Trump Is Ending One Gulf Conflict to Start Another – Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/03/trump-is-ending-one-gulf-conflict-to-start-another
Now Trump is back to intervening — but only to make an apparent U-turn. Instead of hammering the Qataris as he did last June, the president just sent his newly confirmed secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to the Middle East, where he read the Saudis the riot act. Pompeo told Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir to fix the problem with Qataris. Enough is apparently enough.
What changed? The Trump administration realized its relationship with #Iran is coming to a head, and it wants a unified Gulf Cooperation Council on its side. Trump’s change of tone on Qatar almost certainly means he has made up his mind to bust the Iran nuclear deal in the coming weeks.
Ironically, the Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian-Bahraini blockade had become, in the interim, the new regional reality, with #Qatar using its considerable financial wherewithal to tread water. It has set up its own dairy industry, adjusted Qatar Airways’ flight patterns, deepened its ties with Turkey, and accepted shipments of food from Iran, especially in the early days of the blockade. The emir has also used the fact that not everyone in the region was on board with the four countries’ program to his own diplomatic advantage.
The blockading nations, for their part, once they understood the Qataris would not knuckle under and accede to 13 demands they had laid out as a condition for ending the blockade, shifted to working toward Doha’s long-term isolation in the region. The conflict has thus settled into a pattern of each side indulging in various degrees of trolling via fake news, strategic leaks, and hacks to embarrass the other. At times the level of pettiness has barely approached middle school levels. Etihad Airways has, for example, removed the word “Qatar” from its moving map program; meanwhile, the repeated public dumps of the Emirati ambassador’s emails have taken on a vendetta quality.
#nuit_torride #mesquineries
#bagarre_de_cour_de_récréation (c’est pas moi qui le dit…)
