The UAE and the Arab spring: Rethinking foreign policy

Abstract

On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), followed by Egypt, the Maldives and the government of Eastern Libya, decided to sever their diplomatic ties with Doha, triggering the most serious crisis in the peninsula since the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Qatar was immediately isolated from its neighbors as territorial, maritime and air traffic stopped. The reason given and repeated by the international media was that the monarchy supports terrorism. Soon after the announcement, the UAE ambassador to the United States made the recriminations clearer: Qatar had not only backed terrorist groups and ideologies (such as the one the Muslim Brotherhood promotes), but had also meddled in the internal affairs of its neighbors and housed a media source (Al-Jazeera, indicated implicitly) that uses its international platform to prosecute Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE politically (Kahn, 2017). The June 2017 crisis between Qatar and its neighbors sheds a new light on the events of the Arab Spring, especially the repercussions in the peninsula.