Iran, Qatar and the GCC Crisis from 2017

Iran was drawn into the crisis between the Gulf Cooperation Council states from 2017 forward. On July 5, 2017, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt abruptly announced a thoroughgoing blockade of Qatar, a small peninsula with only one land border, that with Saudi Arabia. Qatar had been trucking produce in from Jordan or Saudi towns such as Dammam, and was dependent for milk on Saudi producers. Its hoteliers and restaurateurs also depended on Saudi weekend visitors and on tourism from the UAE and Bahrain. The blockading states attempted to deny Qatar air traffic control so as to bankrupt its prestigious Qatar Airways, and played currency markets in hopes of crashing the value of the Qatari riyal. Some have alleged that Saudi Arabia and the UAE actually had planned a military invasion, analogous to their intervention in Bahrain during the youth uprising in 2011. In summer of 2017 and for the subsequent year, Iran played a key role in thwarting the quartet’s plans. Tehran offered Qatar Airways the use of air traffic controllers at Shiraz, allowing pilots to replace the uncooperative controllers in Bahrain, to which the British had awarded a disproportionate amount of airspace in the Gulf. Iran’s wholesalers quickly made arrangements to ship vegetables and other food to Doha across the Gulf. Iran and Qatar had maintained correct but perhaps not warm relations after Qatari natural gas began being exported in a big way in 2000, inasmuch as Qatar was using Liquified Natural Gas techniques to exploit a vast gas field the passed under the Gulf and was shared by Iran (what the latter calls the Pars 1 field). Iran was unable to develop the field on its side of the Gulf because of US and (for a time) UNSC sanctions, and so Qatar had to be careful to keep Tehran apprised of its operations in the shared field. Among the demands of the quartet were that Iran cut diplomatic relations with Tehran, which is not plausible. Qatar eventually found replacements for most Iranian goods, so that bilateral trade sank again after about 2018. The breaching by the Trump administration of the JCPOA and Qatar’s hosting of the al-Udeid base put Qatar in an awkward position. This paper will explore the Qatar-Iran relationship in the light of the GCC crisis.