The US’s rich Gulf allies were at loggerheads in a nasty feud fuelled by divergent ideologies and old grudges. US President Donald Trump waded into the dispute and lambasted one of the participants from the White House podium.
That was 2017. The state that Trump trashed was Qatar, and it was done at the behest of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Almost a decade later, the two erstwhile allies are now locked in their own spat whose battle lines stretch from Oman’s western border to the Nile River.
But this time, Trump has been unusually quiet.
“Trump should never have picked a side during the blockade of Qatar. That is one lesson he did learn. He knows a lot more now. The first Trump administration did not even know that the US had al-Udeid air base in Qatar. They were just listening to the UAE,” a former US ambassador to a Gulf country at the time told Middle East Eye.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia have fallen out in spectacular fashion. In early January, Saudi Arabia launched strikes on Yemeni secessionists backed by Abu Dhabi and subsequently evicted the Southern Transitional Council from a swath of southern and eastern Yemen.
