It’s being touted quite a bit in the news today that four Islamic countries broke with Qatar over terrorism concerns. Some might even believe this is the effect of Trump’s big Middle East trip to Saudi Arabia.
But Tillerson’s response to this makes it sound like the Trump administration would rather the split didn’t happen at all:
FOX NEWS – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged the Gulf nations to work out their differences after five countries severed ties with Qatar Monday for allegedly embracing several terrorist groups and its ties with Iran.
Tillerson, speaking alongside Secretary of Defense James Mattis in Sydney, said he did not believe the diplomatic crisis would affect the war against the Islamic State.
“I think what we’re witnessing is a growing list of disbelief in the countries for some time, and they’ve bubbled up to take action in order to have those differences addressed,” Tillerson said. “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences.”
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen all announced they would withdraw their diplomatic staff from Qatar, which is home to a major U.S. military base used for the air campaign against ISIS. Saudi Arabia also said Qatari troops would be pulled from the ongoing civil war in Yemen.
All the nations also said they planned to cut air and sea traffic. Saudi Arabia said it also would shut its land border with Qatar, effectively cutting off the country from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Yemen’s internationally recognized government said it would follow Saudi Arabia and supported the kingdom’s decision to remove Qatari troops from the Gulf coalition fighting the war.
Saudi Arabia said it took the decision to cut diplomatic ties due to Qatar’s “embrace of various terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at destabilizing the region” including the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and groups supported by Iran in the kingdom’s restive eastern province of Qatif. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry accused Qatar of taking an “antagonist approach” toward Egypt and said “all attempts to stop it from supporting terrorist groups failed.”
I think this is more about Iran than anything else. Qatar has good relations with Iran given that they share an oil field, as Fox News points out, and Iran is Saudi Arabia’s number one enemy.
Despite all of this, you can tell Tillerson doesn’t want to take sides in this split just based on the language he uses as he pushes the gulf nations (and Egypt) to work out their differences.
His position makes sense given that Trump did meet with Qatar during his visit to Saudi Arabia and said this about them:
At that Saudi conference, Trump met with Qatar’s ruling emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
“We are friends, we’ve been friends now for a long time, haven’t we?” Trump asked at the meeting. “Our relationship is extremely good.”
We’ll see where all of this ends up, but for now it looks like the US is more interested in healing this split than anything else.