In a televised interview on September 25, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour confronted the emir of Qatar about allegations that his country is not a true ally of the United States. Doha hosts America’s largest military base in the Middle East, and at the same time allows private fundraising for American adversaries Al Qaeda and ISIS. Qatar has also been a big source of funding in recent years for U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas, a spinoff of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The 34-four-year-old emir replied to Amanpour: “I'm not in a camp against another camp. … I have my own way of thinking.”



The richest country in the world per capita has developed a working relationship with a particularly wide range of governments and groups, from Hezbollah to the Taliban. Qatar was also willing to engage Israelis after the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s. (Relations have since soured.) Qatar’s basic foreign policy approach is not uncommon among small, vulnerable states. Qatar has one of the smallest citizen populations in the Arab world (250,000), and the largest percentage of non-nationals in the world (88 percent). But Doha has pursued a maximalist version, often using its vast natural gas wealth to cultivate and sustain relations. To fully understand how this plays out you have to take a few central factors into account.

What are the goals of Qatari foreign policy?

Two overarching goals have driven Qatari policy. One has been to maximize Qatar’s influence on the regional and international stage. This originally reflected the personal ambition of the former ruler and current emir’s father, Shaykh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, and his foreign minister and eventual prime minister, Shaykh Hamad bin Jassim al Thani. The two men directed foreign policy until the father abdicated in favor of his son, Emir Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, in July 2013.



The second objective has been to preserve the security of the ruling family and state. Qatar juts out into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia, its much larger, more powerful, and sometimes hostile neighbor, with whom it shares its only land border. Iran, with whom Doha shares the world’s largest gas field, is a short distance across Gulf waters. Another large and challenging state in the neighborhood, Iraq, is across the Gulf to the north. Hosting a major U.S. military base since 2003 has provided existential security for Qatar. Courting Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood to Salafi groups has served as a power amplifier for the country, especially vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia.

Why does Qatar support the Muslim Brotherhood?

Qatar supported Muslim Brotherhood organizations in countries across the region during the Arab uprisings in 2011, believing they represented the wave of the future. From Qatar’s perspective, being at the front end of this trend would showcase the country’s supposedly progressive leadership.



Backing the Brotherhood represented a continuation of a strategy that was already in place. Doha had hosted Egyptian and, later, Syrian Brotherhood members for decades, including the maverick Egyptian cleric Yusuf al Qaradawi who has lived in Qatar since the 1960s. Qatar had also provided Brotherhood personalities an important means for disseminating their views via the state-funded media channel, Al Jazeera, since the mid-1990s.



Qatar’s relationship with the Brotherhood has functioned as an important bulwark against Saudi Arabia. Riyadh has viewed the Brotherhood as a significant domestic irritant since the 1990s, and designated it as a terrorist group in March of this year. Qatar’s patronage of and influence over some parts of the group have served as a stick to wield against its more powerful neighbor.



Qatar’s domestic environment reveals the complicated nature and extent of the country’s support for the Brotherhood. In Qatar, there is a total dearth of Islamist activism. The Islamist politics that Doha has championed in the broader region are illegal in Qatar.

Politics in Qatar are reserved for an elite circle of ruling family members and their appointees. An elected municipal council advises on local services, but the establishment of a a semi-elected assembly, called for in the new 2004 constitution, has been delayed multiple times. Political parties and associations are forbidden. The most remote forms of political expression by Qataris with regard to their own government are not tolerated. A Qatari poet, for instance, was sentence to life imprisonment in 2012 (reduced to 15 years in 2013) for verses that offended political sensibilities.