Lessons and Legacies of the Blockade of Qatar.

• Author: Ulrichsen, Kristian C.
• Position: COMMENTARY

Now into its ninth month, the diplomatic and economic blockade of Qatar launched on June 5, 2017 has gravely weakened the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and raised questions in the United States about the reliability of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as reliable political and security partners. In addition, the ongoing crisis has brought to a head long-simmering tension within the Gulf region that predates the Arab Spring, but which acquired a potent new force after 2011. The result has been a widening of the cracks in the regional political and security architecture as policy responses in the three protagonists' capitals--Doha, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi--have diverged sharply. This has important implications for socio-political stability and regional security in the Gulf against a backdrop of a generational transition of leadership and a far more assertive and unpredictable thrust of policymaking coming out of regional capitals.

The crisis with Qatar began in stages in May and June 2017. On May 23, the Qatar News Agency was hacked and a 'fake news' story that attributed inflammatory quotes supposedly made by Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani was placed on the site and immediately picked up by media in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Over the following twelve days, the Emir's 'remarks'--which U.S. investigators agreed were fabricated--became the basis for a media onslaught by outlets in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that portrayed Qatar as a destabilizing regional actor and accused Doha of supporting terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and Hamas. Given the strict control of media in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE it was inconceivable that such an outpouring of anti-Qatar rhetoric could have happened without some form of state sanction at the highest levels, and in July 2017 The Washington Post reported that U.S. investigators suspected that the hack of the Qatar News Agency had, in fact, been orchestrated by the UAE with the use of Russia-based hackers.

The rising crescendo of anger in neighboring capitals mirrored an earlier iteration of the Gulf spat in 2014 when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March and accused Qatar of being a threat to regional security and stability. The 2014 dispute lasted for eight months and was resolved by an agreement signed in Riyadh in November (known as the 'Riyadh Agreement') that paved the way for the return of the three ambassadors, shortly before the GCC annual summit that took place in Doha (of all places) in December. Qatar made concessions during the eight-month dispute that acknowledged that at least some of the claims made against Doha had some substance. These included the expulsion of several Emirati dissidents who had settled in Qatar after they fled a security crackdown on Islamists in the UAE in 2012, as well as the relocation of seven senior members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who likewise had moved to Doha to escape persecution at home.

On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain again withdrew their ambassadors from Doha and were joined this time by Egypt and, at least initially, by the internationally-recognized Yemeni government in exile in Riyadh led by ousted President Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi. On this occasion, however, Qatar's detractors (who soon labeled themselves the 'Anti-Terror Quartet') went much further than in 2014 and added an economic and trade blockade to the diplomatic embargo of Qatar. The 'Quartet' closed their airspace to Qatar and shut Qatar's only land border with Saudi Arabia to try and stifle the Qatari economy and force Doha to the negotiating table. In addition, the 'Quartet' gave their citizens two weeks to leave Qatar, and forced Qatari residents within their borders to depart, in an act that tore at the cross-border family and tribal ties that are such a prominent feature of the social fabric in the Gulf.

U.S. President Donald Trump joined the fray on June 6, 2017, when he unexpectedly sent a series of tweets that expressed his full support for the move against Qatar and sought to take credit for the blockade by tying it to conversations he had apparently had with Saudi and Emirati leaders at the Arab-Islamic-American summit in Riyadh on May 21-22, 2017--just a day before the hack of the Qatar News Agency. President Trump's comments blindsided U.S. officials at the Department of State and the Department of Defense as they had not been cleared beforehand, and reportedly angered then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who were both visiting Sydney and scrambled to contain the fallout from the sudden 'ditching' of one of the closest U.S. political and security partners in the region and host to the forward...