Three Observations from Doha
What I picked up during a recent trip to Qatar.
This past weekend, I flew out to Doha, Qatar to attend this year’s edition of the Doha Forum—one of a number of state- and think tank-sponsored foreign policy conferences that have sprouted up around the world over the past two decades or so. Like its counterpart gatherings in Munich and Singapore and Halifax, the Doha Forum lets foreign policy big-wigs pontificate on the important regional and global issues of the day. Lesser lights and mere observers like me hobnob and schmooze in between panels discussing important subjects like Syria’s civil war or the grim fate of Afghanistan’s women.
Above all, the Doha Forum is one major way the Qatari government tries to win friends and influence people overseas. It’s hard to tell how well this particular approach works in practice, but it’s part of Qatar’s broader strategy to use its enormous energy wealth (the country holds roughly 11 percent of the world’s proved natural gas reserves) to make Doha a pivotal player in regional and indeed global politics. We’ve seen that recently in the way Qatar helped mediate a week-long truce and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas, as well as in its controversial but ultimately successful campaign to host last year’s World Cup—an effort that the U.S. Department of Justice says involved bribes to international soccer governing body FIFA.
But conferences like the Doha Forum also offer an opportunity to hear what messages its hosts and participants want to get across to broader global audiences. They can also send unintended messages in the ways conference organizers choose to frame their overall enterprise as well as the topics and individuals they choose to highlight.
For my own part, I came away from Doha with three main observations:
Hypocrisy goes both ways in global politics.
The conference’s opening sessions were marked by an understandable focus on the continued war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Hosts and participants darkly warned that a failure to impose a ceasefire on the conflict (the United States used its veto at the UN Security Council to block one such measure on December 9) would fatally undermine what Biden administration officials like to call the “rules-based international order,” hurling accusations of hypocrisy at the United States and other supporters of Israel for allegedly failing to stick up for their proclaimed universal principles—accusations that frequently rested on hyperbolic rhetoric regarding Israeli misdeeds in the war.
The conference then hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, chief diplomatic representative of a government that invaded Ukraine in an act of brazen territorial aggrandizement and helped the Assad regime butcher tens if not hundreds of thousands of ordinary Syrians, as its first major “newsmaker” interviewee. The next day, moreover, the conference brought in Iran’s foreign minister for a video chat—yet another of Assad’s foreign backers and a top supplier of weapons to the Houthis in Yemen in contravention of a UN Security Council-endorsed arms embargo.
Nor is this sort of hypocrisy limited to Qatar: its Gulf rival and frenemy the United Arab Emirates, for instance, blasted America’s veto of its ceasefire resolution, asking what message the veto sent to the world. Yet on December 6, the UAE and Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin, currently facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Similarly, other leading lights in the so-called “Global South” like Brazil and South Africa equivocated on Ukraine—South Africa even allegedly shipped arms to Russia earlier this year—before vociferously denouncing Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza.
There’s also more than a little bit of inside-the-Beltway hypocrisy on display at the Doha Forum as well. Many of the voices that object the loudest to foreign funding of think tanks in America apparently have no problem attending a conference fully underwritten by the Qatari government.
The point here isn’t that one sort of alleged hypocrisy is worse than the other but rather that hypocrisy is very much a two-way street in contemporary global politics—and perhaps more importantly, that contemporary accusations of hypocrisy tell us very little about global politics or the validity of its organizing principles.
Lots of talk about empathy, but a failure of empathy when it comes to Israel.
Likewise, the Doha Forum’s opening sessions emphasized the importance of empathy in global politics—but its participants failed to exhibit much empathy toward Israel in both senses of the word. Little solidarity was expressed with the victims of the October 7 massacre; indeed, the way panelists like the Jordanian foreign minister and Qatari prime minister talked about the atrocity, it was either the functional equivalent of a random asteroid strike or the inexorable (and by extension understandable if not excusable) result of Israeli policy. Hamas and its openly genocidal program simply did not factor into their analyses or statements.
More problematic from a policy factor was the general dismissal of Israeli points of view on the conflict. Widespread Israeli concerns about security were tossed aside by the likes of the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister as if they were irrelevant and a mere excuse for evading a political solution to the conflict. But ignoring or shrugging off the very real security concerns of ordinary Israelis living in places like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the western half of Jerusalem makes impossible the very political solution these figures say they want.
I’m not claiming to be an expert on Israeli public opinion or Israeli society, but having visited the country a couple times over the past decade or so it’s impossible to ignore the way security considerations factor into the way ordinary Israelis think about any potential or possible agreement with the Palestinians. The Palestinian suicide bombing campaign of the Second Intifada left scars on Israeli society that were still fresh even a decade later, and October 7 has undoubtedly left new and even deeper wounds. A common refrain I heard among Israelis was that the country had tried peace with the Palestinians during the 1990s but got suicide bombers, left southern Lebanon and Gaza but got rockets in return.
Put another way, Israelis have severe doubts that any political solution with the Palestinians will give them peace and security. It’s certainly possible to find flaws and faults in the historical reasoning of the Israeli public, but the fact of the matter remains that from their point of view Israel attempted a political solution on multiple occasions and received little in the way of security. That’s a reality proponents of a negotiated political solution have to deal with—and a little empathy for the security concerns of ordinary Israelis would go a long way here.
The Gulf remains deeply tied to the United States and its global partners.
Spending even a sliver of time in Doha, it’s easy to see that Qatar and the other Gulf Arab monarchies remain deeply embedded in a web of geopolitical and economic relationships with the United States and its partners around the world—so much so that it’s hard to see how China poses a realistic alternative to the United States. There have been diplomatic and economic shifts over the past twenty years, yes, but the beneficiaries of these changes have been India and other nations in South and Southeast Asia rather than Beijing. That’s not to say China hasn’t tried to play an increasing political or economic role in the Gulf, but it has a number of rather high hurdles to overcome if it truly aims to displace the United States as the region’s dominant power.
Indeed, the Gulf’s ties with the United States and many of its partners are deep and long-standing, both on the defense and energy fronts. Not for nothing does Qatar host the largest American military base in the Middle East at al Udeid. American energy companies remain important partners for Qatar and other Gulf energy producers like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while it’s impossible to escape ads for European luxury brands in Doha. It’s not impossible to sever these ties, of course, but their longevity and overall strength makes a geopolitical and economic divorce prohibitively expensive.
Equally important, Qatar and other Gulf states simply couldn’t function without foreign labor of just about every sort. Migrant construction laborers from South Asia, service workers from Southeast Asia and Africa, and expatriate professionals from the United States and Europe are all necessary to keep these smaller Gulf states up and running. Economically, Qatar and the rest of the Gulf aren’t just oriented toward the United States and Europe—they’re oriented toward China’s rivals in South and Southeast Asia as well. Nor is the Gulf starved for capital, either; if anything, Qatar, the UAE, and other countries compete with China to make investments around the world. That may lead to new partnerships with Beijing abroad, but the Gulf doesn’t need Chinese investment to get essential projects off the ground.
So what does Beijing have to offer the Gulf? Digital surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence capabilities, perhaps. But even here there are limits: a major Emirati AI firm recently cut ties with Chinese hardware suppliers so as to avoid upsetting the United States. Instead, China will likely serve as a useful foil for Gulf countries in their relationships with the United States—a point of leverage they can use in talks with American officials rather than a real alternative they can pursue, much in the same way Egypt periodically flirts with Russia when Cairo’s relations with the United States come under strain.
If there’s any one larger conclusion I drew from my brief sojourn in Doha, it’s that America and the Gulf are stuck with each other whether we like it or not. The shape and nature of that relationship will evolve in the future, of course, and India will come to play a more prominent role in the region’s geopolitical and economic equations. But ties between the United States and the Gulf will remain the backbone around which these other relationships are built.
It's a reality America and the Gulf Arab nations need to come to terms with, and sooner rather than later.