NEW REPUBLIC
by Lori Plotkin Bloghardt
October 6, 2014
In a televised interview on September 25, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour confronted the emir of Qatar about allegations that his country is not a true ally of the United States. Doha hosts America’s largest military base in the Middle East, and at the same time allows private fundraising for American adversaries Al Qaeda and ISIS. Qatar has also been the biggest source of funding in recent years for U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas, a spinoff of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The 34-four-year-old emir replied to Amanpour: “I’m not in a camp against another camp. … I have my own way of thinking.”
The richest country in the world per capita has developed a working relationship with a particularly wide range of governments and groups, from Hezbollah to the Taliban. Qatar was also willing to engage Israelis after the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s. (Relations have since soured.) Qatar’s basic foreign policy approach is not uncommon among small, vulnerable states. Qatar has one of the smallest citizen populations in the Arab world (250,000), and the largest percentage of non-nationals in the world (88 percent). But Doha has pursued a maximalist version, often using its vast natural gas wealth to cultivate and sustain relations. To fully understand how this plays out you have to take a few central factors into account……
ArchitectGuy on Israel 