As evidenced by its busy diplomacy during the Iran-Israel-US dispute earlier this year, tiny Qatar has transformed itself "into the diplomatic capital of the world," writes Nesrine Malik at the Guardian. Malik's deep dive into the subject, based on interviews with more than two dozen diplomats and academics over the past year, seeks to explain how and why. The "why" part is straightforward. Qatar may be incredibly rich, but it's also small and sandwiched among giant powers. For the 54-year-old nation, then, diplomacy is "existential." The "how" part is more complicated, but it begins with the discovery of the world's largest natural gas field in the 1990s, a discovery that fueled the country's wealth. Then came a palace coup in 1995 that brought the reform-minded Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani to power.
Unlike his father, al-Thani decided that Qatar would no longer be subservient to Saudi Arabia. On that front, the nation launched the Al Jazeera media network, which "took Arab political discourse out of the street and on to the airwaves, challenging orthodoxies, poking at sectarian tensions and antagonizing other Arab governments." All told, the country has leveraged the network, high-profile investments, and the spectacle of hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup to become an influential yet neutral interlocutor in international affairs. At this point, Qatar finds that "there is more appetite for its services than it can handle," writes Malik. It received three mediation requests alone in June. (Read the full story.)
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