LONDON — Qatar restored full diplomatic relations with Iran on Thursday, the latest volley in an 11-week-old geopolitical feud that has set the tiny yet fabulously wealthy Persian Gulf nation against its neighbors and rattled a previously placid part of the Middle East.
Qatar’s Foreign Ministry announced that it was sending its ambassador back to Tehran after a 20-month hiatus that started in January 2016, when Qatar broke off relations after attacks on two Saudi diplomatic facilities in Iran.
The Qataris gave no explanation for the sudden move. But the timing suggested a purposeful snub of Saudi Arabia, which along with three other countries began a punitive boycott of Qatar in June, accusing it of supporting terrorism and a too-cozy relationship with Iran. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt cut their air and sea routes to Qatar, and closed its only land border, with Saudi Arabia.
Mediation by the United States, Kuwait, and Germany has failed to resolve the feud in the Persian Gulf, the one corner of the Middle East that has been largely free of war, refugees or political turmoil in recent years. Analysts said the partial blockade has badly weakened the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council and threatens to undermine regional stability.
The crisis lapsed into a stalemate after Qatar refused an initial list of 13 demands, which included cutting all ties with Tehran. But things took a turn for the worse this week after a visit by a minor Qatari royal, Sheikh Abdullah al-Thani, to the Saudi ruler, King Salman, at his holiday villa in Morocco.
Abdullah, who lives in London and comes from a wing of the ruling family that was ousted in a 1972 coup, posed for pictures with Salman at his lavish coastal palace outside Tangiers. (Estimates of the cost of the king’s holiday run as high as $100 million — expensive even for a monarch who typically travels with an entourage of 1,000 or more.)
Although there was no official explanation for the visit, the Saudi news media played up Abdullah’s visit as the beginning of a potential challenge to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.
Few analysts believe the emir faces a serious threat, but some Qataris took the move as a provocation, and as further evidence that the true intention of the Saudi- and Emirati-led boycott is to engineer leadership change in Doha.
The diplomatic skirmishes are the latest moves in a crisis that, until now, has largely played out in the news media, amid accusations of hacked emails and fake news stories, and in fruitless efforts at conciliation led by worried Western allies like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
President Trump’s role in the crisis has been hotly debated since he openly sided with the Saudi-led bloc in June, although he has been silent in recent weeks.
The charge that Qatar is too close to Iran resonated with Trump, who during a summit meeting in the Saudi capital of Riyadh in May had called on Muslim leaders to isolate Iran, a nation that he said “fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.’’
Qatar insists that it maintains cordial relations with Iran out of commercial necessity, in that the two countries share the world’s largest gas field, the source of Qatar’s vast wealth, and notes that the United Arab Emirates has a far greater trading relationship with Iran.
Doha also says it has shown solidarity with its Sunni neighbors during disputes with Shiite-led Iran, particularly in the 2016 attack on the Saudi mission in Iran, after which Qatar recalled its ambassador.
Still, Qatar’s payment last April of a huge ransom to Shi’ite militants in Iraq, in exchange for a group of hostages that included members of the Qatari royal family, was seen by critics as proof of Qatar’s reckless approach to foreign policy.
