The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.
The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.
> bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible
They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.
Destabilizing the region, working with Hamas, facilitating terror financing, working with Iran, and a bunch of other stuff should concern us. There’s plenty of flat sand to park aircraft on without doing business with those filthy slavers.
> plenty of flat sand to park aircraft on
Then someone else parks there. Barring a Saudi takeover of Qatar, we’re stuck there to keep the Russians and Chinese out.
Qatar already deals with Iran and Russia by proxy. Qatar’s largest trading partner now is China and Qatar supports the one China policy.
> Qatar already deals with Iran and Russia by proxy
So does the UAE. They’ve played their game well.
It doesn’t mean we need to be their staunch defenders. But it’s in our government’s interest to not piss them off for no gain. And we’re not in a place in America where foreign policy swings power.
We should wash our hands of both places and their petty feud. They offer us nothing but problems and moral stain by association.
Much of Europe and Asia is dependent on Gulf sourced ONG and Gulf sourced FDI.
And the current crisis is happening because the last time we were hands off with Middle Eastern affairs shortly before the Arab Spring, a number of conflicts spiraled into proxy wars between KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, and Iran.
We just have to keep protecting them and give them weapons, otherwise somebody else will do it.
Quite a high moral ground to be on, I tell ya. I know I know, realpolitik and all, but then lets stop pretending there is some higher ground and treat say china-us conflict as something that literally doesn't concern Europe at all (seems like US has still military upper hand but who knows for how long, seems like China will steamroll ya economically/technologically pretty soon). Especially given this year developments when we saw that US military equipment cannot be trusted, US IT infra cannot be trusted and so on.
Europe would be more concern if there was more trust in the current US government. Besides, European politicians have been so naive they have let China use their financial power to exert pressure, they are slowly waking up to it, but not fast enough.
OK I'm not a Qatar apologist or anything, but Qatar is obviously on the less-bad side here. What are you suggesting is better? Letting RSF ethnic cleanse whatever portion of Sudan they want?
In this conflict Qatar isn't supporting the genocidal and unrepentant RSF, but previously in Syria it was Qatar that backed the hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusra who committed similar atrocities that the RSF are doing except on Druze, Alawites, and Shia.
There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.
A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
Like I said, I'm not apologizing for any of the many bad things Qatar has done, but I don't understand how this, where Qatar is supporting the legitimate-ish and not-especially-genocidal side, is being used as evidence by the "Qatar sucks" camp.
Becuase this is one proxy war that is part of a larger proxy war across the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia.
I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.