The bargain the US has made with Qatar continues to prove itself as conceptually flawed and generally terrible. While the UAE deserves plenty of blame here, the Qataris are as usual up to their elbows in other people’s blood.
They buy our weapons and financial assets. We get base. I’m not sure we’ve ever particularly cared about what anyone is up to in Africa. Yemen became of interest because it was fucking with the Red Sea.
Then someone else parks there. Barring a Saudi takeover of Qatar, we’re stuck there to keep the Russians and Chinese out.
Quite a high moral ground to be on, I tell ya. I know I know, realpolitik and all, but then lets stop pretending there is some higher ground and treat say china-us conflict as something that literally doesn't concern Europe at all (seems like US has still military upper hand but who knows for how long, seems like China will steamroll ya economically/technologically pretty soon). Especially given this year developments when we saw that US military equipment cannot be trusted, US IT infra cannot be trusted and so on.
So does the UAE. They’ve played their game well.
It doesn’t mean we need to be their staunch defenders. But it’s in our government’s interest to not piss them off for no gain. And we’re not in a place in America where foreign policy swings power.
And the current crisis is happening because the last time we were hands off with Middle Eastern affairs shortly before the Arab Spring, a number of conflicts spiraled into proxy wars between KSA, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, and Iran.
There are no good guys or bad guys - everyone is bad, and that's how proxy wars are.
A major reason Gaza and the West Bank spiraled was due to this Qatar-UAE feud as well - Qatar has historically supported Hamas whereas Abu Dhabi has historically supported the Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, and the former head of Fatah in Gaza is now the 2nd in command in Abu Dhabi (Mohammed Dahlan)
I'm jaded because I've been following this for 15 years, and looked at the Arab Spring with hope, but now all I've seen is the entire movement swung into a transnational proxy war.