These behind-the-scenes journals of my foreign travel are, admittedly, kind of selfish. It’s a great way for me to spend the long plane ride home sorting through the dizzying array of issues you confront on trips abroad representing the United States. And occasionally, the information I document becomes important in retrospect (like my five trips to Ukraine). But over the years, I’ve also sent these accounts out to my email list and gotten really good feedback, and I’m glad that I can provide a peek behind the curtain on these important trips.

But these trips aren’t just a learning experience. I am also there to officially represent the United States in critical regions, and to help move the needle on policy I believe is important to U.S. national security. The September trip to Ukraine was a prime example. I went there because I was trying to figure out why the Trump administration had mysteriously cut off security aid just as the president’s political fixers were trying to get the new Ukrainian president involved in the 2020 election. The details of my trip with Senator Ron Johnson ended up becoming evidence in the House impeachment inquiry.

This piece is long, but I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read it.

I chose this time to travel to Lebanon because a familiar story line was playing out there. Trump had cut off aid to Lebanon, and, like in Ukraine, it came with little warning or explanation. And like in Ukraine, it cut the legs out from under a vulnerable U.S. ally at a critical time. I went to Lebanon to gather facts and raise the pressure to resolve the situation. It would turn out that my trip would help tip the policy balance. Within days of returning, Trump released the aid.

Here's the story of how it happened (the Bahrain part is interesting too, but if you just want the Lebanon details, fast forward).

Falcon Gold

We leave for Bahrain Thursday night after votes in the Senate wrap. The Manama Dialogue is perhaps the most important national security conference in the Middle East, and I’m overdue to make an appearance as the top Democrat on the Middle East subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Chair (Florida Democrat Ted Deutch, a good friend) and ranking Republican (Joe Wilson of South Carolina) of the House subcommittee are coming, and the three us comprise the congressional delegation. It’s really important that we are here, because of the unwise decision of the Trump administration to send no high level officials. After the abandonment of the Kurds in Syria and the drawdown of diplomats in Iraq, our allies in the region are panicked that the United States is withdrawing from the region, and it’s the exact wrong moment for the U.S. to not send a single cabinet official to this prestigious event.

We travel all day Friday, with a layover in London at the Bahraini national airline’s posh “Falcon Gold” lounge, and arrive just in time for the conference’s opening dinner. As I’m standing in the lobby, making my way to the dinner hall, I watch a fascinating ballet of human movement take place in front of me. Bahrain is an old-school monarchy – the al-Khalifa royal family rules the country with an iron fist. In the lobby, about a hundred men in traditional Arab dress nervously mill about. And then, suddenly, the door opens to an adjacent room, and from inside emerges what must have been the most senior member of the royal family attending the dinner. Immediately, the swarm of men in the lobby attach themselves to the smaller swarm walking out of the private room, and together, about 150 Bahraini men move as a tight, coordinated movement into the dinner hall. It’s a visual sign of the power of one-family royal rule. As a late arrival, I get swept up in the action, and the dinner guests inside the hall watch as 150 white robed Arabs and one dark suited Irish-American enter the dinner together.

Saturday is a whirlwind of meetings. I choose to take advantage of the assembly of Middle Eastern leaders to meet privately with as many as I can. I am especially interested in pressing for progress on the developing ceasefire talks in Yemen. The war in Yemen has been a disaster for everyone involved (over 100,000 kids have died of starvation and disease, and terrorists groups have grown stronger amidst the chaos), and I’ve been the loudest voice in Congress to end it. I meet with everyone attending the conference that matters to ending the war – our Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates Foreign State Secretary, and the Saudi Foreign State Secretary. I know that congressional pressure has caused these countries to act more responsibly in Yemen, and I use this opportunity to push them harder.

We also meet with the Bahraini Foreign Minister, and I use the meeting to ask him about the worsening crackdown in Bahrain on free speech. A human rights advocate, Nabeel Rajab, was recently put in jail for sending a tweet critical of Bahrain’s participation in the Yemen war, and I tell the Minister that these types of abuses make it harder to rally support for Bahrain in Congress. He responds by denying everything. “There is free speech in Bahrain!” he exhorts. It’s simply amazing to watch his performance, pretending like hundreds of political prisoners don’t exist. But this is the reality of life during the Trump administration – he knows the American government will raise no meaningful protest of Bahrain’s human rights abuses, and he may not think a rank-and-file Senator can do much to counteract Trump’s abandonment of human rights. I plan to try to prove him wrong later that night.

I speak before the crowd around 4pm on Saturday. On my way up to the stage, former CIA Director David Petraeus, a conference participant, grabs my shoulder and pulls me aside. “It’s really good you’re here,” he says. “This is a really nervous moment. I’ve never seen a conference here like this. Any way that you can reinforce that we aren’t packing up and leaving the Middle East is really necessary.” That’s what I try to do in my speech, where I talk about the lessons learned from our military mistakes of the past in the region, while finding new ways to help build stability.

That night, after a lavish dinner at one of the King’s palaces (yes, apparently the King of Bahrain has several palaces), I quietly slip into a van and, flanked by security detail, drive outside the capital city to a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Manama. I have decided to make a visit to the home of Nabeel Rajab, the jailed human rights advocate, and I can tell the Embassy here is somewhat nervous about the visit. They laudably help with logistics, but the person they work for, Donald Trump, has not made human rights a priority for the State Department. But my visit to Rajab’s family, and my discussion with two dozen fellow human rights activists and members of the political opposition, is meant to be a signal to the Bahrainis that there are at least some in the U.S. government who still care about these issues and are trying to press the Bahraini government into better behavior. Most of the two dozen Bahrainis who show up for our late night rendezvous have been jailed by the government at one time or another. One doctor was jailed just for treating protestors who were injured during the crackdown on large pro-democracy demonstrations in 2011. Word leaks out about my visit fairly quickly, and I leave hoping that this will help hearten other activists in Bahrain and the Gulf who are wondering these days whether anyone in the U.S. will get their back if they speak truth to power.

“Is Anyone From Albania Here?”

On Sunday, we head over to the U.S. naval base in Bahrain which houses the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, our primary naval force in the Middle East. It is also the home of Operation Sentinel, President Trump’s hastily arranged maritime security effort as part of his nonsensical “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran. I’m grateful for the hardworking American sailors who are staffing the operation, housed in a few hurriedly erected tents on an open space on the base. The tent is small, and that’s largely because Trump hasn’t been able to recruit anyone to join Operation Sentinel. Most nations don’t want to have anything to do with any of Trump’s initiatives, or worse, see the operation as a potential prelude to war with Iran. “Anyone from Albania here?” asks one high level State Department official who is touring the tent with us. He is referring to the fact that the mighty Albanian navy is one of only six countries currently part of the effort.

That being said, I’m always blown away by the capability of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines when I travel to see them abroad. As the sun is setting, we climb aboard a small patrol boat commanded by a young sailor who doesn’t look a day older than thirty. He is in charge of two dozen men, cramped into incredibly tight quarters and tasked with the very dangerous job of escorting ships through the Gulf and boarding ships suspected of illegal trafficking. I approach one of his young sailors to thank him for his service, and I ask him where he is from. His face lights up. “South Carolina, sir.” I grab Congressman Joe Wilson to make the introduction, and the sailor’s grin turns into a beaming smile. “I also have relatives in Connecticut and Florida!” he proclaims, as Wilson, Deutch and I all gather around to take a picture with our new favorite midshipman.

That night, the entire congressional delegation and our staff have dinner in Manama. I sit across from Wilson. You probably remember his name because he was the Congressman who shouted out “You lie!” in the middle of President Obama’s first State of the Union speech. Wilson and I are on different ideological planets, and truthfully I haven’t spent much time with him before this trip. But we have a delightful talk over dinner, and he proudly shares pictures and stories of his family with the table. I leave trusting that I’ve made a new friend and reminded how dangerous it is to make assumptions about people based on their politics or one single isolated incident.

The Revolution of the Periphery

On Sunday, I run into Jeff Feltman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, at the conference. He had given public testimony earlier in the week about the promise of the organic, growing protest movement in Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese--Christian, Sunni, and Shiite--have been demonstrating for forty days for an end to rampant corruption within the government. Much of the corruption comes from Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which is a political power in Lebanon, and these crowds of young people have their sights trained on reducing Hezbollah’s corruption as much as any other political party. Feltman pulls out his cell phone and shows me the 1,700 Hezbollah-bot generated text messages that have been left on his phone (Hezbollah publicized his cell phone number) since his testimony. “Something different is happening,” says Feltman. “I’ve never seen Hezbollah this nervous. They know these protests are coming for them.”

First thing Monday morning, I hitch a ride on a giant C17 cargo plane from Manama to Beirut (it’s the only way I can get there in time for meetings on Monday), and our highly respected Ambassador to Lebanon, Elizabeth Richard, meets our plane at the airport. In the car on the way to a refugee center (I want to take a look at how U.S. funding is being used in Lebanon to support the one million Syrian refugees there), she tells me that last night there was a near clash between the protestors and Hezbollah thugs sent out to disrupt the protests. It was the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) that came out and stood as a human shield between the groups. “They view their responsibility as to the people, those protestors,” explains Richard. “If not for the LAF, this whole thing could spiral out of control.”

The problem, of course, is that Trump has mysteriously cut off funding for the LAF – funding that Congress mandated be sent to the LAF. This is especially dumb, since right now it seems that the non-political, religiously integrated LAF is nearly the only thing holding the country together. I ask the Ambassador to take me out to see the LAF in action, and she agrees. We plan to visit with General Joseph Aoun, the commander of the LAF, and tour an air force base where American soldiers and airmen are training Lebanese pilots.

General Aoun is one of the most impressive leaders I’ve ever met in the Middle East. He is clearly tired, having been up night after night directing his troops to protect the protesters. He is under pressure from Hezbollah-aligned factions in the government to shut the protests down, but he refuses. “The Constitution says that I am here to protect the security of the people, not one political group,” he tells me. “We don’t have any training in crowd control. We know how to shoot bad guys. But we’re doing our best. It’s our duty.”

He is confused as to why the $105 million in military aid has been held up by Trump. “If we don’t have the resources to protect the county, then people will turn to Hezbollah. Is that what you want?” I learn that Ambassador Richard doesn’t have any more of an idea as to why the aid is being held up. She has been given no instructions from the White House or the State Department about what to tell the Lebanese, or what they need to get the aid restored. Speculation is that someone in the National Security Council is holding the money as punishment for Hezbollah’s role in Lebanese politics. And it is true that Hezbollah’s political wing has a seat at the table in Beirut, but the army is actually the place where Hezbollah has the least influence. That’s why the hold up in funding makes no sense.

Monday night, I meet with a few think tank leaders in Beirut and Ambassador Richard organizes a dinner with business leaders in Lebanon for me at her house. One woman marvels at how the protestors have no ideological or sectarian agenda. After years and years of elites in Lebanon consolidating power amidst a small coterie of insiders, people are just fed up that simple things can’t get done. The electricity runs only hours a day. The garbage doesn’t get picked up. The internet goes in and out. And now, an economic crisis is gripping the nation, as years of irresponsible budgeting is now preventing the government from paying its bills. Banks are mostly closed and imports are drying up. “It’s a revolution of the periphery,” she explains. “All these protesters, the young people, women, people from small villages, they are standing up and saying ‘enough’. And now, people think that the United States is turning its back on them.”

Like Ukraine

As I proceed through the day in Lebanon, it becomes clear to me that every day the security aid is not delivered to the LAF, their credibility is undermined and the situation on the ground becomes more perilous. If Hezbollah succeeds in disrupting the protests, or if violence breaks out between protesters and Hezbollah, this fragile nation could fall apart. I’m just a rank-and-file Senator in the minority party in the body – I don’t have that much power – but I know I need to do something.

The first thing I do is to send a tweet. Strapped into a seat on a LAF helicopter, shuttling us to the air force base, I ponder how to draw interest to a story that, so far, has failed to attract much attention. It occurs to me how similar the hold in funding for Lebanon is to the hold on Ukraine funding. While the reasons for the Lebanon hold may not be as nefarious as those relating to Ukraine, since the Administration hasn’t articulated a reason for withholding the funding, it leaves the mind to wonder. I know that tying Lebanon to Ukraine (which I believe is absolutely warranted) will spark interest from reporters and pundits. As the helicopter descends to the base, I hastily tap out this tweet:

Admittedly, I know the “stay tuned” bit is a little overly provocative. But it does the trick. The tweet goes semi-viral, and my office in DC starts to get inquiries about the aid.

The next morning, while waiting for my flight home, I type out a Twitter thread making the case for why the hold on funding is so harmful. This thread really does go viral, and I can feel the wheels back home turning. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I stay at it. I and my staff keep in touch with interested reporters, trying to stoke the flames and keep the story going. I reach out to a few Republican Senators who I know are angered by the hold, and we begin to quietly plot a strategy to pressure the Administration in the coming week. On Monday following Thanksgiving, I line up a full day of press interviews to raise awareness of the funding hold, culminating with an appearance on the daytime show that most foreign policymakers in Washington tune in to – Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC. I keep my fingers crossed that my troublemaking is working.

Around 3pm, the Associated Press reports that the White House has decided to quietly, without fanfare or announcement, release the funding--still absent an explanation for why it was held in the first place. The LAF will get their aid, and for the time being, a shot in the arm from their U.S. allies during a time of dire crisis in Lebanon. I’m sure that my trip and subsequent rabble rousing were just a small part of the White House’s decision to get the aid moving again, but then again, who knows.

Whatever the impact, it’s a reminder, once again, how important it is for Congress to reassert its historical role as a coequal branch of government in the construction of American foreign policy. History tells us that congressional acquiescence to the executive branch – from Vietnam to Iraq – had made our nation less safe and resulted in tens of thousands of Americans needlessly killed.

I’m determined to make sure that at the very least, I don’t fall into this trap. I think my constituents expect this of me, and that’s why these trips are so important. Occasionally, done right, they can move the national security needle in the right direction.

Every best wish,

Chris Murphy