Qatari money in Egypt
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Asked by a viewer to explain Qatar's relationship with Egypt, and why Doha would put seven and a half billion dollars into the Egyptian economy, John Kiriakou gave a one-word answer and then the reasoning behind it.

The motive

"Honestly," he said, "to piss off the Saudis." The money, on this reading, is not primarily an investment in Egypt at all; it is a move in a different quarrel.

The two relationships he sets against each other are asymmetric. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Kiriakou said, "have a very close relationship, and they have for a very long time, at least since the mid-1960s." Qatar and Saudi Arabia, by contrast, "have a terrible, terrible relationship."

Given that, "any way that the Qataris can just get a jab in at the Saudis, and vice versa, they'll do it." Knowing how close Riyadh and Cairo are, "the Qataris say, oh, we'll give money to the Egyptians and help the Egyptians", in the knowledge, he adds, that "all it's going to do is piss off the Saudis."

Egypt's position

Egypt, in Kiriakou's account, is neither the object nor the author of the manoeuvre but its beneficiary. "The Egyptians are perfectly happy to take the money," he said.

He paused on Egypt's standing in the Arab world, citing the epithet he renders as "the mother of the earth", the idea, he says, that all Arabs sprouted from Egypt.

The island

The detail Kiriakou uses to show how close the Saudi,Egyptian relationship actually is concerns a transfer of territory. After a year in which the Saudis had been "particularly generous" with them, he said, the Egyptians "gave Saudi Arabia this little tiny uninhabited island in the Red Sea as a gift to thank them."

A state that hands a neighbour an island by way of thanks is not one that can be bought away with a cash injection, which is, in Kiriakou's telling, precisely why the Qatari move is best understood as an irritant rather than a bid. His summary of Doha's calculation: "let us try to throw a wrench into that and see what sticks. That's what it's about."

See also

- Abraham Accords
- Israeli strike on Qatar
- John Kiriakou
- Ted Rall
