Abstract
In this chapter, Cafiero looks at Donald Trump’s presidency as the key variable in the Qatar crisis of 2017. As a security guarantor of all Gulf Cooperation Council members, the US, under the leadership of President Obama, played an important role in thwarting further action from being taken against Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain during the Gulf crisis of 2014. In 2017, however, Cafiero argues the Saudi and Emirati leadership saw an invaluable opportunity to finally settle scores with Qatar given that Trump sat in the Oval Office and had previously indicated his preference for a new US foreign policy that rejected many pillars of his predecessors’ approaches to international affairs. As the chapter will show, based on Trump’s staunch opposition to Iran as an influential power in the Middle East, as well as his rhetoric against the Muslim Brotherhood, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi (mis)calculated that the new US administration would buy an anti-Qatar narrative and interpret the blockade as a sign that Washington’s Arab allies were serious about cooperating with the US in the struggle against violent extremism.
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