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US President Donald Trump has pledged in an executive order to guarantee Qatar’s security and to regard any attack on the Gulf state as a threat to the “peace and security of the US”.
The move comes just three weeks after Israel launched a missile attack on Doha, which targeted Hamas’s political leaders and sent shockwaves across oil-rich Gulf nations that have traditionally looked to Washington as their security guarantor.
Qatar was also briefly caught up in the 12-day war Israel launched against Iran in June. Tehran fired a barrage of missiles at an American base near Doha in retaliation for Trump joining Israel in bombing the Islamic Republic’s main nuclear sites.
The executive order said the US would respond to any attack on Qatar by taking all “lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and the State of Qatar”.
A longtime US ally, the small Gulf state hosts the superpower’s biggest military base in the region, has significant investments in US assets and is a top exporter of liquefied natural gas. Qatar is pressing Hamas to accept Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza, which the president unveiled on Monday.
Elliott Abrams, a former senior US diplomat who served Trump during his first term, described the order as a “highly unusual step”.
“This is the equivalent of a defence treaty with Qatar of the sort the United States has with Japan and South Korea, or to Nato’s Article V. But those commitments were made by treaty, and approved by the Senate,” Abrams said.
“This is a commitment made by the president without any public discussion or debate or any congressional consultations, much less approval.”
Israel’s September 9 attack, which struck Hamas’s political office in a business and residential district of Doha, raised questions in the Gulf about the US security commitment to its Arab allies. Trump said he was “very unhappy about every aspect” of the strike, in a rare rebuke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Designated a major non-Nato ally by former President Joe Biden, Qatar has carved out a role for itself as a mediator between the US and adversaries, including Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It has hosted Hamas’s political office for more than a decade with the US’s blessing, and has played a central role in mediation efforts to end the near two-year war between Israel and Hamas.
In a three-way telephone conversation organised by Trump on Monday, Netanyahu apologised to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani for the attack on Doha and for violating the Gulf state’s sovereignty.
Dana Stroul, a former senior Pentagon official, said the order sent a strong political signal of commitment by the Trump administration to Qatar, while also serving as a warning to Israel.
But she added: “It’s not worth much more than the word of the president, which changes by the hour.”
“It is so broad and undefined that the risk is Qatari leaders have inflated expectations about what the United States will be willing to do that could soon leave Doha disappointed,” Stroul said. “Others might look at this level of commitment and quickly have a snowball effect where everyone would like the same commitment.”
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