ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that while fulfilling its obligations towards its alliance with Turkey, Qatar was burdenedby the latter’s regionally expansionist pan-Islamist, neo-Ottomanist policy. Turkey’s projects in the region eventually failed, especially with a strong militarized statist turn in Egypt, which clashed with Turkey’s support for the transnationalist Islamist Muslim Brotherhood schemes in Gaza, Tunisia, Libya, and failed attempts in Syria. When Turkey’s Islamist arch failed regionally, so did Qatar’s returns on investment in financing proxy jihadist mercenaries as means of hard power projection in regional and global security arrangements. Burdened by Turkey’s increasingly rigid ideology, Qatar lost much of its regional maneuverability and international clout as a once significantly successful emerging state. This chapter argues that the 2017 boycott of Qatar, where Egypt and its regional Gulf allies of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain cut their political and economic ties with the small Gulf state, must be read in relation to the antagonism between two main players: Turkey and Egypt. The clash between the pan-Islamist Turkey–Qatar alliance’s failures in the region and its diametrical opposition to the Egypt- United Arab Emirates-Saudi Arabia regional vision is at the core of the boycott. Ultimately, all these regional dynamics played out in the western capitals of Europe and the United States, as Gulf lobbying of the quintessentially opposite visions of a Secular-Statist-Militaristic Egypt clashed with a pan-Islamist-transnationalist-militancy-backing Turkey. In short, Turkey and Egypt split the Gulf into two camps and that split created new perceptions and realities of the entire region in the West.
