A nation must think before it acts.
Qatar may have dialed back its support for Islamist movements, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be best friends again with Egypt and the Gulf states.
Much has been said in recent days about the perceived thaw in Egyptian-Qatari relations. However, let us delay hoisting up the white flag; Qatar hasn’t quite reversed course in its foreign policy–at least not yet.
What lies at the heart of the dispute between Cairo and Doha? In a word: the Muslim Brotherhood. However, there is a much deeper regional conflict at play and it is nothing short of a fight over the character of the Middle East itself, where monarchs and tyrants, Presidents and self-anointed caliphs are struggling to claim the mantle of winner in the post-“Arab Spring” shakeup of the region.
Back when the term “Arab Spring” was first attributed to…