1. Introduction
By early 2019 the rupture within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)1 stemming from the boycott of Qatar by four Arab states appeared to be well entrenched as a new feature of Middle East politics. The crisis erupted in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain – joined by Egypt – severed diplomatic, trade and transport links with Qatar, withdrew their nationals, and pulled out their investments. Qatar accused this Arab ‘Quartet’ of trying to create a run on its currency, and there has subsequently been speculation that a military confrontation was only narrowly avoided.
Qatar has been able to withstand the pressure of the boycott because of its extensive economic resources and its political alliances beyond the Gulf region. As the world’s top exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), it has benefited from moves by many Western and Asian countries to switch their energy sources from oil to LNG. It has used gas contracts and sovereign wealth investments to consolidate relationships with many countries around the world, and it hosts the main US airbase in the Middle East. Doha’s alliance with Turkey has deepened since the crisis began; it has strengthened its relations with Iran, too. Its links with Turkey and Iran were among the features of its foreign policy that the Quartet objected to, but by cutting off Qatar’s trade routes through Saudi Arabia the Quartet’s boycott has only pushed Qatar closer to these other players.
The new Gulf political landscape
The rift within the GCC, which will impact the region for years to come, has brought a number of features of the Gulf political landscape to the fore.
First, it has put paid to the view, widely held since the 2011 Arab uprisings (but always questionable), that the GCC countries are exemplars of political stability in a troubled region. Rather, the current interstate dispute is fundamentally driven by – and has added to – internal insecurities within each country. The very different internal security concerns of Qatar and the UAE have prompted their respective leaders to pursue polarized, and highly active, policies towards political Islam internationally. This is the key driver of the current dispute.
Second, it has demonstrated a new and more belligerent style of politics from the new crown princes in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, who are now among the key drivers of regional dynamics. Meanwhile, the smaller GCC states that were once on the periphery of Middle East politics have over the last two decades developed unprecedented ambitions to exert greater military, political and economic influence on an ever more complex regional canvas, but with limited manpower and experience. Given their small populations and militaries, they are investing heavily in a fierce competition for international allies. For each of the six GCC monarchies, foreign policy ambitions are largely unchecked by domestic political institutions or international powers. If they worked together, they could be a much more powerful international force. Instead, they are devoting considerable energy and resources to undermining each other.
Third, the rift has rendered the institution of the GCC – previously (though the bar is low) the Arab world’s most advanced regional bloc – dysfunctional. In one key indication of this, in December 2018 the Qatari emir declined to attend the annual GCC heads of state summit in Saudi Arabia. It has put paid to aspirations for greater economic cooperation at the very time when the need to diversify away from oil is pressing. It also marks a generational shift away from the GCC’s founding fathers, a group of monarchs motivated by a sense of common interest and shared threat perceptions. Although dismissed by some citizens as primarily a club of kings and emirs, the GCC has sought to forge stronger societal links, a free-trade area and a common market to bind its members together. Nonetheless, its institutions have proved vulnerable to the relationships between the rulers.
Finally, a row that started between Gulf leaders is becoming more entrenched at the societal level, as some of the world’s wealthiest countries direct substantial resources towards mutually demonizing propaganda. And this is starting to have an impact on their young populations, many of whom are in search of their own identity. Leaders have used the dispute to develop strong populist and nationalistic discourses in an effort to consolidate their political support and to counter the pull of transnational identities which have always resonated in the young Gulf states.
Tellingly, the trigger for the Quartet’s boycott of Qatar was a piece of ‘fake news’. In May 2017 Qatar’s state news agency appeared to broadcast statements by Emir Tamim Al Thani in praise of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, to the outrage of the other countries’ media. Qatar quickly said that its news agency had been hacked, and unnamed US intelligence officials subsequently told the Washington Post that they had evidence indicating that the UAE was behind the hack,2 which the UAE denied.3
Information warfare has remained a key feature of the GCC crisis, with both sides lobbying heavily against each other both at home and in a contest for Western support. Notably, following the assassination, by Saudi intelligence agents, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October 2018, Saudi media initially claimed that the killing had been fabricated by Qatar and Turkey. Even after incontrovertible evidence emerged that it had in fact taken place at the hands of Saudi agents, Saudi commentators have frequently continued to blame a supposed Qatari conspiracy for the international opprobrium the country faced over its actions.4 And in November 2018 Bahrain sentenced its most prominent opposition leader, Sheikh Ali Salman, to life imprisonment on charges that he had conspired with Qatar during Bahrain’s 2011 protests. Even as the US sporadically urged the Gulf countries to mend fences, it was clear that their differences had become enmeshed in the domestic insecurities of the rival states.
The regional impact: Arab countries hedge their bets
Despite the polarising rhetoric emerging from Gulf capitals, most Arab countries have tried to maintain relations with both sides in the GCC dispute, demonstrating pragmatism and bet-hedging. Indeed, for chiefly economic reasons, virtually all countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region want to deal with both Qatar and its GCC rivals; even Egypt has not recalled the estimated 300,000 Egyptian expatriates who work in Qatar. The dispute has stirred some unease among less wealthy Arab states about the risk that GCC states will use their economic levers – aid, trade, investment and remittances – against other targets in future. Furthermore, some countries do not want to take sides in a polarized dispute over political Islam for internal political reasons. Rather than representing a new regionwide rift, the dispute has illustrated the capacity of MENA states to find ways to cope with external pressures and to balance the competing interests of richer powers, a skill learned from hard experience of previous proxy conflicts. But in the Horn of Africa – including in Sudan and Somalia – the GCC rivalry is creating more serious conflict risks. Overall, the rift within the GCC makes it harder for its members to play the regional or international leadership role they have sought.
A limited Western response
International powers, from the US to Europe to China, have called for the GCC crisis to be resolved through dialogue, but none has taken specific action to make this happen. Rather, it has highlighted the reticence on the part of most Western powers to put pressure on Gulf governments to resolve their differences. European countries are competing for Gulf business, and are uncertain how to influence the new leaders of the region – especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose respective crown princes have repeatedly signalled their intolerance of being lectured by outsiders. The US has more influence, but has so far been weakened by its own policy contradictions, although in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination there is mounting bipartisan pressure from Congress to recalibrate the previously uncritical relationship that the Trump administration has had with Saudi Arabia.
Overall, Western countries have focused on limited goals in the context of the crisis, notably pressing all the GCC states for greater cooperation in counterterrorism, and emphasizing that they want to continue to do business with both sides.
Prospects for the future
The Gulf dispute is one of the newest conflicts in the Middle East, yet it has quickly become entrenched. It appears to have reached a stalemate, but one that all the governments can live with, and sometimes even benefit from (rather than the ‘hurting stalemate’5 often seen as a prelude to conflict resolution). The animosity between the relevant leaders has become highly personal, and the media and social media discourse about the dispute has sunk to a level of insult rarely seen in the Gulf.
A resolution therefore appears distant, yet it could come surprisingly quickly, since ending the dispute would depend on a handful of senior leaders whose views could change. Resolving the row would benefit all of the Gulf economies, and would be welcomed by many of their citizens, especially those who have families spanning the political divide. The US may also have an opportunity to bring the parties together if it presses ahead with a proposed conference on a Middle East Strategic Alliance in 2019 – although this initiative has already been postponed more than once and does not seem to be a real priority for the regional powers involved.
Any rapprochement could also have an economic cooperation component, involving a resumption of trade and transport ties, mutual investments (such as investment by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in some of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 projects), joint energy projects (the UAE relies on Qatari gas, and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are both in need of new gas supplies), and possibly joint tourism initiatives around the planned 2022 football World Cup in Qatar.
Nonetheless, it is likely that the legacy of this period of crisis will be enduring mistrust among a group of leaders in Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia who may be in charge of their countries for decades to come.
1 Established in 1981, the GCC is made up of six Arab monarchies: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
2 DeYoung, K., and Nakashima, E. (2017), ‘UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites, sparking regional upheaval, according to U.S. intelligence officials’, Washington Post, 16 July 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/uae-hacked-qatari-government-sites-sparking-regional-upheaval-according-to-us-intelligence-officials/2017/07/16/00c46e54-698f-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html?utm_term=.c72b38502f7d (accessed 5 Mar. 2019).
3 Calamur, K. (2017), ‘Who Hacked Qatar’s News Sites?’, The Atlantic, 17 July 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/uae-denies-qatar-hack-charges/533826/ (accessed 5 Mar. 2019).
4 Jamal Khashoggi was a prominent Saudi journalist who had previously worked for two senior Saudi princes, but had gone into self-imposed exile in the US since Mohammed bin Salman’s elevation to power in Saudi Arabia. In October 2018 he disappeared while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork relating to his planned marriage. After initial denials, the Saudi authorities eventually acknowledged he had been killed inside the consulate. The political fallout from his murder continues. Khashoggi was a particularly well-connected journalist, and a writer for the Washington Post; his high profile, and the dramatic circumstances of his killing, have meant that his case has received extensive media attention, and has become a lightning rod for wider concerns about the authoritarian practices of the Saudi leadership. The Turkish authorities, outraged that the killing happened in Istanbul, have maintained pressure on Saudi Arabia by gradually leaking more details of his death, as well as evidence of the identity of the perpetrators. Saudi Arabia has begun to prosecute 11 people – including intelligence officials – in relation to the killing, but has repeatedly denied accusations that the crown prince personally knew about or authorized it.
5 Zartman, I. W. and Berman, M. R. (1982), The Practical Negotiator, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982.