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They’re dazzlingly wealthy, and so they count on to be in cost for a protracted, very long time.

The monarchs main Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia may appear from the skin like a trio of like-minded Persian Gulf autocrats. But their regional rivalry is intense, and Western capitals have turn into a key venue in a reputational battle royale.

“All of those governments … actually need to have the biggest mindspace amongst Western governments,” stated Jon B. Alterman, director of the Center East Program on the Washington-based Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research.

Because the Gulf states search to wean themselves off the oil that made them wealthy, they know they’ll want mates to assist remodel their economies (and modernize their societies).

“They assume it’s vital to not be tarred as mere hydrocarbon producers who’re ruining the planet,” Alterman added.

With an erstwhile vice chairman of the European Parliament in jail and Belgian prosecutors asking to revoke immunity from extra MEPs, allegations of money kickbacks and undue affect by Qatari pursuits look more likely to ensnare extra Brussels energy gamers.

The Qatari authorities categorically denies any illegal conduct, saying it “works by way of institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with worldwide legal guidelines and laws.”

Towards the background of regional rivalries, that engagement has turn into more and more strong. Whereas tensions with Riyadh have eased over the previous few years, Qatar’s mutual antagonism with the United Arab Emirates has been significantly extreme.

Qatar’s survival technique

Regional rivalries burst past the Center East in 2017 in a standoff that might reshape regional dynamics.

Till then, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been primarily frenemies. As members of the Gulf Coordination Council, they’d been working towards constructing a standard market and forex within the area — not so totally different from the European Union.

However totally different responses to the Arab Spring frayed relations to a breaking level.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera information community gave a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist social gathering that rode a wave of unrest into energy in Egypt and challenged governments all through the Arab world. And Doha didn’t simply provide a bullhorn — it gave the Muslim Brotherhood direct monetary backing.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in the meantime, thought of the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group.

Together with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE severed diplomatic ties with Doha in June 2017, barring Qatar’s entry to airspace and sea routes; Saudi Arabia closed its border, blocking Qatar’s solely land crossing.

Among the many calls for: shut Al Jazeera, finish army coordination with Turkey and step away from Iran. Qatar refused — although it was crunch time for constructing infrastructure forward of the 2022 World Cup and 40 % of Qatar’s meals provides got here by way of Saudi Arabia.

Preventing what it referred to as an unlawful “blockade” grew to become an existential mission for Doha.

“The one factor Qatar may do was be sure that everybody knew Qatar exists and is a pleasant place,” stated MEP Hannah Neumann, chair of the Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula (DARP).

“They actually stepped up the diplomatic efforts all world wide to additionally present, ‘We’re the great ones,’” stated Neumann, of the German Greens.

Qatar wanted Brussels as a result of it had already misplaced a fair greater ally: Washington. Not solely did then-President Donald Trump take the facet of Qatar’s rivals within the battle; he additionally appeared to take credit score for the thought of isolating Qatar — although the U.S.’s largest army base within the area is simply southwest of Doha.

Elsewhere, Qatar had already been working with the London-headquartered consultancy Portland Communications since a minimum of 2014 — as its World Cup internet hosting coup was changing into a PR nightmare, with tales rising over bribed FIFA officers and exploited migrant staff.

Exploding onto the EU scene

In Brussels, Doha leaned on the top of its EU Mission, Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, who had moved to Belgium in 2017 from Germany, to step up European relations.

Inside days of the fissure, Al-Khulaifi appeared in conferences at NATO, and inside months opened a assume tank referred to as the Center East Dialogue Middle to hone Doha’s picture as an open promoter of debate (in distinction, it contended, to its neighbors) and stress the EU to intervene within the Center East.

By the following yr, he was talking on panels about combating violent extremism — alongside Dutch and Belgian federal police. By late 2019, Al-Khulaifi hosted the primary assembly of embassy’s Qatar-EU friendship group with a “working dinner.”

“The scenario following the blockade has pushed Qatar to ascertain nearer relations outdoors the context of the regional disaster with, for instance, the European Union,” Pier Antonio Panzeri, then chair of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, advised Euractiv in 2018.

The next yr, Panzeri would attend the Qatari-hosted “Worldwide Convention on Nationwide, Regional and Worldwide Mechanisms to Fight Impunity and Guarantee Accountability beneath Worldwide Regulation,” and heap reward on the nation’s human rights document.

Panzeri is now in a Belgian jail, dealing with corruption prices; his NGO, Combat Impunity, is beneath intense scrutiny for being a attainable entrance.

Neumann stated that Qatar’s survival technique has paid off. “Completely, it labored,” she stated. “I believe it’s truthful sufficient, in the event that they didn’t do it with unlawful means.”

Immediately or not directly, Qatar clocked a number of large victories throughout this era, together with a number of resolutions in Parliament on human rights in Saudi Arabia and a name to finish arms exports to Riyadh within the wake of the homicide of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Doha additionally inked a cooperation association with the EU in March 2018, setting the stage for nearer ties.

Frenemies as soon as once more

Since Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a deal to finish the disaster two years in the past, Riyadh-Doha relations have usually thawed. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, traveled to Qatar in November for the World Cup and embraced Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 42, whereas sporting a shawl within the host’s colours.

Nevertheless, relations between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, 61 — stay chilly.

Because the Gulf transforms, the United Arab Emirates “has come to see that function as being a established order energy,” stated Alterman. On the a part of its neighbor, “Qatar has come to see that function as aligning with forces of change within the area, and that’s created a certain quantity of mutual resentment.”

Qatar’s smaller scale contributes to Doha’s sense of inner safety, fueling its openness to partaking with teams that others see as an existential menace.

Qataris see themselves as “champions of the Davids towards the Goliath,” stated Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor at King’s Faculty London who has labored previously as a marketing consultant for the Qatari armed forces. Civil society organizations based by “a spread of various opposition figures, Saudi opposition figures within the West, have been supported financially by Qatar as properly,” Krieg added. (Khashoggi, one of many period’s most distinguished Saudi opposition figures, had connections to the state-backed Qatar Basis.) “Therefore why Qatar was at all times seen as type of a thorn within the facet of its neighbors.”

And whereas the €1.5 million money haul confiscated by Belgian federal police seems like an eye-popping sum, it actually pales compared to the quantity the Gulf states spend on authorized lobbying in Brussels. And that sum, in flip, pales compared to what these nations spend in Washington.

“Brussels isn’t that vital,” Krieg stated. “If you happen to take a look at the cash that these Gulf nations spend in Washington, these are tens of tens of millions of {dollars} yearly on assume tanks, teachers … creating their very own media retailers, investing strategically into Fox Information, investing into huge PR operations.”

Nonetheless, the EU stays a key goal. Abu Dhabi is strengthening its “long-standing partnership” with Brussels on financial and regional safety issues “by way of deep, strategic cooperation with EU establishments and Member States,” stated a UAE official, in an announcement. 

“Brussels was at all times a hub to create a story,” stated Krieg.

And proper now, every of the area’s energy gamers is deeply motivated to alter that narrative.

Alterman invoked a broad impression of the Gulf nations as “individuals who have more cash than God who need to take the world again to the seventh Century.”

However that’s fallacious, he stated. “That is all about shaping the longer term with remarkably excessive stakes, profound discomfort about how the world will relate to them over the following 30 to 50 years — and admittedly, a sequence of rulers who see themselves being in energy for the following 30 to 50 years.”