President Joe Biden will soon designate the gas-rich Gulf state of Qatar as a major non-NATO ally.
Qatar joins more than a dozen other countries including Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and a handful of other Middle Eastern states with the privileged status. This puts the country at the front of the line on many defense sales and even makes Qatar eligible to receive depleted uranium ammunition.
This honor is undeserved.
While Qatar hosts the Al Udeid Air Base where U.S. Central Command maintains its forward headquarters, it treats the U.S. presence more as a “get out of jail free card” than as a commitment to countering terror. Qatar’s promoting of radical Islamist groups and partnering with other regimes that are destabilizing the region increased tremendously after the Clinton and Bush administrations began to invest in the airfield heavily.
The Pentagon consistently fails to see the forest through the trees. Just as Pentagon officials have run interference for Turkey’s government in order to protect U.S. interests in the Incirlik Air Base, so too does CENTCOM today often whitewash Qatar’s resistance to the global war on terrorism.
Several years ago, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a series of reports chronicling Qatar’s terror financing. Not only does Qatar fund Hamas terrorists, it has also underwritten al Qaeda groups in Syria and more recently has catalyzed the Taliban. More recently, Qatar has worked fist-in-glove with Turkey to promote the al Qaeda affiliated al Shabaab in Somalia. Qatar also publicly funds if not controls outlets such as Al Jazeera and, more privately, the Middle East Eye, both of which often incite or apologize for extremist groups and terrorists. Qatar also provides a diplomatic and financial lifeline to Iran, even as that regime’s proxies attack its neighbors.
Certainly, Qatar is not alone as a misplaced major non-NATO ally. Pakistan, a regime that worked alongside Qatar to finance and catalyze the Taliban campaign against Afghanistan, also has the designation. Bizarrely, Afghanistan apparently still maintains the status, even as the Taliban openly appoint designated terrorists into their government.
The timing of Biden’s designation is also strange. President Bill Clinton awarded Jordan, a consistent U.S. security partner, with the status in 1996. President George W. Bush bestowed the status on Bahrain, Kuwait, and Morocco at the height of the global war on terrorism. President Barack Obama named Tunisia a major non-NATO ally after the Arab Spring and that country’s fleeting turn toward democracy. Biden, however, has ended U.S. involvement in Afghanistan’s war and scaled back the U.S. commitment to Iraq. He has openly talked about rebalancing U.S. strategic focus toward China and Russia for which the U.S. presence in Qatar is largely irrelevant.
Against this reality, it is hard not to see Biden’s embrace of Qatar as motivated by something more covert or dishonest: covert in the sense that Biden may back Qatar to launder U.S. outreach to the Taliban, Tehran, and Hamas, if not even more radical groups. Dishonest in the sense that Biden’s top advisers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, leveraged their government experience for profit after the Obama administration and would likely do so again, in which case Qatar would see a quid pro quo.
Perhaps Biden’s motivation is pure. If so, however, it is not clear why Qatar and why now. After all, to compare the balance sheet between Qatar’s assets and its liabilities would be to conclude that it deserves designation, not as a major non-NATO ally, but rather as a state sponsor of terror.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
