By Julia Roknifard
When Israeli aircraft struck Hamas negotiators in Qatar’s capital Doha earlier this month, most coverage framed it as another blow in Israel’s long conflict with the group — but to see it only in those narrow terms is to miss the larger picture.
The strike, unprecedented in its audacity, was less about neutralising Hamas than about sending a message to the Gulf states themselves.
It is not that all of a sudden Qatar has become just another arena of regional rivalry. It is home to Al Udeid, the largest US air base in the Middle East, a crucial hub for American operations and, according to former US president Joe Biden, a key non-NATO ally.
To strike there is to signal that not even the closest of Washington’s Gulf partners are beyond reach. The message reverberated across Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Manama: autonomy has limits when the US is determined to maintain its sphere of influence.
For the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) this episode comes at a sensitive time. Across the region there is a growing interest in diversifying security and economic partnerships. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have pursued dialogue with BRICS and China, while Qatar has positioned itself as a bridge to new economic corridors.
In May, the ASEAN-GCC-China summit in Kuala Lumpur laid out a vision of trade and investment flows designed to insulate the Global South from the volatility of Western tariffs. That initiative was watched with unease by Western observers, especially in Washington.
They expressed concern over the tripartite meeting that brought together the US’s primary peer competitor China, the Asean states — already tilting significantly towards Beijing — and formerly entrenched US allies in the Persian Gulf. From Washington’s perspective, this emerging axis represents yet another grouping that could undermine its interests.
To understand why the US would resort to such measures, it is necessary to recall the wider struggle over unipolarity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington has regarded itself as the world’s indispensable power.
The 1990s were framed as the “unipolar moment”, with the US able to dictate the terms of global order. NATO expansion in Europe, military interventions in the Balkans, and the embedding of US bases from the Gulf to Central Asia were all designed to ensure that no rival could challenge its dominance.
In the Middle East, this logic produced a sprawling network of alliances and dependencies. Security guarantees were extended to monarchies across the Persian Gulf in exchange for energy cooperation and strategic access. Sanctions were wielded against Iraq, Iran and later Syria to discipline states that resisted US designs.
Initiatives promoting democracy, often channelled through organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), were deployed to shape political trajectories in ways that aligned with US preferences. In parallel, military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated Washington’s willingness to use overwhelming force to maintain primacy.
The same instinct is visible in the Indo-Pacific. For more than a decade, US strategists have warned that China’s rise poses the greatest long-term challenge to its hegemony.
The “pivot to Asia” announced under President Barack Obama was an explicit attempt to redirect military and diplomatic resources towards containing Beijing. This has since hardened into the concept of “great power competition”, which frames international politics as a binary contest between the US and China.
It is against this backdrop that the Doha strike must be understood. The US is not simply acting against Hamas but against a broader pattern of alignment that threatens its unipolar designs.
For Washington, the danger is that Gulf capitals, by engaging with Asean and China, might accelerate the creation of parallel systems of trade, finance and security outside its oversight.
US officials have not been shy in voicing their concerns more broadly. Former secretary of state Antony Blinken warned Asean partners of China’s “dangerous” ambitions, while US trade envoys pressed against economic commitments that might weaken Washington’s leverage.
The timing of the strike in Doha cannot be separated from this wider contest. It was as much a warning to Gulf capitals considering deeper engagement with Beijing and Asean as it was a strike on Hamas negotiators.
The irony is that such actions may achieve the opposite of what the US intends. Far from reinforcing confidence in US protection, the operation has shaken it.
UK-based newspaper The Guardian noted that Gulf leaders were stunned that a state hosting a major US base could be subjected to such an attack with so little forewarning. If US security guarantees cannot prevent such violations, then diversification begins to look less like an option and more like a necessity.
There are also risks to the fragile architecture of regional peace. The Abraham Accords, already under strain, could fracture further if Gulf leaders perceive Israel as acting without restraint or coordination. Egypt and Jordan, which have long provided the foundation of Arab-Israeli peace, may hesitate to lend their political capital to a project that seems increasingly brittle.
Here we arrive at the most important point. What unfolded in Doha was not simply a tactical operation. It was a strategic signal in the struggle over multipolarity.
For three decades the US has sought to preserve a global order in which it alone sets the rules. It has maintained a network of alliances, bases, sanctions and interventions to guard against any alternative centre of power. But the emergence of groupings such as Asean-GCC-China suggests that the tide is shifting.
As the GCC, Asean and China explore alternative frameworks of cooperation, Washington has chosen to remind its partners of the costs of stepping too far out of line — all while keeping its straight face as the guardian of the “rules-based order”.
Yet history suggests that coercion rarely halts such shifts. More often, it accelerates them. If the US continues to rely on its allies to project force against those who seek independence, it may discover that its greatest challenge is not Chinese expansion but the erosion of trust among its own partners.
In trying to preserve its dominance, Washington risks hastening the multipolar world it fears, and along with it the end of its primacy in global affairs.
Julia Roknifard is a senior lecturer at the School of Law and Governance at Taylor’s University and lectures at the newly launched programme “Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” (PPE). She is also an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
