Krauthammer on Saudi Arabia speech: 'What Trump did was to put together a posse, a coalition of Sunni Arabs'

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Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said Tuesday on "Special Report with Bret Baier" that President Trump may have taken a major step forward in the global fight against terrorism by helping lead a summit of Arab states during his visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this week.

Krauthammer said the remarks before the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit could help the White House build stronger ties with Sunni Arabs, which constitute a majority of Saudis, while casting mostly Shiite Iran as a global threat.

"Essentially what Trump did was to put together a posse, a coalition of Sunni Arabs," said Krauthammer. "The first objective, is to fight the Shiite threat to fight the civil war within Islam-- between the Shiite and the Sunnis, between the Persians and the Arabs. But there was a secondary message and that is to fight the Sunni radicals among them. Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni radicals and they are not Iranian, not Shiite."

"I think after 50 years it's time of the Saudis using their wealth to spread their Wahhabi radical ideology through the Madrassas, throughout the Muslim world," he said. "We're now seeing the fruits of generations later of that. The Saudis understand the irony of what they've done. And I think this could be the beginning of Saudis and other Sunni radical nations, spread their radical ideology, reining it back and that would be a major step."