Qatar’s Foreign Policy: Geography, Politics and Strategy since 1971

This new book on Qatar’s foreign policy asks the reader to focus on the extraordinary fact of Qatar’s success despite the numerical odds against it as a small state. The World Bank defines a small state as having a population less than 1.5 million. The UN Forum on Small States has a somewhat higher threshold of 5 million. Qatar, with a combined citizen and noncitizen population of over 2.5 million fits in the middle of that small state range. In terms of its citizen population, around 350,000, however, Qatar could be considered one of the smallest states in the world. Qatar is also bordered by two large neighbors—sharing a maritime border, the Islamic Republic of Iran has a citizen population of over 90 million, making it one of the top twenty largest countries in the world. Qatar’s only land border is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia another regional behemoth with population of around 20 million citizens and millions of non-citizens, making it one of the top fifty largest countries. Qatar’s population, even factoring in primarily noncitizen male workers, does not even break through the top 100. Looking only at the math, and at the military capacity of both of its large neighbors, it would seem easy to assume that Qatar should be wholly dominated by either one of these neighboring states. Instead, there is a big surprise. As anybody with even a minor interest in world affairs has become aware, Qatar acts far from dominated. Instead, Qatar has been able to chart an unexpectedly independent course since the rise to power of Sheikh Hamad in 1995. Marwan Kabalan’s insightful book seeks to understand how and why Qatar has bucked the trend of small state dependency, often so spectacularly, in its ability to project soft power and influence around the world.Kabalan is most engaging when he compares Qatar to other small states using classical comparative government theory. For small states like Qatar, creating a fully autonomous foreign policy, one that actively intervenes or mediates between larger powers, can require massive investment and risks, without certain results. In the end, small states must ask, is it all worth the trouble and the real risk of offending one’s larger neighbors? For most of the world’s smaller countries, foreign policy is either highly focused on a particular issue, such as sea level rises for Polynesian nations, or simply handed over to larger neighboring states or alliances that act as the small state’s protector or representative in most matters, such as Luxembourg’s relationship with France and Germany. Surprisingly, however, some small states choose the opposite course, embracing their agency and agility to step up and over their larger regional rivals and position themselves as indispensable to distant superpowers, such as the United States. This is the method used by Qatar, which has made itself home to the US regional military headquarters and provides a means for the US to negotiate through Qatar with groups, such as Hamas and the Taliban, considered poisonous in US domestic politics. Kabalan certainly addresses Qatar’s relationship with the United States and devotes a substantial section of his work to US-Qatar relations. However, he seems to avoid a crucial question that arises from this US-Qatari relationship. Is Qatar’s seeming autonomy from regional powers really so surprising or only possible due to a special relationship with a much larger power—indeed the world’s dominant foreign power—the United States? Is Qatar really the case of a small state acting freely without a protector or is it the case that Qatar has been able to circumvent regional powers by attaching itself to the world’s largest power? Is Qatar a small state acting due to the protection of a distant and much more powerful state with complex and occasionally even self-contradictory interests that, at times, come into conflict with the interests large regional powers? The end of the Qatar crisis, as Kabalan admits, was due largely to the end of the Trump administration’s negative view of Qatar. Did Qatar, in this case, serve as a counterexample to realism or is it yet more proof of the power of maintaining the most powerful friends? In the end, Qatar has been able to take advantage of the contradictions between United States’ own domestic politics and its foreign policy, serving as a bridge between the United States’ clear foreign interests, such as peace between Israel and its neighbors, or discussions to end or stifle Iran’s nuclear program, and the lack of domestic political will to achieve those otherwise obvious goals. Qatar’s autonomy and freedom of movement has occasionally touched a nerve with US political leadership, slumping to its lowest point during the first years of the Trump administration. However, each time, it has quickly adjusted. It is this ability to adjust creatively and to accurately predict the range of allowable activity within US parameters, or even to use its wealth to shift those very parameters, not necessarily Qatar’s full autonomy, that is at play. Nonetheless, the range of Qatar’s otherwise US-circumscribed power is still remarkable and deserves the type of further study proposed by Kabalan’s book.Appearing four years after the resolution of the 2017–21 “Qatar Crisis,” which brought the Arab Gulf region to the brink and could have led to the end of Qatar as an independent nation, Marwan Kabalan’s book seeks to challenge the prevailing assumptions of international relations theory, especially realism and structuralism, which, in the classic interpretation, shaped by decades of Cold War thinking, would see present-day Qatar as a near-impossibility. Dr. Kabalan sums up his argument, “Small states like Qatar are often seen in academia and the media as powerless geographic entities sandwiched between competing states with greater capabilities. These smaller polities can only react to events taking place in their regional or international systems to preserve their security and survival.” Despite many regional and geographical challenges, however, “Qatar sought to retain its autonomy and take up a regional role that fulfils its ambitions” (189).In the context of the Gaza conflict and Qatar’s important role as mediator, this book could not have come at a better time. Qatar has certainly proven its central role as a global player in foreign affairs. In support of this argument, Kabalan provides an insightful summary narrative of some ways Qatar has maintained this autonomy and he breaks down the recent history of Qatar’s bilateral relationship with regional powers as well as, although perhaps too briefly, major world players such as China and India. He uses interesting source materials, in addition to a clear listing of the secondary literature that has ballooned on Qatar. However, a deeper dive, rather than just a listing, might have led to some fruitful finds to support his thesis.When I published Qatar, A Modern History about fifteen years ago, it was not a very crowded field. Rosemarie Said Zahlan’s book on Qatar was one of the few works in English, along with Jill Crystal’s book on Qatar and Kuwait and Frederick Anscombe’s book on the Ottoman Gulf. Since then, however, a substantial and impressive bibliography of secondary works has appeared exploring the political economy, history, and foreign affairs of the country. It has become necessary, in other words, to engage more extensively with the literature and the arguments of those who have written on the same subject before. While referencing some previous works on Qatar, Kabalan does so somewhat lightly and for minor factual matters rather than for arguments. Instead of looking at what has already been said or theorized about Qatar, there is an extensive and broad summary of IR theory that, while illuminating, forgets to mention the main subject (Qatar) over many paragraphs and pages outlining the various methods of understanding power dynamics between states. At the end of this chapter, I had a better understanding of IR theories about small states writ large but less understanding of how they related to Qatar in particular. There is an opportunity here, I think, to provide that link, perhaps in a new or expanded edition of the book.From the point of view of a historian, the lack of emphasis on Qatar’s particular historical context, or its particular historiography, was a missed opportunity. This might be due to the unfortunate, general trend in IR/Political Science to see history as only a short preface, rather than the main plot, of any explanatory work. This book, however, cuts out the history even more quickly than is standard in other IR tomes. Only about one page of text is devoted to the period before British withdrawal, despite the obvious importance of this period to Qatar’s internal sense of national identity. The relationship with the Ottoman empire seems too quickly summarized. The Battle of Wajbah and Qatari success against the Ottomans is a central part of Qatar’s national memory. The shift of the national day to December marks the date, in 1878, when Sheikh Jassim bin Muhammad al Thani became “the founder” of Qatar. From a historian’s point of view, it was his father, Muhammad al Thani, who signed treaties with the British such as the one in 1868 that recognized Qatar as an autonomous power. The son, Sheikh Jassim, at first courted the Ottomans, until, of course, the Ottomans tried to take complete control. Qatar’s history of seeking autonomy by balancing various, distant imperial interests, namely the Ottomans and the British, is not just circumstantial. It could be argued it was the reason why Qatar has been so adept and swift at maintaining that independence in recent decades. Drained by war and seeing the rise of the Third Saudi State overthrow its Arab allies, including the Sharif in Mecca, the British were far from active protectors of Qatar; internal documents reveal they thought it would be merely a “shame” if Qatar were to disappear due to Saudi incursion. Thus, the history of Qatar before the discovery of oil provides a prelude to the history of Qatar after the withdrawal of Britain and the end of the Cold War.History and historical memory, as most historians know, is the stuff nations, even and especially small ones, are made of. This “national” story of Qatar, or the very process of creating the idea of Qatar, could have been better added to Kabalan’s analysis and would have supported many of his claims. In fact, one of the primary reasons for the success of Qatar’s autonomous course, and its remarkable staying power during the Qatar crisis, was the sense of nationalism and identification with the Qatari government by Qataris and even non-Qataris in Qatar. This surprised Qatar’s adversaries at the time and most outside observers. However, there can be no effective external power or autonomy without first developing internal ones. A small state, more than any other, benefits most from getting its own house in order before venturing into international affairs as an autonomous power. However, these internal relationships and political and social structures in Qatar, including its various families and informal networks, are rarely touched upon in the book. Instead, at times, the main emphasis of the book seems to be on events and shifts far outside of Qatar itself. Like Al-Jazeera, which is focused on stories outside of Qatar, the book seems to stray into extended narratives about Qatar’s neighbors and rivals or, even, distant players while missing what should be the main subject—Qatar. Some chapters could be shortened as they seem to have more information about Saudi or Egyptian politics than about Qatar and there can be many pages of text before Qatar is again mentioned. This curious avoidance of Qatar gives the impression of Qatar as something of a closed system, an impenetrable black box, which it certainly is not. Any nation’s foreign policy cannot be understood without examining domestic policy and interests. Although the overall argument is interesting and the material compelling, a new edition of this book, focused more squarely on Qatar itself would be even more enlightening. Centering even more on Qatar’s agency and Qatar’s particular history is what really answers the question of how one of the world’s smaller states has a spectacularly outsized influence in global affairs.