Thread by @ArminRosen

I've been writing/reporting on Qatar and Qatari foreign policy since 2011 or so. A major theme runs through all of my work on the topic: For the past 25 years, the country's leadership has had a practically unlimited and in fact globe-spanning sense of the national interest. This is a very small country of about 300,000 citizens that convinced itself that disparate, unrelated actors, such as the dictator of Eritrea, Malcolm Hoenlein, the Taliban, and the Washington Wizards were critical to its national strategy, which had no apparent limits...

The Qataris constantly behaved as if there were no risks to the strategy—and their confidence was warranted. There is an inherent tension, even an inocherency, to a Gulf monarchy serving as the global clearing house for Muslim Brotherhood propaganda. Doha made it work though. At every turn, the inherent tensions of their project wound up working in their favor

Ie, the past couple of years, October 7th has been a huge boon to Qatar. Hosting Hamas turned Doha into one of the managers of the world's hottest crisis, indispensible to everyone. But again, the court's strategy and outlook on the world seemed *only* to produce positive results, to the point that I think they become blind to to how inherently unmanageable and incoherent the larger project actually is

This is the very first thing I ever wrote about Qatar. The ambition, the arrogance, the penchant for wading into unfamiliar foreign crises in which it was only marginally helpeful (at best!) for no reason other than national prestige, Doha's weird and mistaken conviction it could mediate between the west and its opponents without taking on any moral hazard...not to pat myself on the back, but it's all in here theatlantic.com/international/…

Btw their situations are different but it's interesting to contrast Qatar and Israel's global strategies. Israel isn't a leading landowner in London, Paris, and New York the way the Qataris are. The Israelis don't go around buying nationally significant assets (soccer teams, large equity stakes in major companies, airlines, major media outlets etc) in foreign countries, and their American lobbying spend is smaller and less visible than Qatar's. In contrast to Israel Qatar 1) spread a ton of money around, to everywhere and everyone, and 2) built (and more importantly funded) a highly network of loyal clients across the whole mainstream political spectrum (and sometimes beyond it) in all the major democracies. It's a great playbook for a somewhat less reckless actor, but it would be hard for an open political system to execute properly, and I'm not sure any country could duplicate it even if they tried...

The other big difference, Israel has no amibition (or ability, probably) to solve or mediate any conflicts other than the ones it's already involved in. That's the real Qatari innovation—and the one that's gotten Doha into the most trouble...