Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, with the mediation of Kuwait, have placed 13 conditions on the small and misaligned state of Qatar, aimed at limiting its widespread ideological power not only thanks to the media with the indicted television network Al Jazeera, but above all for the financial and logistical support offered to the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas.
Qatar faces a harsh embargo and therefore an isolation in which the much contested alliances with the Iranian theocracy and the Turkey of the "Sultan" Erdogan will be able to do little, beyond appealing (for the series "from what pulpit"), to international law. The Gulf monarchies and Egypt do not tolerate the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to impose an indissoluble union between political and religious power on the Sunni world through the Sharia law, thus considering all existing governments as heretics.
The ban of this dangerous movement for the survival of secularism in the Sunni political world has become vital especially after the drift of Turkey subject to the Muslim Brotherhood. A battle of which in the West many countries are still struggling to understand its foundation and importance, above all due to the evident risk of a new conflict in the Gulf, with an inevitable contagion effect in a Europe where the efficient and organized communities that are linked to this extremist movement dominate in different neighborhoods from Paris to London.
Obviously behind this tug of war there are also and above all strong economic interests, because Qatar with Turkey and Iran is interested in building an important gas pipeline which, crossing Turkish territory, reaches Europe. The starting point would be located right in the offshore natural gas field that is shared by Qatar with the Iranians, called South Pars for the Iranian part / North Dome in Qatar. Alternatively, the pipeline could pass through Iraq and Syria. There had already been an attempt between 2000 and 2010 for a similar project but it was Assad himself who blocked it because he harmed Russia's interests in Europe. And Saudi Arabia itself had aligned itself with the denial, to prevent Iran from benefiting from the proceeds of such a lucrative project.
These attempts, which culminated in 2010 just before the Syrian war, explain the reasons for a conflict which, far from being linked only to the arrows of a civil war, is mainly due to the war of the gas pipelines and to Assad's refusal to let his territory from any gas pipeline that would favor a Sunni country like Qatar, even if linked to an alliance of convenience, also in this case, with the Iranians. Qatar in turn, producing less and less oil, had and still needs to build the pipeline, just like Turkey, which pays a huge oil bill despite the Saudi-induced drop in prices to balance the growth of the oil industry. American shale oil.
In the last two weeks we have seen the correction of Qatar's rating and an acceleration of currency problems related to the fact that the country's currency has a peg and that the country's currency market is limited and illiquid. There has been a run on deposits in US dollars after the publication of the 13 conditions and the local currency has already lost 4% in the expectation that the situation will worsen with the end of Ramadan. Negative effects also on the Sukuk market, with a loss of value in prices and doubts about the actual value of the underlying collateral should the embargo continue or, as it seems, worsen. The danger of an outflow of capital and large estates is real and not easy to deal with by the constitutional monarchy of Emir Al Thani.
The stakes are very high, while the planes of the forces in the field, above all American and Russian, touch each other and the risk of an accident, which lights the fuse on this powder keg of cross-interest between geopolitics and energy business, is very high.
The markets for now do not price this risk and oil remains in the narrow Brent range between 42 and 48 US dollars waiting to understand what will happen in 10 days and if the diplomacy conducted by Tillerson will produce any effect, given that the Americans themselves in this At the moment they are no longer as interested as they once were in sponsoring a gas pipeline project which, in any case, would certainly be contrary to the national interests of the new Trump administration, which is already in itself satisfied with the mega arms deal signed "just in time" with the Saudi Arabia.
