Qatar and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry: A Widening Gulf

Disarray in the U.S. ruling class is creating more instability worldwide. On June 5, two weeks after President Donald Trump was feted by state terrorist Saudi rulers, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and four other Middle Eastern countries (Libya, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain) cut all ties with the tiny island nation of Qatar.
A flare-up between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both crucial to U.S. imperialism, can only make the region even more volatile. But the brunt of the Saudi coalition’s blockade will fall on the backs of the Qatari working class.
The Saudi rulers have charged that Qatar funds extremist Islamic groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood—and, most damning, because it’s too cozy with Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival, Iran. The hypocrisy of bosses the world over knows no limits. Capitalist-run Qatar attacks workers on a daily basis. So do all of the country’s accusers. And so does the United States, most monstrously of all. Collectively, these capitalist bosses have the blood of our class on their hands.
Isolation of Qatar, Proxy Attack on Iran
Amid its sharpening competition with China and Russia, the relative decline of the U.S. has created instability and anxiety for countries relying on U.S. hegemony to maintain their oil profits and control aggression by warring regional powers.
The Middle East contains two main imperialist camps: Russia, Iran, and Turkey on one side, and the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel on the other. Both sides are ready and willing to slaughter workers to come out on top. The international working class has no dog in this fight.
The bosses of Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran have been at each others’ throats for decades. While they often couch their conflict in religious terms to mislead masses of workers, their real conflict is over political power and control over resources in the Persian Gulf. In moving against Qatar, Saudi Arabia, a virtual slave state and the world’s biggest oil producer, is closely allied with the U.S., aims to check Iranian influence. Qatar and Iran share the offshore North Field, the world’s largest natural gas deposit. The Saudis want to stop Qatar’s funding of regional threats (like Hamas in the Gaza Strip), and to quash Al Jazeera, the Qatari-based media outlet that builds unrest among workers in Saudi Arabia.
A Problematic U.S. Ally
Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. It hosts 11,000 military personnel in the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), and is “a core part of Washington’s worldwide military infrastructure” (Foreign Affairs, 6/13). CENTCOM uses Qatar as a forward operating base for its mass murders in the Middle East, including bombings of civilians in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, Qatar wields political and economic influence that make it an uncomfortable U.S. ally:

Qatar…is known in Washington political circles less as a reliable partner than as the home of Al Jazeera (which is often critical of U.S. policy), a sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood (which many U.S. observers oppose), and an antagonist of the U.S.-backed government of Egyptian President Abel Fattah el-Sisi….
And Qatar’s liquefied natural gas is critical to states across the world, from the United Kingdom to China, India, Japan, and South Korea: a healthy set of allies should the situation escalate further (Foreign Affairs, 6/13).

By resuming development of North Field after a 12-year moratorium, Qatar’s gas supply is expected to increase by 10 percent, to a capacity of 2 billion cubic feet per day, the equivalent of 400,000 barrels of oil (Reuters, 4/3). This signals a move to compete with Saudi oil, already hit by declining prices.
Meanwhile, the isolation campaign against Qatar puts Chinese imperialists in a bind:

[It] pressures China to take sides, complicates its effort to tiptoe through the minefield of Middle Eastern conflicts and rivalries by maintaining good relations with all parties, and threatens its Belt and Road Initiative with the likely expansion of the Saudi-Iranian proxy war into Balochistan, a key Pakistani node of the plan (South China Morning Post, 6/12).

U.S. Empire in Decay
After Trump recklessly applauded Saudi Arabia’s anti-Qatar campaign, the dominant section of the U.S. ruling class quickly reined him in: “In a phone call with the Qatari Emir, Trump extended an olive branch offering to help the parties resolve their differences by coming to a White House meeting if necessary” (CNN, 6/8).
Mindful of Qatar’s importance to U.S. military interests, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, added, “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences….[W]e think it is important that the [Gulf Cooperation Council] remain unified” (Vox, 6/6).
Fightback Points to a Communist Future
The working class in the Middle East faces some of the most brutal horrors that capitalism can unleash. Divisive nationalism and religious dogma may be primary at the moment, but their hold on workers’ consciousness is far from eternal. The rich history of communist-led fightback in this region demonstrates how workers throughout the world have been won away from the bosses’ lethal ideology to international revolutionary struggle. Those workers can be won again!
Working people everywhere need to join and build the international Progressive Labor Party. We must develop the Party into the weapon that destroys the bosses’ deadly system—and into the tool that builds a classless, communist world.