# Qatar Diplomatic Crisis The **Qatar diplomatic crisis**, usually called the **Qatar blockade**, began on June 5, 2017, when [[Saudi Arabia]], the [[United Arab Emirates]], [[Bahrain]] and [[Egypt]] cut diplomatic ties with [[Qatar]] and closed their airspace, their ports and Qatar's only land border. They accused Qatar of financing extremist groups and siding with [[Iran]]. Qatar denied it. The four then issued 13 demands. Qatar publicly met none of them, and the blockade ended three and a half years later, on January 5, 2021, with a general declaration of Gulf solidarity. For American readers the blockade is a test case of who makes U.S. foreign policy. President [[Donald Trump]] cheered it on while his secretaries of state and defense tried to end it. Both sides spent heavily in Washington, and several of the Americans who carried their messages were later investigated, tried or pardoned. > [!note] Related pages > Each side's Washington operation has its own page: [[Emirati Influence]], [[Saudi Influence]] and [[Qatari Influence]]. What became of the Saudi-Emirati partnership afterward is at [[Saudi-Emirati Rivalry]]. ## The sides | Side | Who | Role | |---|---|---| | The blockading four | [[Saudi Arabia]] under Crown Prince [[Mohammed bin Salman]]; the [[United Arab Emirates]] under [[Mohammed bin Zayed]]; [[Bahrain]]; [[Egypt]] under [[Abdel Fattah el-Sisi]] | Cut ties, closed borders and airspace, wrote the demands | | Qatar | Emir [[Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani]] | Refused the demands and rerouted its trade and flights | | Qatar's lifelines | [[Turkey]] and [[Iran]] | Turkey sent troops and food; Iran sent food and opened its airspace | | The mediators | [[Kuwait]], and later the United States | Kuwait carried the demands and brokered the ending | All of the Gulf states involved are members of the [[Gulf Cooperation Council]]. Two of its six members, Kuwait and [[Oman]], stayed neutral. ## What the quarrel was about Three long-running grievances sat behind the break. - **Political Islam.** Qatar backed Islamist movements, above all the [[Muslim Brotherhood]], that the Saudi and Emirati monarchies and Egypt's government treat as a threat to their rule. - **[[Al Jazeera]].** Qatar's neighbors accused the Qatar-funded network of promoting those movements and stirring unrest in their countries. Closing it was one of the 13 demands. - **Iran.** Qatar kept working relations with Tehran while Saudi Arabia was trying to isolate it. The United States is allied with countries on both sides. Qatar hosts [[Al Udeid Air Base]], the regional headquarters of [[CENTCOM]], with about 10,000 American troops. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | May 20–21, 2017 | Trump visits Riyadh on his first foreign trip and meets Gulf leaders, including Qatar's emir | | May 23, 2017 | Rep. Ed Royce of California announces a sanctions bill naming Qatar at a Washington conference on Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood, the AP later reported. The bill goes to the [[House Foreign Affairs Committee]] | | May 24, 2017 | Qatar's state news agency carries inflammatory remarks attributed to the emir. Qatar says the agency was hacked and the quotes are fake. Its neighbors block Qatari media anyway | | June 3, 2017 | Hacked emails of the Emirati ambassador, [[Yousef Al Otaiba]], begin appearing in the U.S. press | | June 5, 2017 | The four states cut ties and close land, sea and air routes | | June 6, 2017 | Trump tweets that Gulf leaders had "pointed to Qatar" as a funder of extremism, taking credit for the break | | June 7, 2017 | Turkey's parliament approves sending troops to a Turkish base in Qatar | | June 9, 2017 | Secretary of State [[Rex Tillerson]] calls on the four to ease the blockade. About an hour later Trump calls Qatar "a funder of terrorism at a very high level" | | June 14, 2017 | Defense Secretary [[James Mattis]] signs a $12 billion sale of F-15 fighters to Qatar | | June 22, 2017 | Kuwait delivers the 13 demands, with a ten-day deadline. Qatar rejects them in early July | | July 11, 2017 | Tillerson signs an agreement with Qatar in Doha on fighting terrorism financing | | July 16, 2017 | *The Washington Post* reports that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded the Emirates orchestrated the May 24 hack. The Emirates denies it | | Aug. 24, 2017 | Qatar restores full diplomatic relations with Iran | | April 10, 2018 | Trump hosts the emir at the White House and calls him "a friend of mine" | | June 16, 2020 | A [[World Trade Organization]] panel finds Saudi Arabia failed to protect a Qatari sports broadcaster from piracy by a Saudi-based pirate channel | | July 14, 2020 | The [[International Court of Justice]] rules that the UN aviation agency can hear Qatar's complaint about the airspace closure | | Jan. 4–5, 2021 | Saudi Arabia reopens its airspace and border. Gulf leaders sign the Al-Ula Declaration | ## The 13 demands The list was written by the four governments and handed to Qatar by Kuwait. News agencies obtained copies. Its main points: - Shut down [[Al Jazeera]] and its affiliates, along with other outlets Qatar funds, including Middle East Eye and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. - Scale back diplomatic ties with Iran, expel members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and end military cooperation with Tehran. - Close the Turkish military base in Qatar. - Cut ties with the [[Muslim Brotherhood]], the [[Islamic State]], [[Al-Qaeda]] and [[Hezbollah]], and declare them terrorist groups. - Hand over people the four states had designated as terrorists. - Pay reparations for the damage the four said Qatari policy had caused. - Bring Qatar's policies into line with the other Gulf states. Qatar said the list was an attack on its sovereignty. Tillerson had said beforehand that he hoped any demands would be "reasonable and actionable"; Qatar's foreign minister said they were neither. ## Washington splits The administration never spoke with one voice. **The president.** Trump's June 6 tweets treated the break as a result of his Riyadh visit. On June 9 he said he had decided, with his advisers, that it was time to call on Qatar to end its funding of terrorism. **The cabinet.** Tillerson said the blockade was hurting the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State and should be eased. Five days later Mattis signed the F-15 sale. **The dinner.** In a closed 2019 interview, House Foreign Affairs Committee staff told Tillerson that [[Jared Kushner]] and [[Steve Bannon]] had dined privately on May 20, 2017 with the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, who laid out their plan for the blockade. Tillerson said he had never been told and that it made him "angry," because the State Department's views were never heard. He and Mattis learned of the blockade while traveling in Australia. The White House said the dinner never happened and that no one in the White House was involved in the blockade. **The summit that wasn't.** Tillerson later testified, at [[Tom Barrack]]'s trial, that Trump wanted to bring the parties together at Camp David and that the Emirates declined the invitation. The meeting never took place. **The turn.** By April 2018 Trump was praising Qatar as a partner against terrorism financing. ## The influence war Both sides worked on Washington at once, and each accused the other of hacking. ### Against Qatar - **The ambassador's inbox.** The leaked Otaiba emails showed him coordinating with the [[Foundation for Defense of Democracies]], a hawkish Washington think tank, on Qatar and Iran. The Emirates confirmed the account had been hacked. - **[[Elliott Broidy]] and [[George Nader]].** The AP reported that Nader, an adviser to the Emirati crown prince, wired $2.5 million to Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser, in April 2017 through a Canadian company. *The New York Times* reported that the money helped pay for anti-Qatar conferences at the [[Hudson Institute]] and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Broidy also pressed Royce's sanctions bill and donated to Royce. The AP found the two men expected Gulf defense contracts in return, and Broidy's company later won an Emirati intelligence contract worth more than $200 million. Broidy has said he acted on his own initiative and complied with the law. He was not charged over the campaign. - **[[Tom Barrack]].** Federal prosecutors charged in 2021 that Barrack acted as an unregistered Emirati agent, and argued at trial that he tipped an Emirati contact to the Camp David plan and urged Trump to drop it. Former Treasury Secretary [[Steven Mnuchin]] testified that Barrack had in fact taken Qatar's side and thought Trump was making a mistake, and Barrack testified that he had urged Trump to hold the summit. A jury acquitted Barrack of all charges on November 4, 2022. ### For Qatar - **Lobbyists.** Qatar hired Washington lobbyists to reach Trump's allies and conservative groups, among them Nick Muzin's firm, Stonington Strategies. - **The Broidy hack.** In early 2018 Broidy's own emails leaked to news organizations, and several of the reports cited here drew on them. He sued Qatar, saying its agents hacked him. A federal judge dismissed Qatar from the case in August 2018 because foreign states are immune from such suits, and an appeals court agreed in December 2020. No court ruled on whether Qatar was responsible. Qatar denied it. - **666 Fifth Avenue.** In August 2018 a unit of [[Brookfield Asset Management]] rescued the [[Kushner Companies]]' debt-laden Manhattan tower. The [[Qatar Investment Authority]] owned about 9 percent of that unit. The fund said it had no involvement in the deal. Reuters reported that Qatar first learned of it from the press and then moved to avoid investments it does not fully control, which the fund denied. Senator [[Ron Wyden]] later wrote that Brookfield's assurances that no Qatar-linked entity was involved had turned out to be false. ## How Qatar held out - **Turkey** flew in more than 100 planeloads of food and sent troops. - **Iran** shipped food and let Qatar's airline cross its airspace. - **The American base** made Qatar hard for Washington to abandon. Tillerson and the Pentagon both said in the first week that the blockade was getting in the way of military operations. - **The courts.** In 2020 Qatar won a World Trade Organization panel ruling on broadcast piracy and an International Court of Justice ruling that let its complaint about the airspace closure go ahead. ## How it ended Kuwait mediated from the first weeks. In December 2020 Kushner traveled to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to push for a deal. On January 4, 2021, Kuwait announced that Saudi Arabia would reopen its airspace and border. The next day Mohammed bin Salman embraced the emir on the tarmac at Al-Ula, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf leaders signed the **Al-Ula Declaration**. Kushner attended. Reuters reported that the declaration contained only a general pledge of solidarity. Qatar had not publicly given way on any of the 13 demands. A U.S. official said Qatar would suspend its legal cases. The deal came two weeks before Trump left office. ## Why it's on the map - **Two foreign campaigns, one White House.** Rival Gulf governments lobbied against each other through people close to the president, while the State and Defense departments were left to find out afterward. - **Almost none of it was registered.** The main American go-betweens were a fundraiser, an inaugural chairman and a son-in-law, not registered lobbyists. See [[FARA]]. - **The legal record is thin.** Barrack was acquitted. Broidy pleaded guilty in 2020 to an unrelated foreign-lobbying conspiracy and was pardoned. Nader went to prison for other crimes. - **It explains the sources.** Much American research about Gulf influence is paid for by the other side of this quarrel. Reading it means knowing who funded it. - **The alliance behind it broke.** The two governments that led the blockade later backed opposing forces in Yemen and Sudan. See [[Saudi-Emirati Rivalry]]. ## See Also - [[Qatar]] · [[Saudi Arabia]] · [[United Arab Emirates]] · [[Bahrain]] · [[Egypt]] · [[Kuwait]] · [[Turkey]] · [[Iran]] - [[Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani]] · [[Mohammed bin Salman]] · [[Mohammed bin Zayed]] · [[Yousef Al Otaiba]] - [[Rex Tillerson]] · [[James Mattis]] · [[Jared Kushner]] · [[Elliott Broidy]] · [[George Nader]] · [[Tom Barrack]] - [[Gulf Cooperation Council]] · [[Al Jazeera]] · [[Al Udeid Air Base]] · [[Qatar Investment Authority]] - [[Qatari Influence]] · [[Emirati Influence]] · [[Saudi Influence]] · [[Saudi-Emirati Rivalry]] · [[FARA]]