Description
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been able to cultivate increasing leverage as mediators and strategic actors globally, even as their foreign policy strategies diverge. ‘We are at this inflection point where everything is possible,’ said Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies, King’s College London. ‘You could extract concessions from Israel that you couldn’t have extracted a year ago.’Nevertheless, Qatar’s relations with these groups, as well as with Iran, have enabled the small nation to ‘maintain relevancy on the global stage’ and ‘become indispensable for great powers,’ according to Krieg.
‘Dialogue is the number one ingredient of their foreign security policy. Being the middleman and connecting state and non-state actors is something no other state in the Gulf can do because they also have a relationship with the more juicy, non-state actors that nobody wants to have any contacts with,’ he said.
‘The fact that the Chinese build joint ventures with Emirati businesses to gain access to chip manufacturing companies in America, or how the Russians are using the UAE as a platform to build proxies for Wagner that then can operate globally, bypassing sanctions, this is a very problematic side,’ said Krieg. ‘But it shows you that even great powers such as Russia and China require the Gulf as conduits to do things they can’t do because of their standing, particularly in the western world.’
| Period | 2 Feb 2024 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Chatham House, United Kingdom |
Keywords
- Qatar
- Saudi
- UAE