Fifteen months after the historic al-Ula summit, which ended the Emirati and Saudi-imposed blockade of Qatar, there is a greater sense of confidence in Doha. Having survived a three-and-a-half-year period of relative isolation on the Arabian Peninsula, Qatar finds itself under much less pressure today.
Qatar’s citizens and expatriate population proved resilient amid the 2017-21 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) feud, which has given them a stronger sense of national pride and unity than what they had prior to the crisis.
The al-Ula summit was a joyous occasion for basically everyone in Doha. Residents of Qatar who frequently travelled to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to visit family and friends before the blockade were forced to meet their loved ones in Kuwait, Oman, or elsewhere during the crisis.
Visiting the blockading states was risky for Qatari citizens and residents. Therefore, the resumption of direct travel between Qatar and cities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE has benefitted Qataris in many practical ways.
The GCC crisis ended without Qatar having to compromise its sovereignty, marking a major political victory. It confirmed that Doha was correct in its assessment that standing strong in the face of Saudi and Emirati pressure would ultimately serve Qatari interests.
Since the al-Ula summit, Qatar has been looking forward. No longer needing to worry about the Gulf feud, Doha has spent the past 15 months paying more attention to its diplomatic efforts aimed at defusing other crises elsewhere in the world.
Qatar’s ability to facilitate difficult conversations between political rivals has secured it as a strong diplomatic partner for many. It has emerged as the main GCC state helping Western governments pursue their foreign policy interests in post-US Afghanistan, highlighted by the US and some European countries relocating their envoys from Kabul to Doha and Qatar’s assistance with last year’s evacuation efforts.
Various parties from Chad recently began talks in Doha aimed at bringing peace and stability to the African country. Qatar’s leadership has possibly been playing somewhat of a bridging role between Moscow and Kiev since the Russia-Ukraine war erupted in February. Doha has also been working to bring Iran and the US closer to the point of reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The extent to which these aspects of Qatar’s foreign policy have helped make Doha increasingly useful to Washington heavily factored into the Biden administration’s decision to designate the country a major non-NATO ally in January.
In the Gulf and the greater Middle East there have been a host of rapprochements between regional powers which, until quite recently, were aggressively countering each other. The al-Ula summit took place within this context of states in the neighbourhood wanting to focus more on investment ties and economic cooperation rather than their ideological and ideational differences. Qatar has clearly been a beneficiary of this new sense of pragmatism witnessed in Saudi and Emirati foreign policy decision-making throughout 2021 and 2022.
Different tempos of intra-GCC reconciliations
Among the three GCC states that collectively acted against Qatar, the reconciliation processes have not moved at equal speeds. The Doha-Riyadh rapprochement has occurred at the fastest rate with the Qataris and Saudis taking major steps to build on the al-Ula summit and find ways to benefit from an increasingly healthy and warm bilateral relationship.
After the al-Ula summit, the UAE was slow to move toward reconciliation with Qatar. Yet beginning in August 2021 with the UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s visit to Doha, Emirati-Qatari relations have improved albeit not to the same extent as have ties between Doha and Riyadh. Bahrain stands out as al-Ula’s weakest link with there being essentially no Doha-Manama rapprochement since early 2021.
Such differences highlight how even throughout the 2017-21 crisis, the blockading states were not always on the same page in terms of their underlying motivations for acting against Doha and their perceptions of the alleged Qatari threat.
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Trust deficits
Still, even as relations throughout the Gulf have warmed, there is a prevailing lack of trust that continues to inform many of Doha’s perspectives on the powers that blockaded Qatar until last year. Although the first two GCC crises have been resolved, no one can say with absolute certainty that there will not be a third crisis down the line.
Given that the underlying ideological disputes of these feuds have not been resolved, the possibility of a repeat scenario in which some Gulf Arab states attempt to once again strongarm Qatar into changing its policies can’t be dismissed.
But with the US designating Qatar a major non-NATO ally earlier this year, Doha can likely face the possibility of a third GCC crisis with greater confidence compared to the situation in June 2017.
Under this potential future scenario, support for Doha from Washington would be more institutionalised than it was almost five years ago. There would be less uncertainty about America’s commitment to protecting Qatar from any fellow Arab states seeking to subject it to a blockade, financial warfare or perhaps even military action.
Future US administrations will want to avoid a similar crisis unfolding in the Gulf again. In Washington, there is a bipartisan consensus that the blockade harmed US interests in the Middle East.
US leadership will therefore be keeping an eye on such tensions and try to help Gulf Arab states address their differences in ways that don’t dim the prospects for long-term peace, stability, and prosperity in the region.
The blockade of 2017 was extremely dramatic, stressful, and even traumatising in some ways for many Qataris and expatriates in the country, and created major challenges that the country had to overcome.
No one in Doha has forgotten the magnitude of the crisis which entailed some of Qatar’s fellow GCC states lobbying Washington to turn against it while putting pressure on a host of Arab-Islamic nations to join the anti-Qatar bandwagon.
Although the Qatari government has been keen to turn a new page and consider the 2017-21 crisis water under the bridge, the people of Qatar still have grievances that will take years, if not decades, to completely move beyond.
Ultimately, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi pulling a 180 and reconciling with Qatar has served the overall interests of the GCC and its members. Yet there was never any reason to believe that the al-Ula summit could easily or rapidly reverse the damage which the blockade did to relations within the family of Gulf Arab states.
While Qatar’s ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE have improved to degrees which were largely unimaginable two years ago, there are tensions that remain below the surface.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics.
Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero