According to the official narrative, the reason for the latest Gulf
crisis in which a coalition of Saudi-led states cut off diplomatic and
economic ties with Qatar, is because – to everyone’s “stunned amazement”
– Qatar was funding terrorists, and after Trump’s recent visit to Saudi
Arabia in which he urged a crackdown on financial support of terrorism,
and also following the FT’s report that
Qatar has directly provided $1 billion in funding to Iran and al-Qaeda
spinoffs, Saudi Arabia finally had had enough of its “rogue” neighbor,
which in recent years had made ideologically unacceptable overtures
toward both Shia Iran and Russia.
However, as often happens, the official narrative is traditionally a convenient smokescreen from the real underlying tensions.
The real reason behind the diplomatic fallout may be far simpler, and
once again has to do with a long-running and controversial topic,
namely Qatar’s regional natural gas dominance.
Recall that many have speculated (with evidence going back as far back as 2012)
that one of the reasons for the long-running Syria proxy war was
nothing more complex than competing gas pipelines, with Qatar eager to
pass its own pipeline, connecting Europe to its vast natural gas
deposits, however as that would put Gazprom’s monopoly of European LNG
supply in jeopardy, Russia had been firmly, and violently, against this
strategy from the beginning and explains Putin’s firm support of the
Assad regime and the Kremlin’s desire to prevent the replacement of the
Syrian government with a puppet regime.
Now, in a separate analysis, Bloomberg also debunks and the dispute’s long past and likely lingering future are best explained by natural gas.”the “official narrative” behind the Gulf crisis and suggests that Saudi Arabia’s isolation of Qatar, “
The reasons for nat gas as the source of discord are numerous and
start in 1995 “when the tiny desert peninsula was about to make its
first shipment of liquid natural gas from the world’s largest reservoir.
The offshore North Field, which provides virtually all of Qatar’s gas, is shared with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s hated rival.”
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