Going forward, we are to avoid involvement in Middle Eastern wars — except if Qatar is attacked.
That’s the U.S. position, apparently, after Donald Trump’s America First foreign-policy doctrine took a remarkable turn this week when it was revealed that the president signed an executive order declaring that “it is the policy of the United States to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.”
News reports indicate that the executive order is meant to soothe the Qataris’ ruffled feathers after Israeli jets attacked Hamas’s leadership on their soil. The Trump administration may also be attempting to grease Qatar’s cooperation in its Gaza peace plan. Neither of these reasons is a sufficient explanation for this absurdity.
In 2022, Joe Biden labeled Qatar a major non-NATO ally. Americans may have been under the impression that the second Trump administration was intent on reversing Biden-era foolishness, but now Trump is compounding Joe Biden’s folly by unilaterally extending a promise of U.S. blood and treasure to defend an anti-American petrostate in the Persian Gulf.
But on what reasonable basis should the president ask Americans to “regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” as Trump’s executive order states? There is none. Indeed, in 2017 during his first term, Trump was far closer to the mark when he stated forthrightly that “the nation of Qatar has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”
NATO countries have an American security guarantee because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established by the Treaty of Washington in 1949. For all our petty squabbles and differences, the American people, through their representatives in the United States Senate, viewed the nations of Europe as friends and kindred Western democracies — and therefore worth defending even at the risk of war with the Soviet Union.
Qatar, on the other hand, though it hosts a major U.S. air base and other military facilities, does so as part of a deliberate strategy to cozy up to both the United States and Islamist jihadis of all stripes. Indeed, Qatar materially supports Hamas (and the Taliban, which harbored al-Qaeda and made war on America for 20 years), and it is a principal proponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and its loathsome Sunni Islamist ideology. What’s more, it is an ally of the Shiite jihadist regime across the Persian Gulf in Iran. Qatar is the home of Al Jazeera, which propagates the sharia supremacist worldview, and, as part of a deliberate campaign to increase its soft-power influence over America, it has spent billions and billions of dollars in this country.
Realists may believe, reasonably enough, that our interests need not always align with our values. But can Americans at least ask that those countries to whom we would send our sons and daughters to defend be genuine friends of the United States?
This initiative also trespasses against the Senate’s power to advise and consent to agreements with foreign states. Security guarantees delivered via Senate-approved treaties align with our constitutional order and the gravity and moment of such a decision. When Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Senate voted to approve their accession.
A president of the United States has no unilateral authority to give another country a security guarantee — at least one that the U.S. must honor. Presidential executive orders can be reversed or ignored by the next president. Treaties, by contrast, have the force of statutory law. Presidents must faithfully execute U.S. obligations under such treaties (or formally withdraw from them).
As president and commander in chief, Donald Trump has undeniable power to conduct U.S. foreign policy as he sees fit. If he wants to tell the Qataris they have an American security guarantee, no one can stop him. But to imagine that it’s a security guarantee on a par with NATO’s Article 5 is ridiculous. So is the idea that Qatar is a friend of America.