Asking The Wrong Question About Qatar

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This is the kind of situation that produces op-eds with titles like“Whose Side Is Qatar Really On?” The honest answer, that Qatar is on Qatar's side, as nearly all states are nearly all of the time, is treated as either obvious or evasive, when in fact it is the beginning of any useful analysis.

Consider the geography. Qatar is a peninsula of roughly three hundred thousand citizens, sitting atop one of the largest natural gas fields in the world, sharing that field with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and bordered on land by Saudi Arabia, which blockaded it for three and a half years beginning in 2017.

A country in that position does not get to choose between camps. It hedges, mediates, and cultivates relationships with every actor that might one day help it or harm it. This is not Qatari cunning; it is the standard operating procedure of small states wedged between giants, from the Hanseatic cities to Finland to Singapore. The behavior we describe as Qatari duplicity is, viewed from Doha, the behavior of a state that intends to remain a state.

What is striking is how much of Qatar's supposed double-dealing has been done at American invitation. The Taliban office in Doha that hosted the negotiations leading to our withdrawal from Afghanistan - we asked for that.

The Hamas office that channeled hostage negotiations after October 7 - we asked for that, too, and successive administrations from Bush to Biden have used it. The back channels to Tehran during the recent war, the prisoner exchanges, the Gaza reconstruction architecture now under discussion, all run through a country we periodically denounce for talking to the people we have asked it to talk to.

There is a name for this in the realist tradition: we have outsourced our diplomatic ambiguity. Qatar performs functions the US wants performed but does not wish to be seen performing. The cost of that arrangement is that Qatar must maintain relationships we find distasteful, including with movements that are genuinely hostile to American interests and to Israel.

The benefit is that we have a phone number to call. It is not obvious that this is a bad bargain. It is obvious that it is a bargain, with costs and benefits that ought to be weighed openly rather than litigated as a question of Qatari character.

The genuine concerns about Qatar are not imaginary. The Qatar Investment Authority's enormous footprint in American universities, think tanks, and lobbying firms is a legitimate subject of inquiry, not because foreign investment is inherently sinister but because the US is unusually casual about influence operations conducted through legal channels.

Qatari permissiveness on terror financing has improved markedly since the mid-2010s but remains, by the Treasury Department's own assessments, imperfect. Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English do not always serve the same narrative, and the Arabic-language coverage of Hamas has at times been hard to distinguish from advocacy. None of this is dispelled by saying“Qatar is an ally”; none of it justifies saying“Qatar is an enemy.”