Qatar and the Gulf Crisis

Abstract

Qatar and the Gulf Crisis examines the attempt by four states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt – to isolate and blockade Qatar. The book explores in detail the policy responses taken in Qatar since early-2017 by a small state, cut off by its neighbors and subject to a regional power-play designed to appeal to the baser instincts of a U.S. presidency that had taken office lacking any real sense of a foreign policy and vulnerable, in its first months, to unprecedented attempts by foreign powers to influence American domestic and national security interests. The blockade of Qatar was launched fifty years to the day since Israel launched a surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force at the start the Six-Day War. Just as that war came to define regional politics across the Middle East for a generation so the blockade of Qatar has developed into the most serious rupture in the Gulf since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and has become a similarly era-defining event for the region. Qatar and the Gulf Crisis examines how and why Qatar was able to beat back a blockade that was supposed to split the country and force it into a position of submission to the would-be regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi (in the UAE).