How Can the Qatar Crisis Be Resolved?
Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain imposed a stunningly aggressive blockade on Qatar, the small but wealthy Gulf emirate. Last week, after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged the blockading coalition to be more specific about what it wants, it compiled an implausibly ambitious list of thirteen demands, a list that effectively requires Qatar to surrender its sovereignty. The coalition insisted that Qatar must shutter Al Jazeera and other news organizations it funds, expel a Turkish military presence, reduce ties to Iran, and follow the counterterrorism policies dictated by the coalition.
On Monday, this latest coalition ultimatum expires; the members have promised further pressure. There is not even a small chance that Qatar will agree to the thirteen demands, certainly not as presented. Amid the escalating conflict, there are more than ten thousand American military personnel stationed at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar. From day to day, the U.S. airmen and soldiers continue to launch combat and supply missions against the Islamic State, the Taliban, and other targets in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. That is to say, in alliance with the blockading coalition, the United States is making sacrifices to fight some enemies of that coalition while the coalition attacks an essential ally of the United States—all with the apparent approval of President Trump, who has encouraged the blockade of Qatar on Twitter.
The conflict offers a dissonance that is becoming familiar in the Trump era. Increasingly, around the world, including in Washington, leaders who do not believe that they are accountable act on gut instinct in international affairs. These strongmen confuse bullying for statecraft, and, by overreaching, they expose their own weaknesses, and create disorder and risk.
The Gulf imbroglio is also a story about the smoldering ruins of the Arab Spring. The blockading coalition represents the triumphant counterrevolution against the Muslim Brotherhood and other popular Islamist movements that mobilized, briefly, alongside other Arab urbanites, beginning in early 2011. More recently, after the demise of most of those revolutions, Qatar and Al Jazeera, along with Turkey, have offered rare breathing space for the Brotherhood and other Islamists, who continue to seek power through grassroots organizing and elections. (In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won a free election in 2012, but was overthrown in a military coup d’état the next year.) Whether the Brotherhood is truly democratic or merely keen to use elections to establish a religious dictatorship is a topic of perennial debate.
For the United States, the blockade of Qatar is only the latest disruption in three decades of effort to secure military bases in autocratic Persian Gulf dependencies, which eschew elections and suppress free speech and assembly. At intervals, in an atmosphere of crisis or resentment, the U.S. Air Force has had to pick up and move from one emirate to another, like a rich uncle who is forced to shuttle among feuding relatives without ever quite understanding why. It may now have to move again.
In the early nineteen-nineties, after the Gulf War—during which a U.S.-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait—the U.S. Air Force stationed planes and air-command systems in Saudi Arabia, initially at the King Abdulaziz Air Base, near Dhahran. (The American planes enforced a no-fly zone over southern Iraq, as part of a standoff with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.) On June 25, 1996, terrorists from a branch of Hezbollah detonated a truck loaded with explosives next to a housing complex that was home to about two thousand American military personnel, killing nineteen of them and injuring about five hundred other people.
Saudi Arabia then encouraged the United States to move its planes and airmen to a more remote base, southeast of the capital of Riyadh. The Saudis seemed increasingly anxious that the presence of U.S. forces would stir up domestic trouble; the Americans chafed under new restrictions that the Saudis imposed after the terrorist attack. Then came the strains of the 9/11 attacks, followed by the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, which inflamed the Middle East and made the Saudi royal family more anxious and resentful still.
Meanwhile, neighboring Qatar, which was enjoying new wealth from natural-gas production, watched the fraying ties between Riyadh and Washington, and perceived opportunity. The Emir of Qatar began construction on an airbase, called Al Udeid, on a vast stretch of sand outside the capital of Doha. The royal family approached Washington and offered Al Udeid as a new home for the U.S. planes and command posts, with many fewer restrictions than Riyadh imposed. In April, 2003, the U.S. announced that it was moving its air operations to Qatar. “The Qataris are just as opportunistic as anyone else,” Steven Simon, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama Administrations and is now a visiting professor at Amherst, told me. “They just made an offer we couldn’t refuse.”
The American base’s presence also provides vital security to Qatar, a tiny state with only a few hundred thousand native, enfranchised subjects. In geopolitical terms, Qatar is one of those small, oil-rich countries that looks like a bank waiting to be robbed by invaders or coup makers. The ten thousand Americans stationed at Al Udeid function as a de-facto Brinks force for the royal family. Yet it was not only self-interest that motivated the Qataris to offer Al Udeid. They also “wanted to stick it to the Saudis,” as Simon put it.
Qatar has been messing with Saudi Arabia, and vice versa, for a long time. Their resentments date to pre-oil desert wars among impoverished tribes that formed their erstwhile emirates around oases, tried to keep the British at bay, and scrapped for the region’s then-meagre resources, such as pearls in the coastal waters of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia became rich decades earlier than Qatar, starting in the nineteen-thirties, after geologists discovered massive oil reserves. Qatar’s wealth lies mainly in natural gas, a resource that only created transformational riches after the eighties. When the Qataris did make it big, they started Al Jazeera, the freewheeling and provocative satellite-news network, and pursued an independent foreign policy that often seemed influenced by an instinct to irritate Riyadh.
The members of the blockading coalition have in common a deep and sometimes irrational fear of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, both of which Qatar has accommodated to some degree. The paranoia about the Brotherhood is especially acute in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The brothers have street credibility and organizational skills, and they promote democracy and shared political participation; the coalition’s dictators have none of these characteristics.
With regard to Shiite Iran, the ardently sectarian Sunni states of the Gulf perceive a conflict rooted in scripture, lasting millennia and ordained by God. In addition, Iran has a talented population and an economy that could soar, if its clerical, faction-ridden revolutionary government ever yielded to a modernizing one. As an analyst who has worked extensively in the region put it in a conversation this week, “Iran knows it is going to be around in a hundred years. Turkey is going to be around in a hundred years. The Gulf States—they are not so sure.” And for good reason. The skyscrapers of Dubai, Doha, Riyadh, and Manama are all constructed on brittle foundations.
Then why pick on Qatar, and why now? Don’t all the richest Gulf states—Qatar, the U.A.E., Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia—have many more vulnerabilities in common than they have differences? And, if Riyadh is truly worried about its neighbors cozying up to Iran, why single out Qatar? Oman has closer relations with Tehran than Qatar does, and Qatar’s ties are necessitated by the fact that it shares a large gas field with Iran. Qatar’s accommodation, or co-optation, of the Muslim Brotherhood is hardly unique; chapters of the Brotherhood hold seats in Kuwait’s parliament and participate peacefully in Jordan’s political system. As for Al Jazeera, a multinational newsroom and a rare forum for diverse debate and advocacy in the Arab world, the blockading coalition does not bother to disguise its intentions. Speaking to the Guardian,the U.A.E.’s Ambassador to Russia explained, “We do not claim to have press freedom. We do not promote press freedom.”
There is a kind of negotiating law of physics that holds that demands that cannot reasonably be met will not be met. How, then, does the coalition resolve the conflict it has created? One path would be to quietly back down, accept less than it has demanded publicly, and take satisfaction that a newly chastened Qatar will likely trim its sails after this episode, at least for a time. Another possibility would be escalation beyond the point of no return. Saudi Arabia and its allies could invade Qatar and overthrow the royal family. Or, perhaps more plausibly, they could drive Qatar deeper into an alliance with Turkey and Iran, discredit Doha further in the naïve perception of President Trump, and encourage the U. S. Air Force to requisition more moving boxes.
The U.A.E. is said to be willing to host the Al Udeid planes and the American regional military command. The nation is long on resort hotels and short on loyal infantry; it can always use more Brinks guards. For the United States, in the Gulf, the ties that bind have proved to be loose. Even so, to abandon Qatar now would be to capitulate to aggression and hubris.
