For More Than Three Decades, Qatar Has Flourished by Playing All Sides. Is Its Time Finally Up?

Last month, more than 75 American military experts—most of them retired generals and admirals—published an open letter that applied the law of armed conflict to Israel’s conduct of the war and rejected the claim that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

Shortly afterward, the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took up the argument on X, writing that “the genocide charge against Israel is laughable on its face, but it is an effective permission structure for anti-Semitism.” He blamed the success of the charge on “the Muslim Brotherhood’s Qatari-funded global propaganda campaign.” On the night of October 7, after the post had drawn about 336,000 views, Kennedy deleted it without comment. The deletion invited speculation that he had received a call from the Trump White House, which has drawn notably close to Qatar.

It is highly likely that the Qatari embassy moved quickly to work the phones and contain a public-relations crisis. Yet the episode matters chiefly because it lays bare, once again, the riddle of Qatar and its foreign policy. Qatar is a close American ally—having received the coveted status of major non-NATO ally in 2022—and host to Al Udeid airbase, the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. It is also, through Al Jazeera, the largest funder of anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda in the Middle East. As the largest foreign donor to American universities, it serves as the official patron of the academic red-green madhouse. It finances Islamist movements, and not infrequently jihadist ones. It is also a major investor in Western businesses and institutions.