Sheikh Hamad bin Khaifa Al Thani made Qatar safe by making it relevant. [originally published with Al Jazeera] For most of its modern history, Qatar was a place that things happened to. It was a quiet peninsula prized for its energy resources and consulted about little, living on the margins of larger ambitions. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who died in Doha on Sunday at the age of 74, refused that inheritance. And despite what many commentaries will reduce his legacy to

This piece was originally published on Iranian attacks on Gulf vessels trying to transit via Omani sovereign waters have once again pulled the region into a tit-for-tat spiral of escalation. The US responded by cancelling the waiver permitting Iranian oil exports. Two nights of punitive airstrikes by the US air force against targets across southern Iran followed. Iran answered with ballistic missile and drone attacks on US installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. The reluctance o

As Trump waged a war he could not end, Gulf states closed ranks, revived diplomacy with Tehran and prevented a wider regional crisis [originally published at MEE] For 30 years, the Gulf monarchies rested their security on a single assumption: that the United States would keep them safe. The war that US President Donald Trump and Israel waged against Iran has buried that assumption. The American bases scattered across the Gulf did not shield states from a conflict they never c

The UAE has evidently decided that Pakistan is no longer the partner it once required —but that India is [published originally at the Stimson Centre together with Giorgio Cafiero] In two weeks in April, the United Arab Emirates turned off every channel of its long interdependence with Pakistan. On April 12, plainclothes officers in Dubai began detaining Pakistani workers — most of them Shi’ite Muslims and many with decades of residence — with the total eventually reaching rou

The US and Iran stepped back from the brink of returning to all-out war on June 11. Hours after saying the US military would carry out strikes against Iran for a third consecutive night, Donald Trump postponed the attack. The Iranian military had said the US would “receive a more severe response than before” if it followed through on its threats. Trump claimed to have cancelled the strikes because of progress in negotiations between the two countries. In a statement posted on

The UAE must abandon the illusion of strategic exceptionalism, and rebuild its autonomy through a collective Gulf security order [Article was originally published by MEE] The United Arab Emirates has spent two decades trying to escape the ordinary fate of small states through the network power of hyper-connectivity. It built ports, bought influence, cultivated militias, courted Washington, hedged with Moscow and Beijing, and projected the image of a country too nimble, too w

Following the last round of talks between the United States and Iran in Islamabad, Iran’s foreign minister and negotiator Abbas Araghchi declared in a post on X on April 17 that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open”. This came after he also signalled that his government could be flexible over the issue of nuclear enrichment as well as Iran’s support for its proxies in the region. Then came an abrupt correction. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former commander in the Islamic

As American power becomes more erratic and extortionate, Europe and the Gulf could help each other building strategic autonomy When empires decline, they rarely do so gracefully. They become fiercer. They try, with increasing desperation, to defend their pole position through ever riskier military adventures and ever harsher forms of economic coercion. Their rulers appear more erratic. They overestimate their own judgement, their country’s strength and the resilience of the i

[ originally published on DAWN ] Every war the West has fought in the post-9/11 "War on Terror" era has ended in some form of stalemate or outright defeat. Tactical battlefield successes never consolidated into sustainable strategic outcomes of security and stability — neither for America nor the region. While the U.S.-led coalition toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 quickly, it lost the war in the subsequent quagmire, fighting violent non-state actors across a spe

From Abu Dhabi to Riyadh, regional states must take steps to shape their own destinies, rather than being pawns in the Israeli-US agenda On Saturday morning, the departure board at Dubai’s main airport began to stack up with delays. Over the water, pale arcs rose, flared and vanished - interceptors, officials later said - leaving chalk traces in a sky turning white. Similar scenes occurred in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama and Kuwait City. Then, in the afternoon, both the Dubai air

This is a moment in which the Gulf has to balance between an Iran that has been largely passive and reactive since the 7th of October and an Israel that has been erratic, impulsive and hyper activist in pursuit of short to midterm security interests.

Donald Trump has boxed himself in by promising to ‘help’ Iran’s protesters. But he has few good options for military operations that he can control. [published on Al Jazeera originally ] Illiberal systems often look most permanent just before they change. But moments of upheaval can also produce a different illusion: That the system is one dramatic external blow away from collapse. With Iran convulsed by unprecedented protests against the country’s leadership, it is tempting

One useful way to read the recent escalation along Yemen’s southern coastline is not as a local quarrel over ports and militias, but as a signal that Riyadh now believes it has an opening to reconstitute a Saudi-centric regional order. [originally published at Amwaj ] The first phase of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s rise to power was defined by impulsive, often erratic moves designed to establish primacy. The second phase featured a more measured, introverted pos

UAE - Saudi competition from Yemen over the Horn of Africa and Sudan to Libya

This article was originally published with The Conversation Fighters aligned with the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist group in southern Yemen, raised their flags in the provinces of Hadramout and Marah in early December. The seizures mean the STC now controls all eight of the provinces that make up the south of the country. The new status quo looks like a fait accompli for the creation of a separate southern state. It has left Yemen’s internationally recog

By doubling down on the RSF, Abu Dhabi expanded the brutal civil war. It should now leverage that entanglement to push for deescalation

The fallout from Israel’s strike on Qatar drags the region back into the dangerous early stages of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

The Iranian and Israeli attacks on Qatar in June and September this year, respectively, signify a profound shift in the Gulf's security...

One of the Gulf’s most active mediators has been violated, its sovereignty trampled, while the US administration struggled to find words...

How Israel mirrors Russia's and China's information warfare playbook