Analysis: Has the Gulf reconciled after the Qatar blockade?

For now, it seems bilateral reconciliation efforts in the GCC are proceeding, albeit at various speeds.

June 5 marks four years since Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a blockade on Qatar and five months since the Gulf Cooperation Council Summit at Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia, which marked the end of the deepest rift in the history of the organisation. The way the 43-month blockade started and the way it ended reflect significant broader changes in the regional and international outlook since 2017. Therefore, it is important to look into what lessons have been learned from the past four years, whether the agreement signed at Al-Ula is durable, and how the process of reconciliation is proceeding. From beginning to end, the blockade of Qatar was a textbook study of a regional crisis in the age of US President Donald Trump and the weakening of the rules-based international order. What amounted to a power play designed to isolate Qatar politically and economically began with the hacking of the Qatar News Agency and the planting of a fake news story purporting to report incendiary comments by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. This made the chain of events that followed a real-world manifestation of a crisis rooted in the notion of “alternative facts” – a term coined by Trump’s then senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, in January 2017.