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we now know, there was an entirely parallel effort to influence American foreign policy, and George Nader was at the center of it.

According to the New York Times, Nader and Elliott Broidy pitched a scheme to the governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in which Broidy would use his extensive contacts in Washington, especially in the White House, to shape U.S. policy toward Qatar, which the Saudis and Emiratis accuse of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, funding extremism, and cozying up to Iran. Apparently, the Emiratis agreed to the arrangement. Clearly, putting the screws to Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is a high priority for the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, who undoubtedly would not apologize for using every method and resource at their disposal to advance their countries’ interests. What is the Trump administration’s excuse, though?

The kind of influence-peddling in which Nader and Broidy were involved can be traced back to Jared Kushner. On Nov. 8, 2016, if not before, he was handing out his cellphone number to all kinds of people in Washington with little regard for the potential consequences and apparently little idea about who was genuinely powerful and who were just posers. No doubt that important people in certain countries had the mobile numbers of senior members of the Obama administration, plus their Gmail addresses, but there was something qualitatively different about the way Kushner was operating. He was essentially opening the door to a Trumpian culture in which there is no process, there is no vetting, everyone and anyone could be an asset, loyalty is the greatest quality second only to money, and there are always ways to get something done no matter what.

Trump’s world does not operate the same way as Washington’s major Middle Eastern allies, but there are some parallels that make stories like the George Nader affair possible. Trump’s tendency to eschew the formal processes and procedures of government dovetails with the way in informal power, uncodified norms, and past practices shape governance and policy in places as diverse as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Israel. These kinds of informal institutions exist in the United States as well; a lot of things have gotten done in Washington over the years because of the Harvard “old boys”” network or because that’s the way it has always been done in the cloakroom. But informal networking has generally not guided the realm of foreign policy, which has always involved an exhaustive (and exhausting) interagency process. Kushner’s willingness to hand out his digits signaled that Team Trump was open to doing things significantly differently from previous administrations, and U.S. allies along with people like Nader and Broidy took him up on it. The result was a $650 million contract for Broidy’s security firm after he bent the ear of the president and others about the perfidy of the Qatari leadership.

From the vantage point of Middle Eastern capitals, in Trump’s Washington, the secretary of state and the national security advisor are superfluous. You could go through Kushner or supplement by engaging in some “riyalpolitik.” The influence business has been around

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