An executive order signed by Donald Trump stating that any armed attack against Qatar would be considered "a threat to the peace and security of the United States" received fierce pushback from the editors of the conservative National Review.
The EO, dated Sept. 29, explicitly states: “In the event of such an attack, the United States shall take all lawful and appropriate measures — including diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military — to defend the interests of the United States and of the State of Qatar and to restore peace and stability.”
As explained in the scathing National Review editorial published on Friday, that mirrors the NATO Article 5 guarantee which states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members, which the editors called, in this case, “ridiculous."
As they noted, despite allowing a U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf country, Qatar was called by Trump in 2017 “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”
The editors asked “what reasonable basis should the president ask Americans” to defend Qatar when the country is obviously attempting to “cozy up to both the United States and Islamist jihadis of all stripes.”
“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,” the editors wrote.
Based upon that alone, they asked, “...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?”
“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,” they noted.
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