A year has passed since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain imposed a diplomatic and economic blockade on their Arabian Gulf neighbour, Qatar. To the consternation of his secretaries of state and defence, President Trump chose to take sides in a dispute that pits US defence and security partners against one another. Leaked e-mails have revealed the extent to which Saudi and Emirati-linked interests sought to influence the Trump administration before and after it took office in January 2017. Besides hampering US efforts to mobilise a unified Arab coalition to counter Iran and regional terrorism, the Gulf crisis has come to symbolise the harm to US interests caused by the distracted approach to foreign policy in the opening months of the Trump presidency.
Donald Trump’s unexpected election victory in 2016 and the political inexperience of many of his senior aides offered a unique opportunity to outside actors looking to shape the direction of policy. The Trump administration entered office signalling its disdain for conventional decision-making and lacking a clear policy planning focus. Early signs that the Trump presidency would be more transactional and less rooted in US ‘values’ were accompanied by hostility toward the institutions of governance – Stephen K Bannon’s ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ – unprecedented in recent American history. To the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Trump White House appeared to be operating in the same personalised top-down manner as their own Royal Courts did in Riyadh or in Abu Dhabi.
Officials from Saudi Arabia and especially the UAE reached out immediately to project their points of view on key White House figures. In December 2016, during the transition, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed travelled incognito to New York and held a meeting – not made public at the time – with Jared Kushner, Bannon, and Michael Flynn at Trump Tower. The UAE ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, communicated regularly with Kushner, the president’s son-in-law tasked with much of the new administration’s Middle East policy. Politico quoted Otaiba stating that ‘he did all the asking, and I did all the talking.’
It is unclear what records, if any, were kept of these meetings, but leaked e-mail correspondence has shone a spotlight on the outreach of George Nader and Elliott Broidy – supposedly on behalf of the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi – to push the White House to take a harsher approach toward Qatar. In exchange for the promise of lucrative contracts in the UAE, some of which materialised, Nader and Broidy undertook a wide-ranging campaign that sought to shape political opinion and influence policymakers in the Beltway. Their efforts seemed to pay off as Trump made his first foreign visit as president to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 and then reacted to the June 5 blockade of Qatar by sending a series of Tweets castigating Doha that many Qataris took to signal a green light for the Saudis and Emiratis to launch further action against them. 
The challenge the White House now faces is that having encouraged, however unwittingly, the Saudis and Emiratis to assume US support for their isolation of Qatar last summer, it is proving far harder to get the parties to resolve a crisis that undermines US interests in the Gulf the longer it goes on. President Trump belatedly has recognised the strategic value of the US-Qatari partnership and offered to host Gulf leaders at Camp David to facilitate an end to the dispute. However, Mohamed bin Salman made it clear during his visit to the White House in March that he would not accept US mediation while Mohamed bin Zayed simply refused to come to Washington, DC at all.
From a US perspective there are no winners, only losers, from this needless crisis. When President Trump attended the Arab-Islamic-American Summit in Riyadh in May 2017 he called on the Arab world to work with the United States to counter radical extremism, terrorism, and Iranian support for both. US partners on the front-line against Iran promptly turned on each other instead. With President Trump having pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal in the face of much international opposition, more than ever he needs his regional partners in the Gulf to step up. Working with the Saudis and Emiratis to identify a face-saving way to back down and end the blockade of Qatar would be a way to start.

* Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy

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