Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, has been named in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2020. However, where the list is for remarkable achievers and personalities, the name of UAE envoy has majorly been intolerable.
Although a key player in reshaping Middle East, Yousef Al Otaiba has largely been involved in acts that probably no one would want to get influenced from. He is known to be one of the smartest people in the UAE, whom “MbZ trusts most on foreign issues”. Most recently, the Emirates’ envoy was involved in making the UAE-Israel peace deal, Abraham Accord, possible.
Otaiba had been in talks over the peace deal with his long-time friend and the US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The pact did normalize relations between the two nations, but proved to be a nightmare for Palestine, which is in a danger zone of facing annexation.
UAE envoy, Yousef Al Otaiba pressurized Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon the plans to annex the Palestinian region, but the decision remains far from sight. Instead, the Emirates has walked ahead in demanding the F-35 fighter jets from the US, and has been paving way with Israel to build spy bases in Yemen’s strategically-located Island of Socotra.
Before the so-called peace deal, the Emirati ambassador to US has been a great manipulator of American politics, along with being involved in prostitution in Washington and Abu Dhabi. Since Donald Trump took office in 2016, his administration has been under the influence of UAE’s Yousef Al Otaiba.
A voice so crucial in the US that it changed the Trump Administration’s Middle East policy. Leaked emails exchanged between the UAE envoy and a billionaire fundraiser for Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Tom Barrack, revealed that Yousef Al Otaiba lobbied to transform Donald Trump’s anti-Muslims stance, ahead of the 2016 US presidential elections.
The emails also presented discussions that Barrack had with Emiratis and Saudis for the appointment of Paul Manafort, who was involved in Russian meddling of the 2016 US elections, as Trump’s campaign chairman. On behalf of the UAE, Yousef Al Otaiba has been lobbying with top American diplomats to transform US policies according to the Gulf requirements.
During Trump’s candidacy, the UAE envoy was also in close contact with Barrack and Manafort, along with Rashid al Malik, an Emirati businessman in close contact with the rulers. The leaked emails revealed that a network of these four people exchanged multiple drafts of Trump’s energy policy speech, in May 2016. The speech was circulated among Emirati and Saudi officials and was ultimately changed as per the pro-Gulf region language.
The UAE envoy Yousef Al Otaiba’s name among TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2020 is actually a stain. For years, he has been involved in prostitution and has observed the exploitation of trafficked girls in Abu Dhabi. Following a number of lavish dinners and massive charity donations, Otaiba built connections for significant personalities in the US. Since then, he has been strategically modifying the policies of the Trump administration, as per what is appropriate for the Emirates. Years of his corrupt history put serious questions over the inclusion of his name with some of the most renowned individuals.
