Trump jumps into Mideast dispute
Qatar situation likely not due to recent action
Trump administration officials said Tuesday that President Trump was not “taking sides” in the deepening dispute among its key counterterrorism partners in the Persian Gulf, despite a morning of presidential Twitter posts congratulating Saudi Arabia — and himself — for cracking down on Qatar for alleged terrorism financing.
“During my recent trip to the Middle East, I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology,” Trump tweeted. “Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!
“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off,” he continued. “They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar.”
On Monday, several of Qatar’s gulf neighbors — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — were joined by Egypt and smaller nations in severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, ordering its diplomats and citizens to leave, and threatening deeply intertwined regional trade links and air routes.
The eruption appeared motivated by yearslong regional disputes rather than any recent disagreement or action. It followed a late-May visit in which Trump, while calling on the Arab and Muslim worlds to unite against the terrorist threat, heaped praise on Saudi Arabia as the regional leader.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in New Zealand, called for dialogue among the neighbors. At the State Department, spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that “we recognize that Qatar continues to make efforts to stop the financing of terrorist groups, including prosecuting suspected financiers, freezing assets, introducing stringent controls into its banking system. They have made progress ... but we recognize there is more work to be done.”
“Let’s move off this social media thing,” Nauert said of numerous questions about Trump’s tweets, “because there are a lot of other important things that we need to discuss.”
A senior administration official said: “We’re not taking sides. If we are taking sides, we are taking the side of unity and cooperation” against terrorism.
Nauert and the senior official said the United States had been notified of Saudi Arabia’s intention to break relations shortly before it was announced Monday. But “I don’t think the U.S. government has perfect clarity on what triggered that,” the official said. “We know there have been issues between them.”