Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani
Tamim bin Hamad was blockaded by his neighbours for three and a half years and outlasted them without conceding anything. Qatar is a peninsula smaller than Yorkshire with about three hundred thousand citizens and nearly three million residents, and it sits on roughly a tenth of the world's natural gas in a single offshore field shared with Iran. That geology explains most of its foreign policy: the field cannot be defended militarily and cannot be exploited without keeping Tehran calm. His father had built the state's distinctive instruments - Al Jazeera, which broke the Arab state monopoly on television news and made Qatar hated by every government it embarrassed; a sovereign fund that bought large parts of London and Paris; and a habit of hosting everybody, from the American regional air command at Al Udeid to the Taliban's political office and the leadership of Hamas. He inherited that in 2013, at thirty-three, in a voluntary abdication that is rare in the Gulf. In June 2017 Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut relations, closed the only land border and their airspace, and issued thirteen demands including closing Al Jazeera and the Turkish base - terms designed to be refused. Qatar refused them, airlifted dairy cattle, rerouted its shipping through Oman, deepened its relationship with Turkey and Iran, and the blockade was lifted in 2021 with nothing granted. What it broke was the Gulf Cooperation Council. Six monarchies that had spent forty years presenting a common front discovered that four of them would close a border against a fifth, and Qatar concluded that its security could not rest on its neighbours. It left OPEC in 2019 to concentrate on gas. The lesson small states drew was that having several patrons who dislike each other is safer than having one. The labour system is the standing charge against him. Building the 2022 World Cup stadiums depended on migrant workers under the kafala sponsorship rules, and the deaths and the wage theft were documented well enough that the rules were substantially reformed under pressure - the minimum wage and the right to change employer were introduced, and enforcement remains the argument.
- Lived: 1980 CE – ?
- Nationality: Qatari
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
