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.

Since October 7, Qatar has faced a public-relations crisis in the West equivalent to—if not worse than—the one Saudi Arabia faced after 9/11, when fifteen of the nineteen hijackers turned out to be Saudi citizens. Doha has hosted Hamas’s political leadership since 2012, and after the massacre Qatar’s close relationship with Hamas came to be seen by some in Washington as protection for the terrorist masterminds. At the same time, and surely as a counterstrategy to that crisis, Qatar has grown steadily more visible in its business dealings with the president’s family and his close associates. Qatari Diar, the real-estate branch of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is partnering with the Trump Organization on a golf resort, and the Qatar Investment Authority has put money into Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners. Doha also offered the president the lavish gift of a Boeing 747-8, accepted by the Pentagon for use as Air Force One.

What does Qatar want? Why does a state entirely dependent on American security finance the movements and media that work against American interests? What is the nature of Doha’s double game, and what is its goal?

Answering any of these pressing questions is difficult, and every answer will remain speculative, because political motives are inherently opaque, impossible to verify. While many suspect that the Qatari ruling family shares some ideological affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatari officials insist this is untrue. Qatar, they insist, is simply a very wealthy and very small country in a very tough neighborhood, and its strategy for survival is to bet on all the horses at once, so that whichever wins, Qatar wins too.

On this point, I am inclined to agree with the Qatari officials. I have no doubt that some members of the ruling family and elite are genuinely ideologically bewitched. One of them is the minister of education, Lolwah al-Khater, an eloquent and empowered woman whose admiration for Hamas finds its way into remarkable Arabic verse: in February 2025 she posted on her official account a poem in praise of Mohammad Deif, the slain commander of Hamas’s military wing. Hers is an ideological enthusiasm that is no less revealing for being sincere. But I am willing to believe that the top layer of the royal family and the Qatari elite is, for the most part, secular and Westernized. It patronizes Western art and high culture, and in its elitism and demeanor is as polished and cosmopolitan as Edward Said himself, and as comfortable as he was pairing a Western education with anti-Western politics. These men and women are simply pursuing what they believe to be the optimal set of strategies and policies for maximizing their power and wealth, in the Middle East and in the West alike. If I had to guess, I would say there is little belief involved.

But the reasons for Qatari behavior are at best of secondary importance. Motives are a curiosity at best. Washington has to deal with what Doha funds, not with what Doha believes, and the facts are known: Qatar is one of the largest supporters of Islamism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Americanism in the region and the world. That conduct requires firm policies from Washington, a demand no American administration has yet tried seriously to meet.

If the question of motive cannot be answered, and the question of response must wait until we elect those interested in it, are there questions we can, and perhaps should, answer? There are. It has been the way of the modern mind to fall back on the question of means when the question of ends falls silent—to ask how a thing is done when no one can say why it is done. Moreover, if my guess above is right, and the Qatari elite believes in very little, then technique may be all there is. How did a state smaller than Connecticut, with roughly 300,000 citizens, gain such global influence in the short span of 30 years? How did a tiny nation without the human resources to staff a full diplomatic corps become one of the most diplomatically influential countries in the world?

Until 1990 Qatar effectively operated under the Saudi umbrella. Indeed, during the first ten years of the reign of Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, who ruled Qatar from 1972 (the year after the country gained independence) until he was deposed by his son in 1995, the emirate had no foreign policy of its own. As well as having to fashion a national narrative from a population of pearl divers, Bedouin, and merchants—a process that began in 1975 with the opening of a national museum in the restored palace of his grandfather, Abdullah bin Jassim—Khalifa had to build an entirely new state bureaucracy. It was paid for by oil revenues, which rose from some $300 million in 1971 to $2 billion in 1974, after the price of oil quadrupled in the wake of the Yom Kippur War—an increase owed almost entirely to price. The windfall financed the creation of a modern state, with ministries, a civil service, and, for the first time, the capacity to conduct foreign policy. That capacity became evident in 1988, when Qatar established diplomatic relations with China and the Soviet Union at a time when Saudi Arabia recognized neither.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 permanently transformed Qatar’s strategic thinking. The swift extinction of an emirate smaller and richer than its predator—Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait as Iraq’s nineteenth province within a month—demonstrated that the Saudi cloak that had covered Qatar for so many years was worthless. The Saudis couldn’t even protect themselves: they needed more than half a million American troops to defend their own territory. At that moment, Qatar realized that only the United States could defend it, and that it was vital to develop ties with Washington directly, without Saudi mediation. A defense cooperation agreement with the United States was signed in June 1992. In September of that year Saudi forces clashed with a Qatari border post at al-Khafus, demonstrating how little regard Riyadh had for Qatar’s sovereignty.

Doha had already begun to disregard Saudi hegemony. While the Saudi embassy in Tehran stood empty (Riyadh broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 1988 and did not restore them until 1991), Qatar cultivated warm relations with the Islamic Republic, with which it shares the North Field gas reservoir. Because the field straddles the maritime border between the two countries, Qatar’s future wealth depended on never giving Tehran a reason to interfere with its extraction. Similarly, while most of the other Gulf states remained frozen in their opposition to Israel, Qatar, perhaps along with Oman, seized on the breakthrough in the peace process that followed the Madrid conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993 to develop relations with Jerusalem. Then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres visited Qatar in 1996, and an Israeli trade office opened in Doha the same year.

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, who took power in June 1995 in a bloodless coup that removed his father while the old emir was on holiday in Switzerland, was always a gambler, and his biggest gamble paid off handsomely. Ever since Shell geologists discovered the North Field off Qatar’s northeastern coast in 1971—the largest reservoir of natural gas in the world—the country’s rulers had known that the gas would only be valuable if they could liquefy it domestically. Gas cannot simply be pumped into tankers but must first be cooled to negative-162 degrees Celsius, carried in specially built ships, and sold through long-term contracts to countries that build their own receiving terminals. So in 1984 Qatar set up Qatargas. It took thirteen years, billions of dollars of borrowed money, and a hard-won 1992 commitment from a Japanese utility to buy the gas for 25 years before the first cargo of liquified natural gas (LNG) left the Ras Laffan industrial complex on Qatar’s northern coast in January 1997. By 2006 Qatar had become the world’s largest exporter of LNG. To most of its neighbors in the Gulf, the investment had seemed a reckless extravagance by a minor emirate.

But the bet made sense to Hamad. Like his courtship of both Tehran and Jerusalem, it took a long time to come to collect. And like those other bets, its success was helped by the fact that Qatar’s elite can act without worrying about anything that may be described as public opinion. Most of its few hundred thousand citizens are on the state’s generous payroll, and until 2021 even the Consultative Assembly was appointed by the emir. So when Qatar decided in the early 1990s to open its doors to Israel, nobody complained. Nor were there any complaints when Qatar slammed those doors shut in January 2009, ordering Israel to close its trade office in Doha in the middle of Operation Cast Lead, while Al Jazeera broadcast round-the-clock coverage of the war in Gaza to an Arab audience.

Hamad’s two greatest legacy projects—Al Jazeera and the participation of American universities in Education City—were both founded within eighteen months of his coup. They were part of a larger and cleverly conceived scheme to create a national brand for Qatar and project it across the globe, using financial and media might asymmetrically to compensate for the country’s inability to project hard power.

In April 1996 the BBC closed its new Arabic-language television service, launched in partnership with a Saudi-owned media company, after the Saudis objected to its coverage. Hamad promptly hired many of its journalists, and with a generous grant from the emir they launched Al Jazeera, which began broadcasting that November. It adopted as its motto “the opinion and the other opinion,” and gave airtime to the most contentious political dissidents of every Arab capital but Doha. It was the first Arab channel to invite Israeli officials onto its broadcasts, giving them an Arab audience they had never had before. It also gave a show of his own, Sharia and Life, to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric who had lived in Doha since 1961 and was the most influential theologian of the Muslim Brotherhood; his weekly program was watched by tens of millions. In 2006, Al Jazeera launched an English-language channel, which presented Western audiences with an equally convincing impression of a free press.

Hamad’s second major project, launched in 1995, was to bring leading American universities to Qatar, and he entrusted it to his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. Born into one of the Al Thanis’ most prominent rival clans—her father, Nasser bin Abdullah al-Misnad, lived in exile in Kuwait due to his opposition to the ruling family—and marrying Hamad in 1977 as part of a reconciliation between the two, she has since played an increasingly public role that has made her the first Qatari royal consort to engage in public affairs in her own right. Presiding over several foundations in Qatar, she has become an increasingly frequent speaker at international conferences and was appointed a special envoy for education for UNESCO. The mother of the son Hamad has chosen as his successor, she has served as an important symbol of Qatar’s modernization to Western audiences.

She set up the Qatar Foundation, which built a large campus on the outskirts of Doha called Education City and invited major American universities to open branches there at Qatar’s expense. In 1998, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts became the first to set up shop, followed by Cornell’s medical school in 2001. Campuses of Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and Northwestern University followed, along with Texas A&M University, whose regents voted in 2024 to close its Qatar campus by 2028. Through donations and collaborations of many kinds, the universities’ home campuses receive generous payouts as well. According to disclosure records at the U.S. Department of Education, Qatar is now the largest foreign donor to American colleges and universities. The foundation bought Qatar what no embassy could provide: a permanent presence inside the institutions that educate America’s diplomats, journalists, and officials.

While Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel was designed to project Qatar’s image to the Arab street in the language of Islamism, the universities (and later Al Jazeera English) were meant to do the same among Western elites in the language of liberalism. And Qatar is the only player in the game fluent in both.

Long before October 7, Qatar’s balancing act had proved a perilous one. In 2011 its ruling family, secure in the protection that came with hosting the American military’s largest base in the Middle East, set out to bring Islamist movements to power across the region. When the Arab Spring uprisings began, Qatar used Al Jazeera, its state-funded network, to champion them, and used its financial clout to bankroll the Islamists who expected to inherit them. Al Jazeera’s coverage helped bring down Hosni Mubarak, whose government had shut the channel’s Cairo bureau in January 2011. After the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi became president of Egypt in 2012, Qatar poured some $7.5 billion in grants, loans, and bank deposits into the country.

In Libya, Qatar helped topple Muammar Ghaddafi: it was the first Arab country to recognize the rebels’ National Transitional Council as the legitimate government, it sent Mirage fighters to join the NATO air campaign against Qaddafi’s forces, and it later admitted to having put hundreds of its own troops on the ground. Much of the weaponry Qatar supplied went to Islamist militias, and Qaradawi, the radical cleric widely regarded as Qatar’s unofficial ideologue, used his platform on Al Jazeera to declare that anyone who could shoot Qaddafi should do so.

Qatar then turned its attention to Syria. Hamad, then emir, became the first Arab leader to call publicly for Arab troops to be sent to fight against the Assad regime, and Qatar channeled money and weapons to rebel groups, some of which fought alongside al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Nusra Front—whose leader is now Syria’s president. It was the biggest economic gamble Qatar had ever made, and for a brief moment it seemed that the movements Doha had sheltered for half a century were about to become the governments of the Arab world.

In 2013, however, Qatar appeared to have overplayed its hand. Hamad abdicated in June in favor of his son Tamim, then thirty-three. Eight days later the Egyptian military ousted Morsi, and within days Saudi Arabia and the UAE had pledged billions of dollars to the government that replaced him. The new Egyptian government imprisoned Al Jazeera’s journalists; Libya fell into a civil war fueled in part by Qatar’s support for Islamist militias; and the Assad regime, rescued by Iran, Hizballah, and Russia, remained in power for eleven more years. Qatar’s neighbors, meanwhile, concluded that the Islamist movements Doha financed were aimed at them. In March 2014 Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Doha. In June 2017 the three countries, joined by Egypt, severed diplomatic relations with Qatar and blockaded it, closing its only land border and barring Qatari aircraft from their airspace. The coalition issued thirteen demands that Qatar would have to meet to end the blockade, among them shutting down Al Jazeera, removing Turkish troops from Qatari soil, downgrading relations with Iran, and cutting ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The blockade could have been devastating to Qatar, which imports nearly all its food, much of it once trucked across the Saudi border. But Qatar’s peculiar diplomatic balancing act of the previous 30 years saved it. Qatar turned first to Iran, which opened its airspace to Qatar Airways and shipped in food; in August 2017 Doha returned its ambassador to Tehran, whom it had recalled the year before. Turkey’s parliament rushed through a law authorizing the deployment of Turkish troops to Turkey’s base in Qatar.

Qatar then turned to the Trump administration, which at first seemed to side with the blockade—the president even applauded it on social media. Yet just nine days later, Qatar signed a $12 billion deal to buy American F-15 fighter jets. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis worked to undercut the blockade, and Qatar dramatically increased its lobbying spending in Washington. By the summer of 2018 Doha had agreed to finance an expansion of Al Udeid, home to some 10,000 American military personnel. Qatar also hosted the negotiations that produced the American deal with the Taliban, signed in Doha in February 2020. When the blockade ended in January 2021, Qatar had met none of the thirteen demands. The following year the United States designated Qatar a major non-NATO ally, and Qatar hosted the World Cup.

Qatar drew an important lesson from those years: soft power alone could not secure its aims, but so long as it had Tehran and Washington in its corner, it could survive even the direst threats. Then came October 7. Hamas had moved its political bureau to Doha in 2012, after breaking with Bashar al-Assad—according to Qatari officials at the behest of the United States. When Hamas carried out one of the worst massacres of the century, Qatar’s foreign ministry declared Israel solely responsible for the escalation. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, and other Hamas officials were caught on film in their Doha office, prostrating themselves in joyous prayer as they watched the massacre on television. Seven weeks later Qatar, together with Egypt and the United States, brokered a truce that freed more than a hundred of the hostages Hamas held, and further rounds of Qatari mediation produced new agreements in January and October 2025. (Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in July 2024 and buried in Qatar.) Doha was at once the broker of the hostages’ release and the host of the men who had ordered their abduction—a balancing act that would have been absurd anywhere else.

When Americans discovered that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the country on September 11 were Saudi citizens, the kingdom’s first response resembled Qatar’s after October 7: a barrage of lobbyists and public-relations firms directed at the Bush White House. But the Saudis understood that they needed to change course after al-Qaeda bombed residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003. The kingdom had realized that the jihadist groups it had funded for decades, however indirectly, wanted to destroy the dynasty. The Saudis fought the jihadists on their own soil. Under Mohammad bin Salman they stripped the religious police of their powers of arrest in 2016, removed much of the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian content from their textbooks, and came within sight of recognizing Israel before October 7. The kingdom had the capacity to recognize that policies meant to strengthen its position—buying off Islamists, directing domestic resentment towards America and Israel—had backfired terribly, and it shifted course.

Qatar, by contrast, has only continued to hedge its bets. In November 2024 it announced that Hamas’s leaders had left the country, but they never closed the group’s political office, which is why the Hamas leadership was back in Doha when Israel struck its meeting in September 2025. Al Jazeera continued to broadcast the war to the Arab world through Hamas’s lens. Qatar still pours money into American universities, which have become some of the most hostile environments for Jews anywhere in the West. And it has continued to buy more friends in high places, as seen by its relationships with President Trump’s businesses and family members. While Mohammad bin Salman has a vision for reshaping Saudi Arabia, and Iran, Israel, and Turkey have competing visions for reshaping the Middle East, Qatar has no vision whatsoever. It has means rather than ends. But a policy of pure means is incapable of adjusting to changed circumstances. All Qatar can do is bet on more horses.

So far, that policy has worked. On September 29, 2025, less than three weeks after Israel struck Doha, the president signed Executive Order 14353, pledging that the United States would treat any armed attack on Qatar as a threat to its own peace and security. Qatar has never been wealthier, more powerful, or more secure.

But Qatar has also never been more exposed—or more hated. In June 2025 Iran fired missiles at Al Udeid, America’s largest military base in the Middle East, on Qatari soil. Three months later Israel bombed Doha itself. Abu Dhabi is waging an unrelenting propaganda war against Qatar in the Arab media. Congressional investigators have begun to examine Qatar’s efforts to influence American universities. And Qatar’s own campaign of incitement has produced, in reaction, a large constituency in American politics that regards the emirate as a de-facto adversary. That constituency made Kennedy’s post a sensation—but it was not enough to keep the post online.

Qatar is the perfect postmodern Gulf state; it has converted belief, branding, patronage, media, Islamism, academic obsessions, elite liberalism, and capital into instruments. If there is one thing Qatari officials have never been shy about admitting, it is that their policy is to bet on every horse. The United States is merely one of those horses, running alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and Hamas. Because Qatar has a policy of pure means and no ends, the cycle can be broken only by a nation with ends—and power. That nation is the United States. It has ends: to secure its allies, to defeat a mass-murdering terrorist organization, and to keep its universities free of corrupting foreign influence. The United States holds every card it needs to force Qatar to change its ways. Will it?