The European Parliament's in-house research arm just published a wide-ranging new assessment of Qatari foreign policy, and the country it describes isn't the friendly Gulf partner Washington has been sold. The European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) is the Brussels equivalent of the Congressional Research Service, and the bluntness with which it consolidated years of EU institutional thinking on Qatar into one document should turn heads on Capitol Hill.

The briefing revisits “Qatargate,” the 2022 scandal in which sitting Members of European Parliament former members, and Parliament staff were accused of taking payments to advance Qatari interests. It then pairs this scandal with persistent accusations that Qatari state funds have backed Muslim Brotherhood projects across Europe.

The EPRS explains that Al Jazeera is widely seen as a tool of Qatari foreign policy, reportedly used as a bargaining chip with coverage adjusted in exchange for political concessions. It calls Qatar an absolute monarchy and an authoritarian rentier state, where the judiciary isn't independent and where Shura Council elections were abolished in 2024, leaving every member of Qatar’s legislative council appointed directly by the emir.

Even more concerning is the briefing’s documentation of how Doha treats its energy exports as a political weapon. In a May 2025 letter to the Belgian government, Qatari Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi warned that Doha would "seriously consider alternative markets" if the EU didn't water down its new corporate sustainability rules. It wasn't his first such threat. Months earlier, al-Kaabi had told the Financial Times he would simply "stop sending gas to Europe" if Qatari companies were fined under the directive. This is not how a major non-NATO ally is supposed to treat an ally.

What the EU briefing only hints at – but what crystalizes Qatar’s duplicitous foreign policy posture – is the parallel set of relationships Qatar has been steadily building with Moscow while continuing to host the largest US military base in the region at Al Udeid, as well as relying on the US for its own security. Russia and Qatar established a broader defense cooperation framework in 2016, then in October 2017 concluded their first bilateral military-technical cooperation agreement, bringing in Rosoboronexport, Russia's state arms exporter. That deal led to contracts for Russian small arms, Kalashnikov rifles, and Kornet anti-tank guided missile systems.

Earlier this month, a Russian Ministry of Defense delegation traveled to Doha to meet with Qatar's Coast Guard and Border Security. This week, the two defense ministries signed a fresh memorandum of understanding establishing a direct crisis-communication channel between Doha and Moscow's National Defense Management Center, the command-and-control hub that has coordinated Russia's operations in Syria and Ukraine. That signing happened three months after Iranian missiles — from a country whose defense partnership with Moscow has only deepened during the Ukraine war — hit Qatari export infrastructure.

Qatar’s ties to China are no less revealing. Doha and Beijing formally agreed in September 2017 to cooperate on counterterrorism. In May 2024, Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun met Qatar's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defense Affairs Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah in Beijing, with both sides pledging to "further promote military cooperation," and by July 2025 China's ambassador to Doha was describing the relationship as having entered a "golden era."

The EPRS briefing notes Qatar's purchase of Chinese SY-400 ballistic missile systems, but the more concerning integration is in telecoms, where Huawei provided the network and IT infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, reportedly serving as system integrator for the facial recognition capability tied to the event's 15,000 surveillance cameras, and Vodafone Qatar has run its 5G rollout on Huawei equipment since 2019.

Doha is hedging in every direction at once, and the US is footing the security bill.

Doha wants the protection of being a major non-NATO ally and the prestige of mediating Washington's hardest conflicts. At the same time, it happily hosted the same Hamas leaders who planned the October 7th Massacre, reached for the gas-supply lever the moment Brussels passes a regulation Doha didn’t like, and deepened defense ties with America’s chief geopolitical adversaries. Qatar has correctly calculated that none of its partners will call the bluff, and behaves accordingly.

The new EU document doesn't unveil any grand revelations. It doesn't need to. An American audience that has spent years watching Qatari money flow into US universities, lobbying shops, and foreign agent registrations should treat the briefing as confirmation of what they already know.

Eitan Fischberger is an international relations and Middle East analyst. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and other major outlets. Find him on X @EFischberger.