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.”[1] 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.”[1] Qatar and Saudi Arabia, by contrast, “have a terrible, terrible relationship.”[1]
Given that, “any way that the Qataris can just get a jab in at the Saudis, and vice versa, they’ll do it.”[2] 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.”[2]
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.[2]
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.[2]
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.”[3]
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.”[3][4]