Will Donald Trump End the Gulf Crisis?

Eager to achieve success in foreign policy before the presidential election, the president of the United States may soon decide to settle the dispute among the Gulf countries.

After the White House’s “pro-peace” feat of arms to secure agreement on the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates in August, some high-level American diplomats have been quietly asserting that the blockade put in place against Doha by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh on June 5, 2017 could finally fall before the upcoming November election in the United States.

Indeed, the overnight decision by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to isolate Qatar in June 2017 on the pretext that it would support and therefore finance “international terrorism,” a decision quickly considered illegal by the United Nations, seems less and less tenable.

The small emirate has found the means to bounce back and compensate for its regional isolation by seeking new partners, new clients and by reinjecting several billion dollars into its banking system thanks to the power of its sovereign wealth fund.

But that’s not all. Last July, the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest court, took a stand against the members of the Middle East Quartet, accusing them of illegally closing their airspace to Qatar Airways and gradually paving the way to a trial.

Regional Issues

For four years, Doha has also sought to assert its role as mediator of regional crises, notably by hosting negotiations between the Americans and the Taliban. Not to mention, of course, the importance of the Al-Udeid base for the U.S., the largest American base outside of U.S. territory, which was essential for the coalition against the Islamic State.

Faced with regional challenges, instability in the Gulf region cannot last any longer and the virtual collapse of the Gulf Cooperation Council since the start of the crisis is not helping. Doha, with its pragmatic rather than ideological proximity to Tehran and Ankara, could represent an even more important point of discussion in the future.

This is why the White House, in the recent negotiations between Israel and the UAE, put the question of ending the blockade against Doha into the balance, all the while leaving the most modern stealth planes in the world, F-35s, glimmering in Abu Dhabi.

David Schenker, a well respected State Department adviser for the Middle East, recently said that signs of “relaxation” and flexibility in the resumption of negotiations between the parties, all hyperconnected to Washington, had been observed. It would be just a matter of weeks, he said, when we could expect a”happy end” to the three-year deadlock.

For its part, the UAE–Saudi bloc cracked to some extent when Mohamed bin Zayed, crown prince of the UAE, made a visible rapprochement with Iran in July 2019. The war in Yemen, where Saudis and Emiratis are pursuing different agendas, is a also a point of contention.

The Last Ditch Trip

Donald Trump, after seeing the failure of Kuwaiti and Omani mediation, commissioned Jared Kushner to try to reconcile the parties.

The recent tour by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a slightly more neutral party than Kushner, was also a way to compensate for Kushner’s well-known Emirati-Israeli tropism.

It was also a bit of a last-ditch trip before the U.S. election in November. Because, with two months to go before the presidential election, Trump wants to achieve at least some “success” in a region where he has had little since he arrived at the White House in 2016. And he recognizes indirectly that he cannot do much to settle certain local crises without Emirati, Saudi and Qatari intervention.

It would have been better to try to find a way out of the deadly war in Yemen, mainly led by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, in order to avoid the deaths of nearly 400,000 people.

Failing that, let’s hope, at least, that Trump leaves with his head held high for resolving a crisis for which he was partly responsible when he ruled in favor of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi against Doha on Twitter in early June 2017.