https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/...ance-cuts-qatar-ties-as-gulf-crisis-escalates
Trump is going to get blamed for this by the DC ELITE just as sure as the sun comeS up tomorrow, will Qatar believe it, get the idea to toss
USA out?
Maybe, what we say about our President matters.
But how many people know that?
"Have Ya'll lost your minds?"
Putin(paraphrased)
The US has no real friends in the Middle East. All we truly have are enemies, some of which are more open about their enmity than others. None of which shed a tear when we were attacked on 9/11. Some of which allow us to have military bases in their country for their own benefit, not ours. Qatar being one of those countries, as is Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and others. The US 5th Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain, and CENTCOM's AORHQ is in Qatar. The USAF and the US Army have bases in almost every country in the Middle East and many in Northern Africa, with the forward Africa AORHQ of AFRICOM and the regional AORHQ for SOCOM being right across the Bab al-Mandab Straight and the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, in Djibouti.
The Sunni based terrorists (al Qaeda, ISIS, etc.) get a hell of a lot of their funding and fighters from Saudi Arabia and many of our "allies" in the Middle East. However, as this event shows, the Shi'ite based terrorists (Hezbollah, Al-Houthi front, etc.) get a hell of a lot of their funding and fighters from both allies of the US and enemies of the US, like Iran.
The only, IMHO, redeeming quality of Shi'a Islam's extremists is that their clerics preach that Muslims should adapt to the modern world, whereas Sunni extremists are still stuck in the 7th Century. Both of which, however, feel that the Western World which includes the US and all of Europe must be converted or die.
The problem for the US in all of this, is that in reality we are much better off maintaining relationships with all of the Middle Eastern countries that will ally themselves with us for what ever reason, than we are to extricate ourselves from the area and lose any potential of influence we may have in the region.
Looking around that region, with the number of armed conflicts the US is involved in militarily, it is difficult to see the truth, which is that if it were not for the influence of the US and other Western powers, the Middle East would have imploded upon itself long ago. The tribal conflicts of centuries of hatred and sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'a would have made the region unviable for commerce. In other words, yes, it's about oil. Oil is the blood of modern commerce, and without it, the world's economy would come to a violent, painful, and deadly halt.
I have no idea how Trump and his embrace of the family Saud plays into this. From what I can see, based on the way this has grown over the last year, Trump really didn't have a hand in the creation of this tear in international relations, although I'm sure it will be spun that way by some. I do, however, feel that the Saudi's may have felt more comfortable taking this action after meeting with Trump, but I don't think that affected them as to whether they would cut off relations with Qatar or not, but it may have effected the timing. In other words, from what I can tell, this was going to happen anyway. Trump's friendly visit to the Saudi's, if it affected anything at all, may have allowed them to move quicker then they had previous planned.
International Relations are a always cabal of differing interests that when those interests can be merged together for the mutual benefit of two or more countries, can lead to alliances between otherwise non-friendly actors for the benefit of each other. The Soviet Union and the other Allies in WWII is a great example. The US and Saudi Arabia in modern times is another. As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, then the relationship will continue. If that changes, then there will be no love lost when the parties part ways.
