peace, America, the world. And I gotta say that may have been the single coolest moment I've had in the entire US. Like it Look, you

get a chance to meet all sorts of people. You meet presidents, you meet senators, you meet cabinet officials, you meet heads of state, Bby Nanna, who was one of the most serious, impressive, brilliant world leaders I've ever encountered. And I'm sitting there smoking a montice Cristo cigar at his office, going what in the hell am I doing here? Like like like it was it was surreal. I kept thinking like it was candid camera, someone was gonna come out and say this was all a joke. But part

of it is net Ye, who has a seriousness, a gravity. Listen, he leads a country that historically has been surrounded by enemies that would drive them into the sea. Yeah. Um, and he's been running it forever, it seems so let me give it an analogy from literature, and you're gonna laugh at what the literature is um, which is a children's book that I read as a kid. Did you ever read the series called The Great Brain the Grit No I had. I didn't. I read The Mediocre Brain.

That's probably didn't work out, all right. So the Great Brain is it is? It's a seven book series that I read as a I don't know it's a kid. It's by John D. Fitzgerald. J D. Fitzgerald, and it he is the younger brother and it's talking about his the middle brother, Tom D. Fitzgerald, and the older brother, swind Fitzgerald. And Tom, the middle brother, is a convent.

I mean, he's just a huckster and he's always coming up with these sort of scams to con the other kids out of something, and sort of think Tom Sawyer and painting the fence. But every chapter was a different elaborate Cohn. And they're growing up in Utah, if I remember correctly, at essentially the turn of the nineteen hundred, so late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. And in one of the books, early on, Fitzgerald is explaining he said he said, you know, when we were growing up in Utah,

I said, almost all the other kids were Mormon. Yeah, And he said, my family, we weren't Mormon. And he said, it really wasn't all that hard. It was simply a batter of me learning to whip all the boys my age, and Tom d learning to whip all the boys his age, and Swendy learning to whip all the boys his age. And once we did that, they were very, very tolerant. It's amazing how tolerant a boy can be when you

can whip it. There's a geopolitical lesson there. I read that probably at age ten, and it's stuck in my brain then. And that's frankly Israel's view. It's amazing how tolerant their neighbors can be when Israel's military has defeated them over and over again, and the qualitative military advantage they have is part of what produces peace in the Middle East. And so this past week was a big deal.

It's a big deal. I think we should celebrate with Monte Cristo's and we will hopefully bring peace not just to the Middle East but to the Southeast as well. And then rejoin you over here for the next episode. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations,

and candidates across the country. In twenty twenty two, Job's Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.