Qatar’s double game: Evil pragmatism in the service of power

Qatar is no mystery anymore. The danger is not that we don’t understand what it is doing. The danger is that we do—and still pretend we don’t.

For years, this tiny emirate has played a brutal double game: hosting and financing the ecosystem of political Islam and Hamas on one hand, while selling itself to Washington and Europe as a vital ally, gas supplier, and “indispensable mediator” on the other. 

This is not clever diplomacy or neutral mediation. It is evil pragmatism: a cold strategy that turns Western dependence and Islamist networks into instruments of leverage.

This is not just “Qatar being Qatar.” It directly affects Israeli security, American interests, and the integrity of Western institutions.

How Doha Turned Hamas into an Asset

Qatar has been one of Hamas’s most important external lifelines, financially, politically, and symbolically. 

Over the years, Qatari support to Hamas has run into the billions. In 2012, Hamas’s political leadership moved to Doha, with Qatari officials now openly admitting that this happened in coordination with the United States, which wanted an accessible channel to Hamas outside Iran.

That move did three things at once.

It gave Hamas leaders sanctuary, security, and legitimacy in the capital of a U.S.-aligned state. It turned Qatar into the mandatory address for anyone needing to talk to Hamas, from Israel to Washington to European governments. And it created the illusion that by pumping money into Gaza under Qatari management, Hamas could somehow be “contained.”

For more than a decade, this arrangement was tolerated or quietly encouraged by Western and Israeli decision-makers. Qatari cash was allowed to flow into Gaza as a supposed stabilizer, while Hamas kept building its military capacity and ideological infrastructure under the cover of humanitarian support.

October 7 and everything that followed blew that illusion apart. But the architecture that enabled it is still there.

The Other Face: U.S. Ally and Strategic Partner

At the same time that it was sheltering Hamas’s political bureau, Qatar was deepening its relationship with the United States. 

Qatar hosts thousands of U.S. troops at Al Udeid Air Base, the nerve center of U.S. air operations in the Middle East. In 2022, Washington formally designated Qatar a “major non-NATO ally,” placing it in an elite club with special military and economic privileges.

For Europe, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Qatari liquefied natural gas became part of the strategy to diversify away from Russian gas. Energy and security tied the West more tightly to Doha.

So we end up with a perverse picture. The same state that houses Hamas’s external leadership and bankrolls its territory is also a cornerstone of U.S. regional basing and a major energy partner to the West. 

The same emirate that shelters and legitimizes the leadership of a terrorist organization is the one everyone calls when they need a ceasefire or a hostage deal.

From Doha’s perspective, this is pure power politics: create the problem, then make yourself indispensable as the mediator. That is the core of the evil pragmatism.

Buying Influence in the West

Qatar’s game is not limited to the battlefield and the back channel. It has also invested massively in Western universities and institutions, often via the Qatar Foundation and related entities. 

Qatar has become one of the largest foreign donors to American campuses, sending vast sums to places like Cornell, Georgetown, and Texas A&M.

The point is not charity. It is leverage.

Money of this scale shapes curricula and discourse on Islam, the Middle East, and Israel. It normalizes Muslim Brotherhood–aligned narratives in elite academic circles. It buys proximity to sensitive research and to the networks that will shape policy and opinion for decades.

Even if one discounts the more explosive claims, the scale and opacity are themselves the issue. This is structural influence: captured narratives, bought expertise, and future decision-makers formed under the soft pressure of money.

We have already seen the outcome. Universities that mobilize instantly for every fashionable cause suddenly become evasive, hostile, or paralyzed when it comes to Jewish students, Israeli lives, and the reality of Hamas’s genocidal program. This is not an accident.

The Western Front: Campuses, Europe, and the French Salon

If you want to see what Qatari soft power looks like after a decade or two, look at American campuses—and then look at Europe.

In the United States, Qatari money has flowed into higher education at a level no other foreign power can match. 

The result is not just buildings with Arabic names, but an intellectual climate in which Islamist narratives, aggressive anti-Israel framing, and a carefully sanitized view of the Muslim Brotherhood are treated as sophisticated moral positions. We have watched this explode in public with the campus reactions to the war in Gaza.

Europe is not in better shape. In some respects, it is further gone.

For years, Qatari-linked charities have funded mosques and Islamic centers across the continent. Politicians and security services have repeatedly raised concerns about radical preaching, opaque funding, and the importing of Brotherhood ideology through “community” projects that present themselves as benign social work.

And then there is France, the crown jewel of Qatari soft power.

Over the last two decades, Qatar has embedded itself deep into French public life: massive stakes in Paris Saint-Germain and French football; major real-estate holdings in Paris; lavish cultural partnerships with flagship institutions; and a dense web of bilateral agreements dressed up as strategic dialogue and cooperation.

Officially, this is partnership. In practice, it functions as social capture. 

The Qatari embassy in Paris and related venues have become coveted salons where ministers, parliamentarians, party operatives, media figures, and business elites circulate. Everyone knows it. Everyone enjoys the hospitality. And everyone understands, consciously or not, that criticizing Doha too loudly can carry a political price.

The result is familiar. A political class exquisitely sensitive to Qatari feelings, and strangely blunt when it comes to Israeli security or the dangers of Islamist entrenchment on French soil.

No conspiracy theory is necessary. The model is simple: buy the stadiums, the avenues, the think tanks, and the universities; turn embassies and foundations into social clubs for the political class; and then cash in that social debt when Gaza explodes, when Hamas is on the table, when votes about Israel or terror designations come up.

Whether one wants to describe Europe as “lost” is a judgment. What is beyond dispute is that Qatar has spent years building a social and institutional web from which Western leaders now struggle to disentangle themselves.

Pragmatism or Something Worse?

Defenders of Qatar like to argue that small states must be clever to survive. Doha, they say, is simply leveraging what it has: money, media, Islamist networks, and geography.

That is only half the story.

Pragmatism becomes evil when a state knowingly empowers organizations whose strategy includes mass murder of civilians; when it uses “mediation” to protect and launder those actors even after atrocities; and when it pours opaque money into foreign universities and institutions to tilt their politics and discourse toward an Islamist frame aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is not value-neutral statecraft. It is a decision to build national security on other people’s instability and blood.

A Hard Look That Does Not Damage U.S. or Israeli Interests

The central question is simple: can the United States and Israel confront Qatar’s role without blowing up their own strategic interests?

The answer is yes, but only with discipline and a cold approach.

First, weaponize transparency. Forget grandstanding. Start with facts. Require detailed disclosure of all Qatari funding to universities, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, schools, and religious institutions in the United States and allied democracies. 

Create public registries and regular reports that make these links visible. Enforce foreign-funding and foreign-agent transparency laws to drag this money out of the shadows. This does not harm American or Israeli interests. It protects them, and forces every institution to decide whether Qatari money is worth the cost.

Second, quietly redefine the relationship. Qatar should be treated as a strategic partner under enhanced scrutiny. 

That means annual public assessments of its record on terror finance, incitement, and sanctuary, and a clear linkage between its “major non-NATO ally” status and measurable behavior: concrete steps against Hamas networks, not public relations lines. There is no need for a dramatic rupture that endangers U.S. basing or energy security. What is needed is a change in the cost–benefit calculation in Doha.

Third, hit networks, not people. The target is not Qataris or Muslims in general. The target is specific structures: charities, shell companies, media entities, and individuals connected to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood financing. 

Enforcement against undeclared foreign agents and proxy organizations operating in Western capitals with Qatari funding must become normal practice. Narrow, evidence-based pressure preserves the moral high ground and avoids giving Doha the chance to pose as a victim of Western prejudice.

Fourth, turn Al Udeid and gas into leverage instead of vulnerabilities. Right now, Qatar behaves as if the West cannot live without its base and its gas. 

That perception must change. The United States and its partners should begin building redundancy for Al Udeid—alternative basing and regional options—over a multiyear horizon. They should continue diversifying energy sources so that Qatari liquefied natural gas is useful but not irreplaceable. 

No one is suggesting pulling the plug tomorrow. The point is to make it clear that the plug can be pulled if Doha pushes too far. That alone shifts the power balance without sacrificing a single American or Israeli asset today.

Fifth, put conditions on mediation. Qatar will continue to present itself as the broker for ceasefires, hostages, and regional crises. 

That role should stop being a free pass. Every mediation track should be linked to a parallel track on Qatari behavior: closures of offices, expulsions of designated operatives, frozen accounts, real changes in the infrastructure that supports Hamas and its allies. If Qatar wants the diplomatic glory of peacemaker, it must pay with verifiable constraints on the very networks it protects. Mediation must become a leash, not a shield.

Stop Looking Away

Qatar is not the root of all evil in the region. But it is a known problem: a state that mixes Islamist patronage, Western dependency, and money-driven influence into a single model of power.

The West and Israel helped construct this model—by outsourcing mediation, tolerating the Hamas office in Doha, relying on Qatari gas, and looking the other way on influence campaigns in universities and non-governmental organizations.

The minimum level of moral and strategic sanity now is to stop pretending.

Admit the double game. Strip away the immunity that “mediation” and “alliance” have provided. Use transparency, targeted pressure, and structural diversification to force choices in Doha instead of constantly being blackmailed by it.

Evil pragmatism only works as long as its victims are too scared or too compromised to confront it. A serious policy on Qatar is not about vengeance. It is about finally aligning Western and Israeli interests with reality instead of with comforting illusions.

That begins with one simple act: stop looking away.