The Gulf Crisis (2017-21) witnessed Qatar facing sanctions by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain, self-proclaimed as the ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Accusing Qatar of sponsoring Islamist terrorism, the Quartet broke diplomatic relations with Doha and imposed an embargo. In reaction, Qatar affirmed its sovereignty yet sought in parallel to expand and make permanent the US al-Udeid airbase—a marker of US imperialism in the region. To understand such a paradox, this article argues that we must study sanctions in tandem with the stigmatization narratives that legitimate them. Sanctions and stigma work together as performances of norms, which themselves serve to bound an order. This article conceptualizes the Gulf Crisis as an episode of regional order-making reproducing the hegemonic repertoire of the US-led global order. The Quartet employed US-inspired practices of sanctioning ‘rogue’ actors and hegemonic narratives on the fight against terrorism, while Qatar sought to counter this stigma by scaling up the al-Udeid airbase to showcase its pro-US, anti-terror credentials. By attending to the deployment of hegemonic norms—through sanctions and stigma—as tools of regional ordering, this article underlines that the Gulf Crisis ultimately contributed to bolstering the normative architecture sustaining the US-led global order.