Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (5 page)

From its very inception, the GCC suffered from lingering suspicions among some of its members, principally Qatar and later also the UAE, that it was a forum meant to legitimize and institutionalize Saudi Arabia’s hegemony over the smaller sheikhdoms.
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Lack of mutual trust has meant the continued preference of the GCC states for bilateralism over multilateralism, thus undermining the emergence of internal consensus among its member states and weakening its collective decision-making framework.
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According to Joseph Kostiner, “GCC strategic planning is an exercise in disparate security, displaying similar perceptions but particular priorities.”
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Qatar in particular revels in its pursuit of an independent, at times seemingly maverick, diplomacy of its own. In recent years, the United Arab Emirates, in an effort to highlight its diplomatic autonomy in relation to Saudi Arabia, is also trying to have a more dynamic, independent, and innovative foreign policy of its own.
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The GCC state’s continued preference for the preservation of the status quo has had the ironic effect of spurring them into action in times of acute regional crisis—as was the case during the Arab Spring—to prevent the crisis from deepening.

Uncoordinated and underdeveloped as it has been, the GCC security architecture has two pillars—the United States and the six member states.
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The Persian Gulf is often seen as “a cauldron of insecurity” in which the United States has sought to play the role of an “active balancer.”
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This balancing has more often been directed against prevailing threats rather than against a predominant power.
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This is despite the fact that most regional actors, in line with other small states, have shown a marked preference for diplomacy over armed action as a means of conflict resolution.
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Ultimately, it has been American-led balancing, most recently against Iran, that has shaped the Persian Gulf’s intra-regional politics. Up until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the Persian Gulf was a tripolar regional system with Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia as the region’s three major players, with the US playing an active, increasingly direct role in balancing against threats to its interests and its regional allies.
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The US invasion removed Iraq from the equation and left Iran and Saudi Arabia as the two dominant regional powers, along with the ever-present United States. As Ulrichsen points out, this balancing system, in place since the early 1970s, has been anything but successful; it has led to three bloody wars, and has done precious little to lessen the region’s chronic tensions.
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However, there are no signs that it will be transformed or dismantled anytime soon.

The steady rise in influence of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, is “affecting regional politics in ways that do not always meet with the interests of the major regional actors,”
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most notably those of Egypt, Syria, and Iran.
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The shift between “leadership” and “strategic follower” roles has created tensions between Egypt, on the one side, and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, on the other, and also between Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
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But intraregional relations have not all been rosy either, with intense competition, and at times quite serious friction, particularly between Saudi Arabia, the self-ascribed leader of the Arabian Peninsula, and the new kid on the block, Qatar. Realists often categorize states into major, middle, and small powers, ascribing to each different goals and interests based on their capabilities rather than the institutions to which they belong or the ideas they espouse. Unlike major powers, which have the broadest range of interests spanning the length of the international system, small powers “often remain on the sidelines…or succumb to the power of the larger states.”
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A number of other scholars have added to the top of the pyramid a “dominant power,” which manages the international (or regional) system “under rules that benefit its allies and satisfy their national aspirations.”
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According to this schema, states at the bottom of the hierarchy tend to have the most grievances and seek deliberately to change the rules and norms that underlie the international system, especially if they are located in the vicinity of a much more powerful and bigger state. In such cases, a relationship of “confrontational competition” is likely to characterize the relationship between the two unequal states.
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As will be discussed in the chapters that follow, confrontational competition generally sums up Qatar’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, a relationship that is sometimes more and sometimes less confrontational, but is always competitive. When a challenger nation is unsatisfied with the regional or international status quo and seeks parity with a dominant power, the likelihood of conflict is greater.
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As the two cases of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the UAE demonstrate, parity and overtaking both have brought the small sheikhdom into frequent competition and rivalry with its two bigger neighbors.

No matter what might have happened in the lower rungs of the Persian Gulf’s power hierarchy, the United States has placed itself at its top since the British withdrawal in 1971, ensuring that the waterway remains an “American lake” regardless of what happens to and among the regional states. The United States has consistently considered the Persian Gulf to be of strategic significance since World War II.
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The US Navy, in fact, first started using naval facilities in Bahrain in 1948.
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The “Americanization” of the Persian Gulf initially started out slowly. But it picked up pace with a vengeance in the 1990s, when American footprints began appearing across the Persian Gulf region in unprecedented numbers. Still, for much of the twentieth century US policy in the Persian Gulf was one of “reactive engagement”; bereft of a grand strategy and with occasional inconsistencies and contradictions, the United States frequently found itself simply reacting to regional developments and challenges as they arose.
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In 1979, two major crises led to a fundamental reassessment of US strategy toward the Persian Gulf—the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—both of which brought with them a direct military role for the United States in the Persian Gulf.
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Ironically, although at the time tensions between the United States and Iran were at an all-time high due to the storming of the US embassy in Tehran and the holding of American diplomats hostage by the Iranian revolutionaries, the United States began worrying about a Soviet attack on Iran in order to gain access to the Persian Gulf. In his 1980 State of the Union address to the US Congress, in what was meant as a warning against such a possibility, President Carter outlined elements of what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine:

Let our position be absolutely clear: any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
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The Soviets never did invade Iran. Neither did the Americans see any reason to leave the Persian Gulf. From the American perspective after all, as one former US ambassador put it, “the United States will have no choice but to remain a deeply engaged power in the region.”
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As US-Iranian tensions deepened throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, and as the collapse of the Soviet Union freed America’s hands militarily, the United States steadily expanded its presence in the Persian Gulf. In 1987, the United States began reflagging Kuwaiti tankers passing through the Persian Gulf to protect them from the spillover effects of the Iran-Iraq war. Soon after the United States led the campaign to eject Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait in 1991, the American military presence in and around the Persian Gulf became increasingly expansive and semi-permanent. Throughout the 1990s, that presence deepened and assumed multiple dimensions.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, three developments converged to bring to an end the US policy of balancing in the Persian Gulf. They included the rise of the United States as the world’s only superpower following the end of the Cold War, the rise of transnational terrorism, and the ascent within Washington’s policymaking circles of ideological neoconservatives who were determined to reshape global politics.
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In fact, spurred on by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, America’s neoconservative policymakers substituted their strategic objective of stability in the Persian Gulf through balancing for an ambitious effort to redraw the region’s international relations.
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That the Iraqi campaign turned into a bloody and disastrous quagmire seemed to matter little to Washington’s ideological crusaders. Soon, they began floating ideas of regime change in Iran also. The appearance of a kinder, gentler US foreign policy under President Barak Obama, conveyed through the new president’s Muslim-friendly rhetoric, hardly masked the continuity in America’s hawkish foreign and security policies toward the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. As one observer put it, the “smothering embrace” of the United States continued unabated.
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This smothering embrace is welcomed by the GCC states, which continue to be the biggest purchasers of US military hardware. According to a 2012 US Congressional report, from 2007 to 2010, the GCC states spent over $26.7 billion on American arms purchases, more than any other region in the world, and in 2011 alone, the United States agreed to sell Saudi Arabia $29.4 billion in fighter aircrafts, in what is to date “the single largest arms sale in the history of the [country].”
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As the report concluded, despite phenomenal investments in their militaries, “most Gulf states are not yet fully capable of independently sustaining significant tactical support to the United States in times of crisis,”
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a limitation of which especially the smaller sheikhdoms are keenly aware. The United States, therefore, is most likely to “remain a central part of the Gulf security framework” in the near future,
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with the full and eager consent of the GCC states.

Paradoxically, although “Washington is a direct, day-to-day player in Gulf politics now”—or perhaps because of it—“the new disposition does not appear to be stable at all.”
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The Persian Gulf is more volatile today than at any other time in the past, on the brink of a catastrophic eruption as each of its claimants to power—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States—looks at the other warily and threatens to unleash its wrath if push comes to shove. One of the primary beneficiaries of these tensions, ironically, has been Qatar (for more on this, see chapter 3). In light of the increasingly ideological and unilateralist foreign policy during the George W. Bush Administration, tensions grew between the United States and its close ally Saudi Arabia, and questions were raised about how the kingdom could continue to fit into the US security architecture.
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This opened up space for Qatar to deepen the niche it was carving out for itself as a critically important player and a reliably dependable ally located in the heart of the Persian Gulf.

Another important dimension of the international politics of the Persian Gulf is its increasing trade and investment ties with Pacific Asia. Strong and comprehensive trade ties between the two regions—involving especially the GCC and China, Japan, and South Korea—have transformed what was only a few years ago a mere “marriage of convenience” into a “comprehensive, long term mutual commitment” binding the two sides along multiple axes involving trade and investments. China and Japan have the second and third highest oil consumption needs in the world, behind the United States, and South Korea is also among the world’s top ten energy consumers. Despite their overt dependence on hydrocarbon imports from the Persian Gulf, Pacific Asian countries make little efforts to conceal or alleviate their dependence and are, instead, expanding their trade and investment ties with the Persian Gulf on several additional fronts. Japan remains the Persian Gulf’s single most important exporter. China’s nonhydrocarbon trade with the Persian Gulf is also growing at a precipitous rate.
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The ensuing commercial ties between the two sides run deep, with Japanese overseas development assistance to the Persian Gulf growing significantly in the 1970s.
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In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia, at the time the dominant diplomatic power in the Arabian Peninsula, consented to the GCC states establishing trade and diplomatic relations with China.
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It did not take long for trade between the two sides to mushroom. Between 1981 and 2004, GCC imports from the United States decreased by 15 percent while imports from China and the rest of the non-Western world increased by the same percentage.
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Across the Persian Gulf, Pacific Asian companies are being awarded major contracts, further deepening the growing economic interdependence between the two regions. The 2008 credit crunch introduced some wrinkles into the Persian Gulf–Pacific Asia economic relationship, but it did not significantly affect the depth and upward direction of the growing trade and investment between the two regions.
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By 2010, imports from Pacific Asia to the Persian Gulf monarchies amounted to some $63 billion a year, most of it in the form of manufactured goods and services.
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This was a product of the GCC’s “look East” policy of the early 2000s, viewing the expansion of trade and investment ties with East Asia as “logical” because it “carries no political agenda.”
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