Qatar in the World 

A Unique Small State 

The Periphery 

 

 In the spring of 2024, negotiators from Hamas and Israel sat across from each other in Doha to discuss a ceasefire in Gaza. The mediator was Qatar, a nation smaller than the state of Connecticut, with a population of under three million, sitting on a peninsula in the Persian Gulf. That a country of this size was serving as the indispensable back channel between two bitter enemies, with the United States and Egypt as supporting partners, would have seemed implausible a generation ago. But Qatar has spent the last three decades making the implausible routine. Beginning in 1995, Qatar started a journey in foreign affairs that would challenge long-held notions about small-state power and how influence is projected in the modern world.

After gaining independence from the UK in 1971, Qatar saw Saudi Arabia as its main security guarantor. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Saudis decided to found the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), of which Qatar was one of the first formal members. But in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and with the ascension of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in 1995, the Qatari foreign policy elite decided to try a new track. After having observed KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the Gulf War and its reaction to Iraqi aggression, Qatar decided it needed to reevaluate its position in the Middle East. Qatar had already signed a new security agreement with the United States in 1992, no longer seeing Saudi Arabia as being able to guarantee its security. Later in 2002, they decided to allow the US to base troops in-country. The US had been looking for a new rental location in the region after the Kingdom had forced the US to vacate the Amir Sultan base after disagreements between the two arose in the aftermath of 9/11.

It was also during this time that Qatar decided it needed to balance out the two growing regional powers, KSA and Iran. Qatar would seek warmer relations with Tehran and try to distance itself from the more confrontational tone of the other GCC members, especially the Saudis. During the Arab Spring, Qatar would attempt to position itself as a champion of the various revolutionary movements, which would put it at odds with both the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose governments were opposed to the general uprisings for different reasons. And later in 2013, Qatar would publicly condemn the military coup against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, a further break from its fellow GCC members. But later, the Qataris would find themselves on the same side as Saudi Arabia in the backing of Syrian rebels against the Assad regime. Additionally, Qatar and the Saudis would join forces again, with the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen against Houthi rebels. Both actions, in Syria and Yemen, were seen as proxy conflicts with Iran, whose attempts to use armed groups in civil conflicts were seen as a threat to the two Gulf states. Qatar would also demonstrate its willingness to work without Saudi involvement when Qatari forces helped support NATO forces in their intervention in Libya in 2011. Within the post-9/11 Middle East, Qatar has demonstrated both a willingness to work with regional partners, in the case of Saudi Arabia, politically, diplomatically, and militarily, but at the same time has had the capacity to make its own way in the case of Libya or work with international partners like the US or NATO.

The most dramatic test of Qatar's independent foreign policy came not from an external adversary but from its own neighbors. In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt severed diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed a sweeping land, sea, and air blockade. Their demands included the closure of Al Jazeera, the severing of ties with Iran, and the expulsion of Turkish troops from Qatari soil, essentially a demand that Qatar abandon the entire foreign policy architecture it had spent two decades building. Qatar refused. Rather than capitulate, Doha deepened the very relationships its neighbors were trying to punish it for — accepting Iranian airspace access and food supplies, and welcoming an expanded Turkish military presence. The blockade lasted three and a half years. It ended in January 2021 with Qatar having made essentially no concessions. The episode inadvertently proved Qatar's thesis — its network of independent relationships, cultivated precisely because it refused to rely on any single patron, was exactly what saved it.

But Qatar wouldn’t be limited to hard-power initiatives; it would also make great strides in soft power. The creation of Al-Jazeera, as a state-owned media group, would become a hallmark of Qatari influence not just in the Middle East but across the world. This again bore out of the policy shift in 1995. It was decided that there was a need for an Arabic-focused and based news agency to compete with Western and Iranian-based news groups. It was this news network that would bring Qatar and the news into people’s homes all across the world, not just in the Middle East. It was this kind of initiative that would play to the Qatari strengths, readily available proceeds from petrochemical sales to endless finance, and fund a massive media operation and a soft diplomatic touch state-run media outlet.

But Qatar wouldn't limit its diplomatic ambitions to the Middle East. Beginning in 2006 with negotiations between Fatah and Hamas, Qatar established itself as a mediator of regional disputes that others couldn't or wouldn't touch. In 2020, Qatar hosted the US-Taliban negotiations that produced the Doha Agreement, the framework that ultimately ended America's longest war. More recently, Qatar has served as the primary back channel for Gaza ceasefire negotiations, shuttling between Hamas political leadership, which maintains its political bureau in Doha, and Israeli and American negotiators. The extraordinary contradiction at the heart of this arrangement is worth stating plainly: Qatar simultaneously hosts the largest US air base in the Middle East and the political leadership of Hamas. That this arrangement has functioned, however uncomfortably, for years is perhaps the clearest expression of Qatar's foreign policy philosophy: that maintaining relationships across every divide, however contradictory they may appear, is itself a form of power.

Small states, like Qatar, have traditionally been thought of as minor players in the international system. Limited by geography and natural resources, which in turn limits their ability to project power. They are either pushed into balancing or bandwagoning. But Qatar has found a way, or ways, to operate independently. While they have at times tried to straddle between Tehran and Riyadh, there have been just as many times when they have decided to go against both. Or they have decided to take their own path. This has been done with a smart mixture of both hard and soft power mechanisms. Qatar's deliberate decision not to join the Abraham Accords, while Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel, was not an oversight but a calculated choice to preserve its credibility as a neutral mediator in the Palestinian conflict, a credibility that would prove indispensable in the Gaza negotiations that followed. It could be said that their petrochemical wealth has allowed them this freedom, but not all resource-rich nation-states have found this to be true. It’s truly this smart use of soft power, through Al-Jazeera and branding as a mediator, that has put them in the position of a regional power. Not too bad for a nation smaller than the state of Connecticut.