Qatar announced on Thursday it is restoring full diplomatic ties with Iran. “The state of Qatar expressed its aspirations to strengthen bilateral relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran in all fields,” the Qatari Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that Qatar’s ambassador will return to Iran after a year of vacancy in the post.
This comes at a time when relations between Qatar and its Arab neighbors are particularly tense. In June, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt jointly decided to sever ties and cut off land, sea, and air routes with Qatar, unless Qatar meets a set of demands – including withdrawing support for Iran and shutting down Qatari media group Al Jazeera.
The move to restore diplomatic relations with Iran is sure to anger Qatar’s neighbors. Yet at the same time, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced on Wednesday they will exchange diplomatic visits sometime soon – begging the question, are regional relations with Iran thawing?
The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder asked Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and AEI scholar focusing on the Middle East and Iran in particular, about the current state of relations – and how this could impact U.S. strategy on the ground in the Gulf.
The Cipher Brief: Qatar announced it is restoring its ambassador to Iran, despite its dispute with Gulf states. The Gulf state leading the bloc of Arab nations that has demanded Qatar sever ties with Iran is Saudi Arabia – but now Saudi Arabia and Iran are apparently trying a diplomatic exchange. Meanwhile, an Iranian official is visiting Turkey for the first time in decades. Is this all a sign of rapprochement with Iran? If so, why?
Michael Rubin: Let me break it down in a few bilaterals.
Qatar-Iran
Sure, it’s a rapprochement, but it may be more an opportunistic than a meaningful one. Long before the current dispute, Qatar sought relations with all sides. Alongside Oman, Qatar maintained informal but meaningful relations with Israel and good relations with the United States, while simultaneously crafting solid ties with Iran. Iran, meanwhile, is happy to seize any opposition to divide potential opponents.
Remember, as the current Qatar crisis was erupting, Khorasan, one of Iran’s largest circulation dailies (published out of Mashhad) was questioning just why Qatar was reaching out to Tehran. By restoring ties, Qatar is showing it can’t be dictated to by its opponents, but there’s a difference between symbolic and substantive action. Earlier this year, Morocco also fully restored diplomatic ties with Iran after they had been severed for eight years. During a research trip to the Middle East in May, I asked Moroccan security officials and diplomats about the move, and they said that Iran knew it was on a short leash and that they could no longer engage in some of the behavior which had led to the break in relations in 2009.
If Iran is opportunistic, so is Qatar. Each of the smaller Persian Gulf emirates plays Saudi Arabia and Iran off each other in order to maintain their own independent space. In addition, for both countries, the old adage that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” holds true. As the only two officially Wahabi countries, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are rivals. The border dispute between the two may be long forgotten in the West, but it has only fed fuel to their competitive animosity.
Saudi Arabia-Iran
As for a diplomatic exchange between Iran and Saudi Arabia, this too occurs from time to time, but its importance shouldn’t be exaggerated. One shouldn’t confuse a weed with a forest. Both countries are over-extended in resource-draining proxy wars with each other, but seek to talk about logistics for Hajj [the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia]. The desire by both countries to draw redlines – especially given the ability of both Iran and Saudi Arabia to sponsor unrest and/or terrorism in each other’s territory – can be reason enough to talk. Some talks are more about managing the status quo than finding resolution.
Turkey-Iran
There are limits to Turkey and Iran rapprochement, but both countries have found reason to improve their relations. Several of the reasons have nothing to do with Qatar: The authorities in both Ankara and Tehran share antipathy toward the Kurds. With the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) resurgent and, separately, with Iraqi Kurdistan heading to a referendum on September 25, both Turkey and Iran wish to discuss their response. Keep in mind, however, that should Iraqi Kurdistan become independent, Iran and Turkey would be the two poles in what likely will be a proxy war for influence in the new country. Turkey will seek to transform the Kurdistan Democratic Party-held territory into a new equivalent to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, while Iran will dominate areas controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Gorran.
Trade between Iran and Turkey has also increased dramatically over the last decade, even if a bilateral preferential trade deal proved a bridge too far. Ideology also matters. Both Turkey and Iran are drawn together by their mutual hatred for the United States. Pew Research Center has consistently found Turkey to be among the most anti-American countries on earth. Turkish paranoia and xenophobia has always been problematic, but it’s become more so as President Erdogan and the media he controls deliberately pours fuel on the fire. Once again, however, just because Turkey and Iran find commonalities in what they are against – Kurds and the United States – that does not mean they have a solid basis to build a more substantive relationship about what they are for.
Turkey-Qatar
This is, by far, the most interesting and perhaps substantive shift. Among Turkey analysts, one of the biggest debates is whether Erdogan’s Islamism is a tactic or sincere in his quest to consolidate dictatorial power. Put crudely, does Erdogan want to be a new Vladimir Putin, or does he want to be a caliph? Turkey’s rush to Qatar’s defense suggests that Erdogan wants to solidify the Turkey-Qatar-Hamas axis of the Muslim Brotherhood. Many in the Turkish opposition also suspect, however, that there could be a financial angle to Turkey’s move: Qatar is alleged to have long subsidized Erdogan’s ruling party, and some even suggest that some of Erdogan’s suspected stolen billions of dollars could be in Qatar.
TCB: How will other Arab states respond to Qatar’s – and Saudi Arabia’s – moves?
Rubin: The crisis has moved into a new phase. Initially, the anti-Qatar Quartet hoped for a quick surrender by Qatar. Now, that’s off the table, and all the regional states are settling in for the long-haul. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt are not going to back down because they figure they’ve already given Qatar a chance, after the 2014 mini-crisis [dispute over Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt], but that it did not fulfill its agreements to resolve that dry-run for the current crisis. What’s happening now is a prolonged cold war, albeit one that won’t get in the way of other regional states to conduct business as usual, even if they’re on opposite sides of the Qatar issue. That doesn’t mean a resolution is at hand because, God knows, there’s a huge difference between “business as usual” and peace when it comes to the Middle East.
TCB: How could this potential thawing of relations between Iran and its neighbors alter the security climate in the region?
Rubin: The communication channel is positive, but the threats from Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood remain. “Export of revolution” is part of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s raison d'être according both to its constitution and the founding statutes of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). That the IRGC is better resourced now than it was before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [the Iran nuclear deal] promises further problems between Iran and its neighbors.
A decade ago, Iranian leaders described themselves as a regional power. By around 2011, they began calling themselves a pan-regional power, meaning the northern Indian Ocean region. Today, however, they have described their strategic boundaries as the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aden. An exchange of ambassadors isn’t going to mean Iran will stand down in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Bahrain. Simply put, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a status quo power now and it will never be so long as it upholds its foundational ideology. Separately, and maybe much more significantly, is the rapprochement between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another day.
TCB: What’s the U.S. view on this – and how could it impact U.S. strategy in the region?
Rubin: Alas, there seems to be a lot of strategic confusion coming out of the Trump administration. The Pentagon wants to preserve its use of the al-Udeid Airbase and, therefore, would like a solution, and the State Department has also sought to broker a compromise. Trump, however, threw a wrench in the gears with a tweet highly critical of Qatar, and even if the White House walks that back, it remains in the back of the regional actors’ minds.
What’s not clear about the U.S. approach is why there has got to be compromise. For decades, successive U.S. administrations have been asking Arab states to take the lead in a coordinated manner in the battle against extremism and the fight against terrorism, and so when they finally do, Arab leaders in Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Manama, and Riyadh are right to ask why they should stop. And for those partial to Qatar who say that Saudi Arabia and perhaps even the UAE have supported their share of radical groups, they don’t explain why that should mean that Qatar should be let off the hook.
As for al-Udeid, it’s not as important as some believe. It hosts perhaps 100 U.S. planes today, but at the height of Operation Desert Storm, air bases in Bahrain held many times that number. Nor is the strategic environment today the same as it was in 2003, when the United States was fully engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simply put, the Pentagon is not seeing the forest through the trees if its seeks to let off the hook a regime financing the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups in order to keep a lease on a Qatari airbase that it arguably no longer needs.
Sometimes taking sides is important, lest both sides believe the United States isn’t with them. That was Obama’s biggest mistake on Egypt during the Arab spring. By remaining neutral, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military believed the United States was siding with their enemies. We pursued a policy equivalent to playing blackjack but not wanting to put our cards on the table until we saw everyone’s cards. The Trump Administration is approaching the Qatar crisis with the same strategic confusion that Obama approached Egypt. It doesn’t work. It makes America look weak, and it doesn’t win us any friends.
The last point – and one that bears watching – is how Russia seeks advantage from all of this, but once again, that’s probably a long conversation for another day.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @KaitLavinder.
