Qatar’s Propaganda Machine Could Be ‘First Casualty’ of LNG Collapse

…

John Hannah, the Randi & Charles Wax Senior fellow at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America and a former national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, said the devastating loss of Qatar’s LNG revenues could force Doha to reconsider its international investments.

“Hopefully, Qatar’s decades-long project to advance pro-Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israel causes will be one of the first casualties of the devastating loss of its LNG revenues,” Hannah said.

Hannah said the collapse of Qatar’s gas export income has left the ruling royal family facing an unfamiliar set of constraints.

“For the first time in a long time, Qatar’s leaders have to make hard choices on how they are going to keep their domestic economy afloat, their Western partners happy, and the ruling family in power without the LNG golden goose providing endless mountains of cash for massive welfare benefits, payoffs and strategic foreign investments,” he said.

According to Hannah, the fiscal reckoning facing Doha should extend beyond domestic austerity and into a fundamental reassessment of Qatar’s international posture.

“They are being forced into a major belt-tightening and part of that reckoning should be a decisive turn away from the two-faced foreign policy that had them playing all sides of the Middle East’s divide between pro-Western pragmatic modernists and anti-Western extremist Islamists,” he said.

Hannah argued that Doha’s long-running strategy of simultaneously courting Washington and accommodating Islamist actors across the region has now visibly failed.

“That’s the strategy that came crashing down on their heads when the same Iranian regime they’d spent years seeking to accommodate and appease didn’t think twice to devastate Qatar’s LNG lifeline in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field that Qatar had nothing to do with,” he said.

He added that Western governments now have an opening to press Doha toward a genuine policy shift.

“Ensuring that reckoning happens and gets reflected in Qatari policy should be a priority for the U.S. and its allies in their engagements with Doha going forward,” he said.

…