Report: Donald Trump prevented a war between UAE/Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

President Donald Trump. Bloomberg. 

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates considered military action until President Donald Trump called them and told them to back off. Bloomberg. The Saudi and UAE leaders wanted regime change in Qatar due to the countries support of terrorism and relationship with Iran. Trump warned the leaders that regime change in Qatar would destabilize the region and would only help Iran. Trump has called for a political solution to the dispute. Both the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE dispute that military action was ever considered. 

My Comment:

Huge news if true. The problem is that the Bloomberg report only relies on anonymous sources. Though the report cites multiple sources, those sources are still anonymous and can't be vetted by the public. During the Trump administration there has been a real problem with fake news reports relying only on anonymous sources, so I would take this report with a grain of salt. 

However, I do think that this does have a chance of being true. For one thing, it is a rare positive story about the Trump administration at a time when those are basically non-existent in the United States media. The leaks that have plagued the White House have mostly been negative and I doubt the leakers would leak something that paints the administration in a positive light. 

I also recall quite a bit of hand wringing a few months back over Qatar and the fear that a war was possible. There were a lot of troop movements on both sides. Turkey was sending troops to back up the Qataris and there was a real fear that war would break out. People were extremely concerned what was going to happen to the US troops that were stationed in Qatar. The fear of war was real at the very least. 

A war between Qatar and the Gulf States would have been a complete disaster. At the very least the entire region would be completely disrupted. There would have been massive casualties. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all have modern advanced military's with top of the line US military equipment. It would have been a war like no other in recent history. 

And Trump was right, the only people that would benefit from the war would be Iran Sure, they would lose their interest in Qatar but most of their enemies in the region would be devastated by the war. It would also help their support of the Houthi rebels in Yemen as the UAE and Saudis would almost certainly have to pull out troops to fight in Qatar. 

A war in Qatar would have also disrupted relations with Turkey for pretty much everyone involved. Turkey was deploying troops to Qatar and would have likely joined their side. That would expand the war to a regional level and would put the United States in a very awkward position where two of their allies were fighting each other. We would probably have to choose one over the other and that would again only benefit Iran. Choosing the Saudis would greatly disrupt our efforts against ISIS in Syria and Iraq and choosing the Turks would essentially break our relations with every other Arab state that isn't Qatar and Turkey. It was a lose-lose situation all around. 

There would have been massive economic consequences as well. Any war would greatly disrupt oil production which would raise prices across the world. This would have a massive effect globally and could start a rescission. 

Avoiding the war was a key goal for America and if this report is true than Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit. A weaker president would have caved to the demands of the Saudis and UAE but Trump did not. Will Trump get credit for that? Of course not. The official media narrative is that Trump is the bad guy and that anything he does is evil, even avoiding a war. He will get zero credit for preventing this war...