\n
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has urged all sides to end the dispute.<\/p>\n
Gulf leaders privately concede they have collectively become locked in a dispute that appears ugly, and sometimes petty-minded, and so damaging the image of all Arab states in the eyes of the west. Much of the propaganda, such as\u00a0hiring protesters, is designed for domestic Arab media. But they insist the underlying issues at stake are too important to abandon, and that Qatar\u2019s independent-minded royal family is ultimately culpable by reneging on commitments made in 2014.<\/p>\n
The four Gulf states \u2013 UAE, Saudi, Bahrain and Egypt \u2013 launched a\u00a0blockade on Qatar in June last year, expecting the gas-rich kingdom to succumb to the economic squeeze within months. More than a year later, with millions spent by both sides on lobbyists, PR firms and contracts, the Gulf Co-operation Council is nearly defunct and a frustrated Saudi Arabia is reduced to discussing whether to dig a ditch across its border with Qatar, in effect turning the Qatar peninsula into an island.<\/p>\n
The two demands on Qatar, according to the UAE foreign minister, Anwar Gargash, have now boiled down to a requirement that Qatar ends \u201cits million pounds of interference in the internal affairs\u201d of the boycotting states, and stop its \u201cirresponsible financial support\u201d for political Islam including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Brotherhood is an incubator \u2013 the gateway drug \u2013 to jihadism of all kinds,\u201d Gargash said at a speech on Thursday to the British centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange.<\/p>\n
Gargash said that if the dispute could not be resolved, the aim should be that Qatar is \u201cno longer seen as a crisis, but as the new state of affairs\u201d. He argued that in the Middle East three forces were competing against each another \u2013 Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the modernising Gulf States increasingly open to women\u2019s equality, represented by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Qatar, far from siding with its natural allies in the Gulf, was backing extremism and Iran, he said. Gargash also claimed Qatar was funding the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.<\/p>\n
But Qatari officials this week, during Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad\u2019s visit to London, presented their country as a reliable ally of the west and pointed to the reckless foreign policy judgments of the Saudis, in particular in\u00a0Yemen\u2019s civil war.<\/p>\n
Qatar and the US \u201claid the foundation stone for expanding\u201d the chief US airbase in the Middle East at\u00a0al-Udeid, located 35km southwest of Doha, they said. The US has flown tens of thousands of missions against Islamic State from the base, which houses 10,000 US armed forces. This hardly suggests Qatar is hostile to the US, the officials said.<\/p>\n
More concerning for the US is the possibility that if the Gulf dispute drags on, Iran and Qatar could find themselves pushed towards one another in a diplomatic embrace born of mutual isolation. That would be a high price for the US to pay for letting the dispute fester.<\/p>\n
Qatar, unlike the other Gulf states, has sided with Europe, and not the US, in saying\u00a0Iran has complied with the nuclear deal\u00a0– the JCPOA \u2013 signed in 2015. It regards US policy as likely to lead to chaos, rather than regime change favourable to the west. It was noticeable this week that Qatar was willing to warn Britain that Iran could well block the Straits of Hormuz if the US pushed sanctions too fiercely.<\/p>\n
In the battle for Washington\u2019s ear, the Saudi-UAE support for Trump\u2019s stance on Iran may yet prove decisive. But Gargash admits he is worried by the divergence between Europe and the US on Iran. Privately, some Gulf leaders would like to see Trump temper his anti-Europe rhetoric on trade in the interests of bringing Europe on board for the US plan to isolate Iran.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US hopes to defuse simmering dispute between Qatar and other key states in the region Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are hoping to call the leaders of the Gulf states to a summit in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1343,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,57,90,96,107,137,139,160,174,184,201,202,209,232,233,244,246,249,256,267,277,279,288],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aramco","tag-baroudi","tag-democracy","tag-doha","tag-embargo","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-international-maritime-disputes","tag-lebanon","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-opec","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-saudi","tag-straddling-hydrocarbons-reserves","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}