The tiny emirate of Qatar—a former British protectorate in the Persian Gulf—is where the Evil Empire narrative, used by Western Liberals to admonish themselves and their voters, finally comes full circle.
Ordered into a modern state and given the tools to become the richest society on earth, Qatar used its 1971 independence to return to its feudal ways, to challenge every last liberal shibboleth that the enlightened West cherishes, and to exert its cultural influence abroad.
Yet, while left-wing commentators beat themselves with straws of white privilege, women’s persecution, and workers’ exploitation to explain the inequalities of wealth among their own populations, they have no problem promoting those same vices in Qatar in return for the diminishing rewards of Qatari political allegiance.
The calculation seems simple: as long as Doha provides gas, Western governments will forget every postured principle they use as an excuse to raise your taxes.
Will anyone notice, as struggling households tighten their belts in pursuit of Net Zero, that the EU is not only buying a quarter (and rising) of the gas exports from a nation that doesn’t give a fig for our ‘carbon targets,’ but whose women can’t travel or work without male permission, where an entire underclass of imported indentured labourers are denied the status of citizens, where trade unions are illegal, gays locked up, and whose royal family have cosied up to virtually every enemy of the West apart from North Korea?
The war in Ukraine has triggered embargoes on Russian gas and nearly doubled the price of energy in swathes of Europe—but how long will people see the sense in this while their bills support one of Russia’s closest allies in the Middle East?
In short, how long can the green, the progressive, and the socialist export their sins by using Qatar to hedge against their own principles? The answer, I fear, is indefinitely—because this form of foreign policy has no principles.
The West should examine its double-entry bookkeeping when fighting terrorism. Qatar has brought us into conflict with our own strategy with its constitutionally-enshrined role of ‘Global Mediator’ producing alarming results. Stuffing cash into the pockets of senior European politicians, Qatar lobbies the West to turn a blind eye to its abuses of progressive agendas while it continues to harbour Hamas’ leadership and welcome the Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood leaderships. Through its slick state broadcaster Al Jazeera, Qatar projects anti-Western political rhetoric considered dangerous enough to have been banned even in other Middle Eastern states, while backing American journalism schools with tens of millions of dollars. Furthermore, Qatar hosts the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East—a joint venture shared by their own airforce—while Sandhurst and King’s College London train its military leadership in the arts of modern warfare.
Yet, despite its undoubted bribery of Western political figures, conspiracy plays less of a part in our inept handling of Qatar than the simple route of least resistance. Democratic governments are just too cowardly to upset the status quo. They tell themselves that because Qataris are rich, they are worthy clients. This is nonsense, of course—the only money Qatar has is the money we pay it for gas in the first place, and the reason that the 300,000 Qatari citizens have cornered this market is largely due to embargoes we ourselves have slapped on Iran and Russia. If you focused Western energy expenditure on just 300,000 Russians or Iranians, they’d be rich, too. Yet we boycott these vast nations to very little effect while, in the case of Qatar, our funds go not just to national oil companies but to precisely the individuals who rule the nation and exhibit the patterns of behaviour we sanctimoniously claim to admonish. At least when we buy gas from Russia, some of our cash goes into the pockets of Rosneft company directors like Gerhard Schroeder.
Gas is the source of 80% of Qatar’s government revenue, so Western embargoes might actually work. Indeed, a major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—imposed an embargo from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was, typically, Qatar’s support for regional terrorism.
Alas, the more the West attempts to keep ideologically pure, the more political and material power we heap into the hands of a consigliere nation we deem too small to harm us, whilst it fillets us with a stiletto made of our own money.
We’re not dealing with a vast and ancient civilisation like China, Russia, or Iran here—and that is precisely the problem. Qatar has no outlet for its vast wealth except to spread its influence abroad. It now owns more of central London than the British Royal family and is buying up banks and infrastructure fast. But the most alarming facet of Qatari expansion is perhaps the most ancient.
For centuries, the minaret and the belfry have been calling European souls. While the Qatari government bans Christian institutions from using religious symbols such as crosses in public, they have poured €71 million into building mosques and Islamic cultural centres in Europe—with particular focus on the very heart of Christendom: Italy.
Accuse me of petty cultural chauvinism if you like, but in the Italian port of Livorno there is a statue which, if it were located in Washington, London, or Brussels, would certainly have been destroyed during the latest spasm of anti-racist woke iconoclasm. It depicts Ferdinand I of Tuscany vanquishing the African and Ottoman pirates who harried the Mediterranean while the Saracen Empire was at the gates of Vienna. We would do well to remember that the archduke who stands proud over the shackled Corsairs around the base of his plinth worked tirelessly to establish not just opera houses and universities, but the systems of banking and trade on which the wealth of Europe is now built.
The struggle to keep order on the high seas continues in Livorno and other NATO bases to this day, including against Qatari-backed Houthi rebels menacing the Red Sea and Israel. This is the struggle to maintain civilisation itself.
Qatar may think it has stolen the march every time it subverts, buys, or entices our institutions, but it should pay particular attention to the damage it is causing in the West. After all, it can’t get its own wealth from anywhere else.
The Axis of Good People Doing Nothing
Two men walk along Corniche promenade as Doha’s skyline is seen in the background.
Photo by JUAN MABROMATA / AFP
The tiny emirate of Qatar—a former British protectorate in the Persian Gulf—is where the Evil Empire narrative, used by Western Liberals to admonish themselves and their voters, finally comes full circle.
Ordered into a modern state and given the tools to become the richest society on earth, Qatar used its 1971 independence to return to its feudal ways, to challenge every last liberal shibboleth that the enlightened West cherishes, and to exert its cultural influence abroad.
Yet, while left-wing commentators beat themselves with straws of white privilege, women’s persecution, and workers’ exploitation to explain the inequalities of wealth among their own populations, they have no problem promoting those same vices in Qatar in return for the diminishing rewards of Qatari political allegiance.
The calculation seems simple: as long as Doha provides gas, Western governments will forget every postured principle they use as an excuse to raise your taxes.
Will anyone notice, as struggling households tighten their belts in pursuit of Net Zero, that the EU is not only buying a quarter (and rising) of the gas exports from a nation that doesn’t give a fig for our ‘carbon targets,’ but whose women can’t travel or work without male permission, where an entire underclass of imported indentured labourers are denied the status of citizens, where trade unions are illegal, gays locked up, and whose royal family have cosied up to virtually every enemy of the West apart from North Korea?
The war in Ukraine has triggered embargoes on Russian gas and nearly doubled the price of energy in swathes of Europe—but how long will people see the sense in this while their bills support one of Russia’s closest allies in the Middle East?
In short, how long can the green, the progressive, and the socialist export their sins by using Qatar to hedge against their own principles? The answer, I fear, is indefinitely—because this form of foreign policy has no principles.
The West should examine its double-entry bookkeeping when fighting terrorism. Qatar has brought us into conflict with our own strategy with its constitutionally-enshrined role of ‘Global Mediator’ producing alarming results. Stuffing cash into the pockets of senior European politicians, Qatar lobbies the West to turn a blind eye to its abuses of progressive agendas while it continues to harbour Hamas’ leadership and welcome the Taliban and Muslim Brotherhood leaderships. Through its slick state broadcaster Al Jazeera, Qatar projects anti-Western political rhetoric considered dangerous enough to have been banned even in other Middle Eastern states, while backing American journalism schools with tens of millions of dollars. Furthermore, Qatar hosts the largest U.S. airbase in the Middle East—a joint venture shared by their own airforce—while Sandhurst and King’s College London train its military leadership in the arts of modern warfare.
Yet, despite its undoubted bribery of Western political figures, conspiracy plays less of a part in our inept handling of Qatar than the simple route of least resistance. Democratic governments are just too cowardly to upset the status quo. They tell themselves that because Qataris are rich, they are worthy clients. This is nonsense, of course—the only money Qatar has is the money we pay it for gas in the first place, and the reason that the 300,000 Qatari citizens have cornered this market is largely due to embargoes we ourselves have slapped on Iran and Russia. If you focused Western energy expenditure on just 300,000 Russians or Iranians, they’d be rich, too. Yet we boycott these vast nations to very little effect while, in the case of Qatar, our funds go not just to national oil companies but to precisely the individuals who rule the nation and exhibit the patterns of behaviour we sanctimoniously claim to admonish. At least when we buy gas from Russia, some of our cash goes into the pockets of Rosneft company directors like Gerhard Schroeder.
Gas is the source of 80% of Qatar’s government revenue, so Western embargoes might actually work. Indeed, a major shock to Qatar’s economy occurred when some Gulf Cooperation Council members—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—imposed an embargo from 2017 to 2021. The reason for the embargo was, typically, Qatar’s support for regional terrorism.
Alas, the more the West attempts to keep ideologically pure, the more political and material power we heap into the hands of a consigliere nation we deem too small to harm us, whilst it fillets us with a stiletto made of our own money.
We’re not dealing with a vast and ancient civilisation like China, Russia, or Iran here—and that is precisely the problem. Qatar has no outlet for its vast wealth except to spread its influence abroad. It now owns more of central London than the British Royal family and is buying up banks and infrastructure fast. But the most alarming facet of Qatari expansion is perhaps the most ancient.
For centuries, the minaret and the belfry have been calling European souls. While the Qatari government bans Christian institutions from using religious symbols such as crosses in public, they have poured €71 million into building mosques and Islamic cultural centres in Europe—with particular focus on the very heart of Christendom: Italy.
Accuse me of petty cultural chauvinism if you like, but in the Italian port of Livorno there is a statue which, if it were located in Washington, London, or Brussels, would certainly have been destroyed during the latest spasm of anti-racist woke iconoclasm. It depicts Ferdinand I of Tuscany vanquishing the African and Ottoman pirates who harried the Mediterranean while the Saracen Empire was at the gates of Vienna. We would do well to remember that the archduke who stands proud over the shackled Corsairs around the base of his plinth worked tirelessly to establish not just opera houses and universities, but the systems of banking and trade on which the wealth of Europe is now built.
The struggle to keep order on the high seas continues in Livorno and other NATO bases to this day, including against Qatari-backed Houthi rebels menacing the Red Sea and Israel. This is the struggle to maintain civilisation itself.
Qatar may think it has stolen the march every time it subverts, buys, or entices our institutions, but it should pay particular attention to the damage it is causing in the West. After all, it can’t get its own wealth from anywhere else.
READ NEXT
Play the Ball, not the Man: Cancel Culture’s Attempt To Capture Hungarian Academia
Starmer’s War on Farmers: a New Low for Client Politics
Unprincipled Liberals & the Principle of Cause and Effect